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Over the summer I generated this graphic in support of demonstrating how Topic Analysis brings forward a radically inclusive and surprising insights into the nature of genre. Below is an illustration of topics generated from a selection of writers reflecting on their processes of becoming artists. A similar illustration could detail expert commentary in any discipline over the ages. Yet another variation is this: parsing topics by categorical variables as different as rank in the workplace or by years on the job.

Why Method Enables Infinitely Customizable Measurement, from a follow-up paper building on recent findings. Ultimately, the pay-off is in method, rather than contributing to the trivia of discussion point concerning even two seminal narratives in Cold War and Beyond American science fiction. In particular, I consider Herbert's Dune sage and Octavia Butler's Parable duo set.
Corpora as Bodies of Knowledge, or Epistemologies in Action
All together, the test-set passages of theological commentary comprise about 22,400 words, while its training set counterpart formed by eschatologically themed passages in two sets of serialized speculative fictions sum to 32,270 words. My sole concerns are establishing how these very different depictions of collapse may relate in an eschatological semantic space. If that relation index is high, despite the differences of expression across the worlds depicted so differently, then the components of my training set suggest that the psycho-social construct of resilience must be at play in the interpretation of present events in two distinct depictions of collapse, if not also in anticipation of a better to come to be revealed only in a time to come. My second hypothesis, then, is this: If a moderate or greater strength of semantic similarity exists between the training set comprised by literary passages enacting eschatological expectations and that formed by the ontological and epistemological standards of interpretation adopted generally by the Patristics, then those dual strands of dramatization and commentary point toward a dominating presence of discourse weaving two different but complementary strands of approaching the noumenality of an eschaton in which the Creator entirely absorbs the creation.
By dominating I mean a discourse larger than its various expressions across domains as different as sacramemtal theology and archetypally, mimetically commenting on human motivation in literary criticism. This sense of domination recalls the Carroll (1993) account of hierarchical intelligence. That human quality that we believe is present but which can only be discerned by the proxy of present observations underlying the presence of that quality (e.g., intelligence) by necessity dominates multiple domains because its expression in ideation v. narrative are so different. Accordingly, if there is a discourse-level discerning capacity in machine learning leveraged in tandem with human supervision of text of selection, then literary criticism itself may enter an era in which each semantic measurement study serves as a possible baseline of human conduct that could be unobtrusively observed in the general population of people going about the many tasks of their day. Just as importantly, each study in literary motivation and conduct can be said to be a test of one expectation or another. Entirely possible is the launch of evidence-driven theoretical inquiry about human motivation as that is dramatized in literature. Simultaneously, such may represent the method by which humanities investigators may weigh in on the estimation and measurement of human intelligence.
Rather than seeking to summit the dominating peak of a region, this psychometric sensitivity to test use as revealed in the ongoing arguing validity argument about the utility of a test is a circumnavigation of that peak that we can never entirely summit because its way is noumenal. At best we can approximate a tenuous step and then validate our insights in the interplay of sense and sensibility in an entirely different corpus of theological assertions attesting to a reality beyond human perception, yet one which one day will bring a radical coherence to all of the acts of God Looking On within human history.
More generally, we can begin considering literary phenomena as delivering revelations via the thousands of parables of human motivation we can examine from multiple consensus-driven perspectives formed by so many interpretive communities. Such constitute the micro-tasks that approximate a distinct form of intelligence that may be imitated by a machine. If a mind can be represented by a set of verbal correspondences to a construct in action (e.g., buy-in), then that mind can be brought to deliberate the semantic similarities of another set of texts framing that topography- defining summit from another perspective. Statements of similarity, and dissimilarity, then can be prompted by a score. That score enfolds ontologies, or domain-driven dictionaries of semantically clustered keywords, and the purpose of bringing together any given group of texts.

Any construct can be amplified by the similarity and dissimilarity of text sets. Scientific Study of Literature is this month publishing my demonstration of such as I homage Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and modern AI-themed cinema. Bring me your most pressing concerns. I'll show you an analysis highlighting why those should matter to others.

