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Ted Underwood | |
|---|---|
 Ted Underwood, 2016 | |
| Born | 1968 (age 57–58) |
| Occupations | Literary scholar, information scientist |
| Academic background | |
| Education | M.A. PhilosophyWilliams College 1989, PhD EnglishCornell University 1997[1] |
| Alma mater | Cornell University |
| Academic work | |
| Discipline | Digital humanities,Information science,Literary criticism |
| Institutions | University of Rochester,University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign,Leiden University |
| Notable works | The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science, and Political Economy, 1760–1860 (2005),Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies (2013),Distant horizons : digital evidence and literary change (2019) |
| Website | tedunderwood |
Ted Underwood (born 1968)[2] is an American literary and informatics scholar, usingtext mining andcomputational methods, such asmachine learning, andstatistical modeling withlogistic regression for literary criticism on large digital collections of historical literary works such asnovels. He is a professor ofInformation Sciences andEnglish at theUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).[1][3]
Underwood obtained aM.A. degree inPhilosophy atWilliams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, and aPhD in English atCornell University,Ithaca, New York, in 1997, where he trained as aRomanticist. He was a visitingassistant professor at theUniversity of Rochester during 1997-1998, and an assistant professor of English from 1998 up to 2006 atColby College,Waterville, Maine, and at UIUC. There in 2007 he became anassociate professor of English and since 2014full professor of English, and since 2016 also of Information Sciences. He teaches 18th and 19th century British literature in the English Department. AtLeiden University, he was a 2019 visitingScaliger professor.[4]
After publishing on eighteenth and nineteenth English literature using classical literary criticism, Underwood turned todigital humanities for the study of literary patterns, such as genres or gender representation since 1780, by analysing hundreds or thousands of books from digital libraries with computational methods.
Underwood's publications include:[5]
It's safe to conclude, then, that the first law of thermodynamics would not have had the impact it did if the cultural ground hadn't been prepared for it by romanticism. "Productivism" first became a prevalent doctrine in the late eighteenth century, and it did so in a way that left traces in language itself. Of these traces, the redefinition of "energy" and its promotion to the status of a social ideal was probably the most enduring.
Numbers are becoming more useful in literary study for reasons that are theoretical rather than technical. It is not that computers got faster or disks got bigger but that we have recently graduated from measuring variables to framing models of literary concepts. Since a model defines a relationship between variables, a mode of inquiry founded on models can study relationships rather than isolated facts. Instead of starting with, say, the frequency of connective words, quantitative literary research now starts with social evidence about things that really interest readers of literature — like audience, genre, character, and gender. The literary meaning of those phenomena comes, in a familiar way, from historically grounded interpretive communities. Numbers enter the picture not as an objective foundation for meaning somewhere outside history but as a way to establish comparativerelationships between different parts of the historical record.
— Ted Underwood, "Preface",Distant horizons : digital evidence and literary change (2019), pages xi-xii.
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