Katherine Bode's superb analysis of ~10,000 works of fiction in the National Library of Australia’s Trove database. Open-access.

A survey by David S. Miall and Don Kuiken from 1995.

LRB piece on how the online drug market has changed the drug trade.

Superb set of LaTeX tips.

"This directory contains 450 novels that appeared between 1770 and 1930 in German, French and English. It is designed for us in teaching and research."

"We present a general framework of analyzing existing story corpora to generate controllable and creative new stories. The proposed framework needs little manual annotation to achieve controllable story generation. It creates a new interface for humans to interact with computers to generate personalized stories. We apply the framework to build recurrent neural network (RNN)-based generation models to control story ending valence and storyline. Experiments show that our methods successfully achieve the control and enhance the coherence of stories through introducing storylines. with additional control factors, the generation model gets lower perplexity, and yields more coherent stories that are faithful to the control factors according to human evaluation."

A data-rich close reading of a book by Obama and a book by Ayers. (c.f. Has Critique Run out of Steam) """Obama's floors slant. Ayers' floors slope. Both use skillets. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the word "skillet" seems "to have been confined to the Midland section of the country." Elsewhere, "frying pan" or "fry pan" is more common. Ayers grew up in Illinois. In "Dreams," which is about 130,000 words in length, the word kitchen appears 29 times. In "Fugitive Days," it appears 11 times in about 100,000 words. As a control, I used my 2000 novel, "2006: The Chautauqua Rising." I have very little interest in cooking. It shows. Although the novel has a 26 year-old male protagonist and any number of domestic settings, the word "kitchen" appears once in about 100,000 words. """

Danielle J. Navarro

Superb visualization of recent economic history in the US (1980-2014). "A neat reminder of just how unrepresentative an average can be: Average US income growth 1980-2014 was 1.4% per year. But almost the entire income distribution - 1st-87th percentile - had income growth below this average. Graph from @PikettyLeMonde , Saez & @gabriel_zucman"

Panel at DH2018. Wonderful references section. Participants: Grant Wythoff (grant.wythoff@gmail.com), Pennsylvania State University, United States of America y Alison Booth (ab6j@virginia.edu), University of Virginia, United States of America y Sarah Allison (sallison@loyno.edu), Loyola University New Orleans, United States of America y Daniel Shore (Daniel.Shore@georgetown.edu), Georgetown University, United States of America

JEP piece by Waldfogel. Abstract: "Digitization is disrupting a number of copyright-protected media industries, including books, music, radio, television, and movies. Once information is transformed into digital form, it can be copied and distributed at near-zero marginal costs. This change has facilitated piracy in some industries, which in turn has made it difficult for commercial sellers to continue generating the same levels of revenue for bringing products to market in the traditional ways. Yet despite the sharp revenue reductions for recorded music, as well as threats to revenue in some other traditional media industries, other aspects of digitization have had the offsetting effects of reducing the costs of bringing new products to market in music, movies, books, and television. On balance, digitization has increased the number of new products that are created and made available to consumers. Moreover, given the unpredictable nature of product quality, growth in new products has given rise to substantial increases in the quality of the best products. Although there were concerns that consumer welfare from media products would fall, the opposite scenario has emerged—a golden age for consumers who wish to consume media products. ..."

Comments about Bowker's monopoly on ISBNs in the USA.

Why demand for low-quality products remains (very) high. Abstract: "Between 1810 and 1939, real per capita spending on patent medicines grew by a factor of 114; real per capita GDP by a factor of 5. The long-term growth and survival this industry is puzzling when juxtaposed with standard historical accounts, which typically portray patent medicines as quack medicines. This paper argues that patent medicines were distinguished from other products by an unusually low elasticity of demand with respect to product failure. While consumers in other markets stopped searching for a viable product after a few failed attempts, consumers of patent medicines kept trying different products, irrespective of the number of failed medicines they observed. The market expanded as the stock of people buying potential cures accumulated over time. Because no one was ever cured and consumers possessed a highly inelastic demand with respect to product failures, demand was unrelenting. In short, patent medicines flourished not despite their dubious medicinal qualities, but because of them. There is also evidence that genuine medical advances, such as the rise of the germ theory of disease and new therapeutic interventions, helped expand the market for quack medicines."

Interesting take on the Dan Mallory fraud.