J.D. Porter
@jdporter.bsky.social
Literature/DH scholar, Price Lab at UPenn | I work on text mining, canons, literature and philosophy, and so on | Writing in PMLA, Synthese, The Atlantic, Cultural Analytics, the Stanford Literary Lab pamphlet series, etc
The extent to which everyone refuses to learn whether it's "Sliwa" or "Silwa" is very funny to me
November 3, 2025 at 9:15 PM
The extent to which everyone refuses to learn whether it's "Sliwa" or "Silwa" is very funny to me
The occupied city winning because its diverse prosperous team came through thanks to guys who don’t usually get the glory is what we’re going for here, I think.
November 2, 2025 at 4:31 AM
The occupied city winning because its diverse prosperous team came through thanks to guys who don’t usually get the glory is what we’re going for here, I think.
Love this piece by Laura McGrath, who finds an important question for the book industry—“What if we’ve been over-estimating the role that genre plays in the life of a reader?"—in a recent paper I wrote with James English.
The Omnivore Dilemma
Digging into the Data of Contemporary Readers
laurabmcgrath.substack.com
October 21, 2025 at 4:06 PM
Love this piece by Laura McGrath, who finds an important question for the book industry—“What if we’ve been over-estimating the role that genre plays in the life of a reader?"—in a recent paper I wrote with James English.
As a metaphor maybe
October 20, 2025 at 10:56 PM
As a metaphor maybe
I think a lot of people feel an almost familial pride in and love for their cities, and among other things these marches highlight each city, its particular faces, slang, colors, streets, communities. It's ineffable but I think it’s profound.
October 19, 2025 at 6:24 PM
I think a lot of people feel an almost familial pride in and love for their cities, and among other things these marches highlight each city, its particular faces, slang, colors, streets, communities. It's ineffable but I think it’s profound.
Roughly 40% of political journalism is “Right Wing Guy Dislikes Left Wing Thing”
October 13, 2025 at 6:21 PM
Roughly 40% of political journalism is “Right Wing Guy Dislikes Left Wing Thing”
It’s so clear he didn’t write this: the fanfic cadence, coherent narrative, diverse (for him) vocab, topical focus, quotations, a sense of other people’s experience, the notion that he spoke to Melania. These Potemkin ramblings show that even his old delights (griping online) are beyond him now.
“A REAL DISGRACE took place at the United Nations yesterday — Not one, not two, but three very sinister events! First, the escalator going up to the Main Speaking Floor came to a screeching halt…”
September 25, 2025 at 1:00 AM
It’s so clear he didn’t write this: the fanfic cadence, coherent narrative, diverse (for him) vocab, topical focus, quotations, a sense of other people’s experience, the notion that he spoke to Melania. These Potemkin ramblings show that even his old delights (griping online) are beyond him now.
If eating road kill were just a little more dangerous, I wouldn't have COVID right now.
September 9, 2025 at 6:09 PM
If eating road kill were just a little more dangerous, I wouldn't have COVID right now.
Really excited to see this piece come out! Studying eclectic readers has been a fascinating and extremely rewarding challenge. We wound up operationalizing both genre and eclecticism in ways that (classic DH stuff here) point to the limits of both concepts.
culturalanalytics.org/article/1429...
culturalanalytics.org/article/1429...
The Eclectic Reader | Published in Journal of Cultural Analytics
By James English, J. D. Porter. Using Goodreads data, this study explores the overlooked eclecticism of readers, revealing both patterns of cultural hierarchy and the conceptual limits of eclecticism ...
culturalanalytics.org
August 22, 2025 at 4:15 PM
Really excited to see this piece come out! Studying eclectic readers has been a fascinating and extremely rewarding challenge. We wound up operationalizing both genre and eclecticism in ways that (classic DH stuff here) point to the limits of both concepts.
culturalanalytics.org/article/1429...
culturalanalytics.org/article/1429...
These were the best donuts in the world, and really good kolaches, too. Now we're a year from them being as bad as Krispy Kreme, <5 years until they're gone entirely.
July 28, 2025 at 8:16 PM
These were the best donuts in the world, and really good kolaches, too. Now we're a year from them being as bad as Krispy Kreme, <5 years until they're gone entirely.
Out of the cradle, endlessly boppin
June 28, 2025 at 9:20 PM
Out of the cradle, endlessly boppin
I will pretty much always participate in a ranking exercise—a habit that has been weirdly vital to my career.
The big caveat here is I only did one film per director, so this wouldn't just be a list of Kelly Reichardt films.
The big caveat here is I only did one film per director, so this wouldn't just be a list of Kelly Reichardt films.
June 26, 2025 at 9:04 PM
I will pretty much always participate in a ranking exercise—a habit that has been weirdly vital to my career.
The big caveat here is I only did one film per director, so this wouldn't just be a list of Kelly Reichardt films.
The big caveat here is I only did one film per director, so this wouldn't just be a list of Kelly Reichardt films.
This is an incredible dataset, and it's a lot of fun to play around with it on the Post45 site!
Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower was published in 1993 and starts in 2024—a 31-year leap. Are creators imagining futures that are closer or further away?
Explore a *new* dataset of 2.5k narrative works set in the future, each tagged with its release year and setting.
doi.org/10.18737/552...
Explore a *new* dataset of 2.5k narrative works set in the future, each tagged with its release year and setting.
doi.org/10.18737/552...
June 25, 2025 at 6:28 PM
This is an incredible dataset, and it's a lot of fun to play around with it on the Post45 site!
Here's a graph of the Sufficient Bucket in every NBA playoff game so far this season.
The SB gives team A a score that team B will never reach in the game. The earliest one in these playoffs came when a Donovan Mitchell FT got CLE to 84 with 9:15 left in the third (MIA finished with 83).
