#267 Richard Jean So: Cultural Analytics, Literary Studies, And Race
RECORDED ON SEPTEMBER 28th, 2019.
Dr. Richard Jean So is Assistant Professor of English and Cultural Analytics at McGill University in Montreal. Previously, he served as an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago, where he co-founded the university’s first digital humanities lab (“Textual Optics Lab”). He earned his BA at Brown University in English and Economics, and PhD in English at Columbia University. More recently, he has retrained in Computer Science at the University of Washington, and Statistics at the University of Michigan. Broadly, he works in the fields of cultural analytics and American culture, with a particular focus on race and inequality. Increasingly, he also works on the Internet and social media. His first book was Transpacific Community: America, China and the Rise and Fall of a Cultural Network.
In this episode, we talk about the new and emerging field of cultural analytics, and how it applies to literary studies. We discuss what we can gain from computer analysis approaches in the humanities. We also talk about integrating the humanities with the sciences; race and racism; and the cultural transmission through the internet and social media.
Time Links:
What literary studies have to gain from computer analysis and AI approaches?
What insights can we obtain from computer analysis?
Studying social phenomena, like racism
Cultural transmission through different mediums
Integrating the humanities with the sciences
Studying historical phenomena
Race through a literary lens
Culture and communication through the internet and social media
Follow Dr. So’s work!
Follow Dr. So’s work:
Faculty page: http://bit.ly/2YSFXWR
Personal website: http://bit.ly/2ocN4wJ
Publications: http://bit.ly/2oc5u0t
Cultural analytics: http://bit.ly/2muPqqe
Twitter handle: @RichardJeanSo