Just put in press for Scientific Study of Literature.

Examining the continuum of self- to omni-interest in a sci-fi survey:
Self-, Species-, and Omni-Interest
I begin with Octavia Butler’s elaborations of the Human Contradiction in Adulthood Rites (1988). In this tale of the cultural clash between a crippled and needy humanity and a collectivist Alien society, some pockets of this fallout-era humanity resist assimilation, even when to assimilate would assure the survival of our species, however altered and augmented. That is the HC in essence: intelligence joined to our propensity to maintain and create hierarchies in our relations. Resistors do so at their peril in Adulthood Rites because humanity can no longer make babies without the genetic engineering done in tandem with one of the alien species. Hierarchies enable both self- and species-interest. Self-interest may lead as readily to innovation and creative adaptation as elitism and isolationism. At the tribal level, it is canonized whenever another race, class, s*x or preference requires its legitimation by opposing some other. Species-interest, by extension, I take to be marked in the best sense by a symbiotic, charitable and evolution-granting worldview. Its baser complement is the conformism Atlas, Shrugged (Rand, 1957) dramatized, the brutal utilitarianism of 1984 (Orwell, 1949) and The Dosadi Experiment (Herbert, 1977), and the anthropocentricism of Planet of the Apes (Boulle, 1963) and Ender’s Game (Card, 1985).
Between self- and species-interest is the grey space of omni-interest, or any embodiment of a win for the individual, tribe, species and world. Bringing that coherence in science are those stories of enlightened, technology- and wisdom-sharing aliens. Just as readily the win can be found in an egalitarian use of science that addresses human problems without cost to peripheral citizens or to other species. That beneficent science may be found in fiction featuring AI or genetic engineering. It can also be contained by God, however received into various post-apocalyptic and dystopian settings or altered to account for the radical present of each. That God figure may even be figured in a survivor donning a postman’s jacket and satchel in a walking memorium for a collapsed federal government (Brin, 1985).
For Butler that omni-interest was illustrated in a bildungsroman chronicling the life and development of Akin, a half-human, half Oankali child who occupies a middle space that enables him to both assure the furtherance of life and the restoration of the Resistors. As most fully human appearing and most familiar with the lives of Resistors, the Oankali hope Akin will negotiate the Contradiction more productively than they. Yet, from the start of his consciousness within the womb to sensing genetic structure itself, Akin is clearly another instance of a supernormal of some kind. He is related to Odd John as one of a kind, Horty as the first of his kind, and Victor’s Creature as the first and last of his kind. In Butler’s commonwealth of assimilation, free will, and Productive Adaptation, the God figure in Change. In her subsequent breakout novels (1993, 1995) Butler annotated her Earthseed God as persistent and adaptive, obsessively so in order to prompt productive change. Simultaneously, Butler saw us shaping God to our needs, which can only be realized amid the stars.

