{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,4,29]],"date-time":"2026-04-29T09:53:39Z","timestamp":1777456419543,"version":"3.51.4"},"reference-count":18,"publisher":"SAGE Publications","issue":"2","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2015,12,1]],"date-time":"2015-12-01T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1448928000000},"content-version":"tdm","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/journals.sagepub.com\/page\/policies\/text-and-data-mining-license"}],"content-domain":{"domain":["journals.sagepub.com"],"crossmark-restriction":true},"short-container-title":["Big Data &amp; Society"],"published-print":{"date-parts":[[2015,12,1]]},"abstract":"<jats:p>Debates over \u201cBig Data\u201d shed more heat than light in the humanities, because the term ascribes new importance to statistical methods without explaining how those methods have changed. What we badly need instead is a conversation about the substantive innovations that have made statistical modeling useful for disciplines where, in the past, it truly wasn\u2019t. These innovations are partly technical, but more fundamentally expressed in what Leo Breiman calls a new \u201cculture\u201d of statistical modeling. Where 20th-century methods often required humanists to squeeze our unstructured texts, sounds, or images into some special-purpose data model, new methods can handle unstructured evidence more directly by modeling it in a high-dimensional space. This opens a range of research opportunities that humanists have barely begun to discuss. To date, topic modeling has received most attention, but in the long run, supervised predictive models may be even more important. I sketch their potential by describing how Jordan Sellers and I have begun to model poetic distinction in the long 19th century\u2014revealing an arc of gradual change much longer than received literary histories would lead us to expect.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1177\/2053951715602494","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2015,12,1]],"date-time":"2015-12-01T21:44:25Z","timestamp":1449006265000},"update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1177\/sage-journals-update-policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":9,"title":["The literary uses of high-dimensional space"],"prefix":"10.1177","volume":"2","author":[{"given":"Ted","family":"Underwood","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of English, University of Illinois, Urbana\u2013Champaign, IL, USA"}],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"179","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2015,12,1]]},"reference":[{"issue":"4","key":"bibr1-2053951715602494","first-page":"857","volume":"62","author":"Abbott A","year":"1995","journal-title":"Social Research"},{"key":"bibr2-2053951715602494","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1214\/ss\/1009213726"},{"key":"bibr3-2053951715602494","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1016\/j.poetic.2013.08.004"},{"key":"bibr4-2053951715602494","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1353\/nlh.2014.0025"},{"key":"bibr5-2053951715602494","volume-title":"Norton Anthology of English Literature","author":"Greenblatt S","year":"2006","edition":"8"},{"key":"bibr6-2053951715602494","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1632\/pmla.2013.128.2.409"},{"key":"bibr7-2053951715602494","unstructured":"Marche S (2012) Literature is not data: Against digital humanities.\n                      Los Angeles Review of Books,\n                      28 October. 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Available at: http:\/\/miriamposner.com\/blog\/humanities-data-a-necessary-contradiction\/ (accessed 12 July 2015)."},{"key":"bibr13-2053951715602494","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1007\/s11135-011-9545-7"},{"key":"bibr14-2053951715602494","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1214\/10-STS330"},{"key":"bibr15-2053951715602494","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","DOI":"10.1086\/606126"},{"key":"bibr16-2053951715602494","unstructured":"Underwood T (2014) Page-level genre metadata for English-language volumes in HathiTrust, 1700\u20131922. In:\n                      figshare.\n                      Available at: dx.doi.org\/10.6084\/m9.figshare.1279201 (accessed 2 March 2015)."},{"key":"bibr17-2053951715602494","unstructured":"Underwood T and Sellers J (2015) How quickly do literary standards change? 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