The SB gives team A a score that team B will never reach in the game. The earliest one in these playoffs came when a Donovan Mitchell FT got CLE to 84 with 9:15 left in the third (MIA finished with 83).
June 13, 2025 at 6:55 PM
Here's a graph of the Sufficient Bucket in every NBA playoff game so far this season.
The SB gives team A a score that team B will never reach in the game. The earliest one in these playoffs came when a Donovan Mitchell FT got CLE to 84 with 9:15 left in the third (MIA finished with 83).
The SB gives team A a score that team B will never reach in the game. The earliest one in these playoffs came when a Donovan Mitchell FT got CLE to 84 with 9:15 left in the third (MIA finished with 83).
This is a great dataset, very excited to see it go live! Already looking forward to sharing this with my students next time I teach.
More than 30 years worth of data on UK literary prizes (and their winners) goes live today @post45data.bsky.social! Bravo to researchers Katherine Binhammer, Kanika Batra, Theo Gray, and Maryse Jayasuriya for compiling and publishing this incredible resource! data.post45.org/posts/britis...
Selected British Literary Prizes (1990-2022) – Post45 Data Collective
The Selected British Literary Prizes (SBLP) dataset contains information on nine major literary prizes in the U.K. from 1990 to 2022 and demographic information on 682 prize winners and shortlisted au...
data.post45.org
June 11, 2025 at 8:11 PM
This is a great dataset, very excited to see it go live! Already looking forward to sharing this with my students next time I teach.
One of my favorite papers to work on! Writing with Nat and Jumbly had a huge impact on my thinking about meaning, especially (though not exclusively) in the context of LLMs.
Jumbly, @jdporter.bsky.social, and I have a new paper on what happens when we raise old Fodor & Lepore style criticisms of holism about distributional models of meaning (like those at work in LLMs). It turns out there's a lot of stability even in super holistic models.
philpapers.org/rec/GRIDSH
philpapers.org/rec/GRIDSH
Jumbly Grindrod, J. D. Porter & Nat Hansen, Distributional Semantics, Holism, and the Instability of Meaning - PhilPapers
Large Language Models are built on the so-called distributional semantic approach to linguistic meaning that has the distributional hypothesis at its core. The distributional hypothesis involves a hol...
philpapers.org
April 4, 2025 at 6:16 PM
One of my favorite papers to work on! Writing with Nat and Jumbly had a huge impact on my thinking about meaning, especially (though not exclusively) in the context of LLMs.
Erik and I have been blown away by the excellent work these students have done. It was really thrilling to see them featured at this showcase!
March 13, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Erik and I have been blown away by the excellent work these students have done. It was really thrilling to see them featured at this showcase!
Inspired by a few people over the holidays mentioning Trump's "blowout win", here are a few tables (via Wikipedia) showing how narrow it was.
- Worse than every Dem win of this century
- 5th worst in the last 100 years
- All time, 49th place (out of 59)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
- Worse than every Dem win of this century
- 5th worst in the last 100 years
- All time, 49th place (out of 59)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
December 29, 2024 at 7:54 PM
Inspired by a few people over the holidays mentioning Trump's "blowout win", here are a few tables (via Wikipedia) showing how narrow it was.
- Worse than every Dem win of this century
- 5th worst in the last 100 years
- All time, 49th place (out of 59)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
- Worse than every Dem win of this century
- 5th worst in the last 100 years
- All time, 49th place (out of 59)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...
“Difficult” is the top word missing from Moby Dick. Feels like Melville doing a little malicious compliance with his editor’s demands
How can we visualize what a book ISN'T talking about? With an anti-tag cloud! See the most common English words that are never mentioned in a text.
www.bewitched.com/demo/anti/
www.bewitched.com/demo/anti/
Anti-Tag Cloud
Visualize the negative space of literary works
www.bewitched.com
December 18, 2024 at 5:53 PM
“Difficult” is the top word missing from Moby Dick. Feels like Melville doing a little malicious compliance with his editor’s demands
Reposted by J.D. Porter
What's in an anthology? @jdporter.bsky.social, Price Lab DH Specialist, & @fredner.org (with assistance from David McClure & the @stanfordlitlab.bsky.social) built a relational database of all 464 authors & 3,374 works published across the ten editions of the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
December 18, 2024 at 4:21 PM
What's in an anthology? @jdporter.bsky.social, Price Lab DH Specialist, & @fredner.org (with assistance from David McClure & the @stanfordlitlab.bsky.social) built a relational database of all 464 authors & 3,374 works published across the ten editions of the Norton Anthology of American Literature.
I went to a very interesting AI/pedagogy summit yesterday, and one of my big takeaways is that we really need an institution-level push to normalize this kind of thing. It's a really straightforward way to make sure we preserve the essay form and writing skills (in code or prose).
December 11, 2024 at 10:26 PM
I went to a very interesting AI/pedagogy summit yesterday, and one of my big takeaways is that we really need an institution-level push to normalize this kind of thing. It's a really straightforward way to make sure we preserve the essay form and writing skills (in code or prose).
I can really relate to this
Well I'm fucked.
November 14, 2024 at 12:29 AM
I can really relate to this
Tried to do a ballot curing phone bank, but by the time they trained the new folks like me they had already finished the entire list. A case where it feels great to be unnecessary
November 5, 2024 at 8:00 PM
Tried to do a ballot curing phone bank, but by the time they trained the new folks like me they had already finished the entire list. A case where it feels great to be unnecessary
The most evergreen post about MAGA politics I’ve seen
Am I going to need to google something to find out what the hell this is even about? Do I even want to know?
November 4, 2024 at 6:55 PM
The most evergreen post about MAGA politics I’ve seen