Literary Event: 2013 International Virginia Woolf Conference

I’ve never cracked the spine of a Virginia Woolf book, but last week I was a featured speaker at the 2013 International Annual Virginia Woolf Conference in Vancouver. Using computationally driven macroanalytic techniques, I didn’t have to.

For a class on digital methods for critical analysis (a truly Stanford version of a humanities class), my best friend and I developed a classifier in the R programming language to sort out stylistic similarities between Woolf’s diary entries and her characters’ streams of consciousnesses in her novels, none of which we had read.

The fruits of our labor included such startling revelations as, “In general, the characters of the Waves (with the exception being Rhoda) very

strongly exhibited a classified with the year 1928, with Bernard, Jinny, and Neville classifying

into ’28 with 92%, 94%, and 86% confidence respectively.”

If the magnitude of this discovery is lost on you, I will admit that it’s lost on me as well. In presenting our findings to Stanford’s foremost Virginia Woolf scholar at the end of our digital methods my class, my friend and I had no idea the significance of any of our results. Consequently, I had a fantastic opportunity to improv a presentation, the topic of which I was stunningly ignorant on. Essentially, I had to iteratively proffer statistical information and various interpretations, gauge which reactions seemed most right, and continue from there.

In what was sort of the ultimate version of getting an 'A' on that book report on that summer reading book you never read but actually spark noted, Stanford gave my friend and me both grants to fly to Vancouver and present at the international Virginia Woolf Conference last week in Vancouver. Kidding aside, our research was actually interesting and opens new doors into humanities studies, even if I'm neither a particularly adept programmer, statistician, or Virginia Woolf scholar; rather, I just happened to be at the right school at the right time with the appropriate.

As for the Woolf conference, itself, it was a truly strange experience entering briefly into such a small world with such a shared, fervent interest that I knew and know nothing about. Weirder than that was being caught in the middle of it—having an old, hunched-back Woolf scholar with a strong dutch accent, for instance, come up to myself and my buddy telling her about how important our research approach could be for her study of the use of color words in Virginia Woolf's corpus. Certainly, however, it made for a funny little story.