Underwood and students present research at CHR2020

Ted Underwood
Ted Underwood, Professor

Professor Ted Underwood, PhD students Wenyi Shang and Yuerong Hu, MS/IM students Anirudh Sharma and Shubhangi Singhal, and English PhD student Peizhen Wu will present their research at the Workshop on Computational Humanities Research (CHR2020), which will be held virtually from November 18-20. The purpose of the workshop is to "foster the formation of a community of humanities scholars that rely on a wide range of computational approaches" and to serve as a stepping stone toward the creation of a research-oriented, open-access computational humanities journal.

Underwood and the students will present their paper, "The Rise and Fall of Genre Differentiation in English-Language Fiction," in which they examine the strength of textual differentiation between genres of fiction in a collection of English-language books dating from 1860 to 2009.

"We know that new genres can emerge over time," said Underwood. "The categories we call 'mystery' and 'science fiction' weren't clearly defined in 1850, but by 1950 they described sharply distinct kinds of writing. In this paper, we ask whether the process can also go in the other direction. Can existing genres blur and melt together? We found this was true not only for specific genres, but for the genre system as a whole. The books grouped in a particular category in the twenty-first century tend to be less different from other categories than they were in the middle of the twentieth century. To check that this wasn't just an accident of library classification, we also tested the hypothesis with genre categories inferred from book reviews and found the same thing."

Underwood is a professor in the iSchool and also holds an appointment with the Department of English in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. His research interests include statistical and computational modeling of humanistic evidence, machine learning and text mining, book history, digital libraries, sociology of literature, computational social science, and digital humanities. Underwood earned his PhD in English from Cornell University.

Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

New book explores video standards in film and archives

A new book co-authored by iSchool Adjunct Lecturer Jimi Jones and Marek Jancovic, assistant professor of media studies at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, examines video file standards and the tensions that have emerged between the film industry and the archiving community that is tasked with preserving cultural cinematic productions. 

Jimi Jones

Chin receives NSF CAREER award

Assistant Professor Jessie Chin has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to support lifelong learning and foster information literacy. This prestigious award is given in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Chin’s project, “Search as a Mechanism for Learning,” will be supported by a five-year, $629,451 grant from the NSF.

Jessie Chin

What are the effects of trade restrictions on digital technologies?

President Donald Trump has threatened to levy higher tariffs on more than two dozen countries and on various products in the past few months. China in particular has been a target of the administration’s trade wars, aimed at preventing its dominance in areas such as artificial intelligence, although the U.S. government announced recently that it would sell advanced semiconductors used in AI to China. Assistant Professor Meicen Sun spoke with News Bureau arts and humanities editor Jodi Heckel about the effects of trade restrictions.

Meicen Sun

Hassan selected for IAPP Westin Scholar Award

PhD student Muhammad Hassan has been selected as an IAPP Westin Scholar Award honoree. The annual awards were created by the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) to support students who are identified as future leaders in the field of privacy and data protection. 

Muhammad Hassan

School welcomes specialized faculty

The iSchool is pleased to announce the appointment of two specialized faculty members. Yildiz Esener and Nitin Verma will join the School as teaching assistant professors in August 2025.