Self-interest in Frankenstein is both catalyst of Victor’s destruction and the driver of his brilliance. The Creature has become the first of humanity’s wunderkind to leap from the head of a man by science through the fancy of another enfant terrible. Mary Shelley’s depiction of the Creature as immune to the usual human weaknesses and supernaturally endowed with strength and intelligence should be understood equally as a being who can only be understood in its processes of development. Her most important collaboration with her poet-rebel husband Percy Shelley came when Percy insisted on representing the making of a monster’s mind in its encounter with The Sorrows of Werther, Paradise Lost, and Plutarch’s Lives of Ancient Greeks and Romans. In Frankenstein she appropriates the bildungsroman as employed by Goethe, father William Godwin and as structuring Rousseau’s species-wide depiction of the noble savage, even as Shelley amends it by exploring the horrific consequents of hubris and self-interest.
The present study brings to focus how a self-interested humanity may thoughtlessly destroy another species with its own agency or interest. That same stiff-necked insistence on seeing the world through conflict in an economy of scarcity is more often than not depicted as the seed ground of humanity’s destruction. That eschatology is apparent in Victor predicting a super-human species preying upon the world, Odd John’s collapsed utopia, Akin’s irradiated world, and Melanie and Stephen’s zombie (a.k.a., Hungry) infestation. Horty, for his part, is the corrective to the befouled and toxified order the Maneater sets along his carnival sites. All of these wunderkind also explore possible outlets for omni-interest.
Odd John (1936) further clarifies the inherent antagonism of a rival species, even as Stapledon dramatizes the Human Contradiction. This Radium Age standard is in the company of science-fiction writers who put the Űbermensch in action for their own interests, at whatever the cost to the lesser herd. Odd John is a supernormal child who sees multidimensional space, murders without hesitation toward advancing his Utopia of supernormal children, and even comes to telepathically unite his tribe. Its incessant exploration of the Will-to-Power gives its protagonist endless opportunities to demonstrate the species deficiencies of Homo sapiens, which must by global necessity yield to Homo superior. Rather than be taken into and exploited by the common rabble, John leads the children to destroy their own sanctuary. John, like many other exemplars of the ‘30s, offers damning critique of a species drunk on the power to harness the energy of the atom, to declaim the metaphysical and stare into the void of scientific/logical positivism. The end result of that is us assuming the Godhead, as a species, as chanted distantly by Hegel (Wallace, 2005).
Another response to that Radium Age skepticism is found in Theodore Sturgeon’s (1950) The Dreaming Jewels, a tale in which another remarkable child is actually the child of mating aliens. In fact, there are three alien children featured in this frightening anticipation of genetic engineering in which a usually indifferent alien species happens to create human-being-like constructs of themselves. Collectively, these characters may be understood to represent the best and worst of humanity. These alien creatures embodied in living jewels are as nonchalant as Victor Frankenstein in birthing a new species. These jewels represent a greater species because they continually form Horty through his early childhood.
Horty is an orphan poorly adopted by socially climbing parents more interested in appearing sympathetic to voters than giving of themselves to a child. Moreover, Horty is abused physically and verbally before he runs away to join a traveling carnival. There, he regenerates his mangled hand in secret and becomes conversant in all of human knowledge and the arts. Horty is a wunderkind and Alien enhanced, although most of the novel progresses in his self-awakening to his unique status. His döppelgänger complement is The Maneater, another enfant terrible on whom was done an irreparable slight. That loss of prestige as a doctor prompted Pierre Monetre (a.k.a. Maneater) to vow eternal strife against the whole of humanity. In that he echoes the Creature’s promise, who watched Victor destroy his last hope for happiness. It is also Satan’s purpose in Paradise Lost when the fallen angel epically sojourns to remake God’s creation in sin. Rather than moral damnation, the Maneater plies in biological warfare and creation of sentient beings who become freaks featured in the carnival. These freaks become family for Horty, who takes on the appearance of a petite young woman who never ages and for a decade is featured in musical acts. Her protector is Zena, who also takes on the role of Horty’s teacher. Her role is primarily that of a purveyor of books, for anything must be read but once to be absorbed by Horty’s eidetic memory. She also protects Horty from the Maneater. M.R. Carey dramatizes two other wunderkind with perfect recall, although considerably more burdened by their ability than Horty. One of these children has an adoptive mother; the other delivers a new species.
These super-normal children interrogating their self-interest against the species-interest of their protectors are featured in The Girl with All the Gifts (Carey, 2014) and The Boy on the Bridge (Carey, 2017). Both follow a Breakdown England 20 years after the event, when what is left is humanity is either feral or desperately focused only on survival. The first tale features Melanie. It is again a bildungsroman depicting her full acceptance as another sort of Hungry, but one left with reason and empathy. She is the best of humanity as is Pandora, yet also plays the Eve role in her initiation of the next generation to order the earth for its benefit. Her counterpart is less mythically framed as a high-functioning autistic child who makes two great discoveries. The first masks the human scent to which the Hungries are drawn. The second is finding a vaccine for the hungry plague. His dilemma is how to hide that discovery for its species-interest cost to a new ruling race.
All of the characters surveyed are enveloped by their wastelands, even while each determines a moral response to the plight of others. Even Victor’s unnamed Creature has a backstory to the horrors to which it acquiesced. In that story is a prototype of that Radium Age critique on science that has lost its humanity. Similarly, the post-apocalyptic wastelands envisioned by Olivia Butler and M.R. Carey reveal the undercurrents of human reason in all of its species-interest atrocities. In The Dreaming Jewels the very human motivations to create and control are interrogated and found wanting by those who insist on a better humanity within the standards of omni-interest.

