We’re very excited that our new culture analytics essay on creativity and MFA programs, as well as issues of gender and racial diversity in publishing, has been published at the Atlantic Monthly. We use text mining techniques to reveal some troubling patterns in creative writing today, and tell a new story about institutions and creativity. In the next week or so, we’ll be publishing more details and findings about our experiment.
Donate your ideas to science not Facebook! Every day we post valuable information to social media sites. These platforms use that information to learn all sorts of things about us. But they never share that learning back with us. We want to start a new culture of idea donation in which the knowledge gained is given back to you the participants.
Have you ever written a novel or a short story and had it rejected? We want to hear from you!
In this project, we’re interested in understanding what makes a work of creative writing pass through the gatekeepers of editors, publishers, and marketing departments. What are they selecting for? Does anyone on the outside really know?
We have lots of examples of things that have been successfully published. New novels, new short stories appear every day. But what we can’t see are the piles and piles of rejected manuscripts from which the successful ones are chosen.
Knowing how these choices are made can help aspiring writers of the future navigate these filters better (assuming it isn’t random, but we might learn that too!). But it can also give us a critical lens through which to view the often narrow ways we think about creativity today.
If you want to donate your manuscript to our project, please send it as word document along with a copy of your rejection letter/email (if you received one) to:
Of course, if your material becomes a part of our published study, we will not include any information about your name or identity – everything will be kept anonymous.
And we will definitely share our findings with you.
Sincerely,
Richard Jean So
Andrew Piper
We have a new piece appearing in The New Republic today. In a number of recent book reviews, literary critics and novelists arrive at the consensus that to be a great writer, one must avoid being “sentimental.” One famous novelist describes it as a “cardinal sin” of writing. But is it actually true? Using a computer science method called “sentiment analysis,” we tested this claim on a large corpus of novels from the early twentieth century to the present, and found the opposite. Writers who win book prizes and get reviewed in the New York Times are not any less sentimental than novelists who write popular fiction, such as romances or bestsellers. The only group for whom this was not true were the 50 most canonical novels ever written since about 1950. Our analysis tells us that if you want to write one of the most important books of the next half century, then you should tone down the sentiment. But if you want to be reviewed in a major newspaper, sell books, or win prizes, go ahead and emote away.
But the larger point for us is the way our cultural taste-makers are often wrong or extremely biased in their assumptions about what matters. We found that a computer, ironically, can paint a more nuanced picture of what makes great literature.
Here is a an excerpt:
If you want to be a great writer, should you withhold your sentimental tendencies? The answer for most critics and writers seems to be yes. Sentimentality is often seen as a useful way of distinguishing between serious literature and the not-so-serious, probably best-selling kind. “Sentimentality,” James Baldwin wrote, is “the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion…the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel.” While sentimentality is false, grandiose, manipulative, and over-boiled, high literature is subtle, nuanced, cool, and true. As Roland Barthes, the dean of high cultural criticism, once remarked: “It is no longer the sexual which is indecent, it is the sentimental.” This sentiment (yes sentiment) has been around since at least the early twentieth century and is still a subject of debate in the review pagesof numerous media outlets today. But is it true? Whether you are for subtlety or against sentimentality, is this a good way to think about writing your next novel?
Read more here.
We are very pleased to be launching this new website which represents a collaborative endeavour between the two of us. Our goal is to make humanities research more relevant to public debates and to see how the use of new kinds of evidence change how we discuss cultural topics. Please join us. We welcome your feedback and insights.