Hmmm. The guy calling for a mindless revolution acted out of line. Such needs a court ruling if only to observe boundaries in power.

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How to illustrate multi-dimensional, proximate space. For example, consider the word barrier as used in the 1818 Frankenstein. However it is used there are the only possibilities for comparison to such key terms as abject, archenemies, condemnation, ice rift, inextinguishable, insurmountable, malicious, precipitous and shun. Especially when a narrative is also located in a hierarchically organized society. Barrier is almost on top of abject by the way, in terms of those relations to all other words retained for an analysis.

Terms so often cluster in a similar semantic space. Thus, everything else you cannot read must be located in one of two quite close features of semantic space. Archenemy and condemnation comprise the lower cluster, while inextinguishable, insurmountable, malicious, precipitous and shun comprise the middle cluster. The lowest possible semantic similarity is that between abject and archenemy. Abject in this data set is to grant defeat, while assuming the role of the archenemy is to defy even God himself.

Plato anticipated Erik Erikson's conclusions on aging in this snippet from The Republic: he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

In mapping the semantic spaces of the 1818 Frankenstein and its archetypal complements found in The Girl with All the Gifts (2016), I state either the moderate or strong influence in passage to passage comparisons. Those clusters I generated in response to eight hypotheses prompted by the present critical reception of the 1818 first edition. All of those appeared as ancillary material in the MIT Press 200-anniversary edition Frankenstein: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Types. I restricted the commentary to the contents of this new critical edition in order to demonstrate that various hypotheses can be tested within the same representation of semantic space. All comparisons I did on the R open-source platform. Results suggest the template-like nature of the analysis procedures could reveal the particulars of thousands of other domain-driven conversations demanding critical judgment. This may be literary study’s greatest contribution to the emergence of a disembodied AI in providing human cut-off points and rationale to classification decsions.

From a paper about to be put under review, in reflection on the distinct contribution machine learning brings to discourse analysis and structural literary criticism. ...

"representing the part in relation to the whole or even declaring that whole never existed beyond the power-granting rhetoric of masculine-, hetero-, nationalist- and class-based agendas of critical reading may be reframed—and humbled—by machine learning practices. Regardless of the unit of analysis—morpheme, word or phrase—machine learning can only authoritatively and transparently proceed by consensus. If a literary work were believed to be so unique as to have neither precedent nor consequent, then machine learning could at best explain it as another moment of fallout from Babel, and perhaps show some coherence to its own internal logic. As an unapologetic social cognitivist, I cannot imagine there exists any instance of such novelty, for all literary work proceeds from the heritage of language employed by a given writer in a given age and produced in that colloquy. But granting that such a literary work has been or will be, I fail to see the value of critically illuminating it, for neither readers nor writers can learn from it. At best, we can applaud its novelty. For all other literary works considered as either consequents of their time or disruptors of it—or even both—distributional semantics enables the commentator to consider the inherent properties of words constituting both literary works and their various constituencies receiving them."

From a paper in process evaluating the tractability of "Calamus" from one Whitman edition to another: The terms hypertext and resonance may begin to address the inadequacy of descriptives in literary criticism that Greenblatt observes (2005, p. 27) for a way of speaking to the intersection of art and history. Hypertext, that digital device often shaded in blue, disrupts linearity and underscores the intertextuality Nelson identifies as swirls. Resonance approximates the relatedness of texts, all texts, regardless of their function, for all texts may be understood as discourse artifacts of one sort or another. The only limitation to probing how one text may possibly relate to another is in their assemblage. Any dialogue among poems represents but a figure of the zodiak made visible not only by the proximity of starry points in the universe of texts of assembled, but also by their dynamic gravitational interactions.