Search and Replace: Josephine Miles and the Origins of Distant Reading

From this day forward, every time you see the name Roberto Busa invoked as a—or the—founding scholar of either quantitative or computational method in the humanities, we want you to mentally search and replace with another name: Josephine Miles.

Miles was a poet and an English professor at Berkeley. In the 1930s, as a graduate student at Berkeley, she completed her first distant reading project: an analysis of the adjectives favored by Romantic poets. In the 1940s, with the aid of a Guggenheim, she expanded this work into a large-scale study of the phrasal forms of the poetry of the 1640s, 1740s, and 1840s. In all of this distant reading work, Miles created her tabulations by hand, with pen and graph paper. She also directed possibly the first literary concordance to use machine methods. In the early 1950s, Miles became project director of an abandoned index-card-based Concordance to the Poetical Works of John Dryden. Partnering with the Electrical Engineering department at Berkeley, and contracting with their computer lab and its IBM tabulation machine, Miles used machine methods to complete the concordance. It was published in 1957, six years after she and several woman graduate students and woman punch-card operators began the work. It was thus begun around the time that Busa circulated early proof-of-concept drafts of his concordance to the complete works of St. Thomas Aquinas, and published 17 years before the first volumes of the 56-volume Index Thomasticus began to appear.

There are good reasons, of course, that scholars and journalists like to begin with Busa: he was the first concordance-maker to automate all five stages of the process, in 1951. Busa also sought out high-profile partnerships with Thomas Watson of IBM and others; he foregrounded the innovative nature of his work, and his index incorporated new programming approaches as they developed through the later 1950s and 60s. Miles, on the other hand, worked with the engineers and machines that were close at hand in nearby Cory Hall; she credited the woman typists and punchcard operators she collaborated with; she valued “imaginative” programmers.”[1] And Miles came to the discarded Dryden concordancing project from her own difficult experiences attempting to convince the University of California Press to publish her data along with her literary-critical and literary-historical interpretations of it. When she started work on the Dryden project, Miles was already deeply experienced with the problems of publication and workflow that swirl around the history of concordancing, both manual and machine.[2]

What we stand to gain from Miles is therefore twofold. Most importantly, we find in her work a literary genealogy for distant reading to stand alongside other long genealogies that track the rise of “quantitative or empirical approaches to literary history” through literary sociology, for example, as Ted Underwood does. Miles understood the latest in computational concordancing as influenced by the “inventive” concordancing tradition of the last generation, including “the great Lane Cooper Concordance for Wordsworth, Cornell 1911” (Miles, review, 290). Miles saw concordances and machine indexing as a core part of literary criticism, for they could help scholars to a broader view of comparisons between poems and poets. And Miles’s distant reading work was not only literary, it was in an important sense modernist: her work tested and overturned some of her generation’s defining accounts of modernist and metaphysical poetry as “hard” or “concrete.” Miles’s distant reading projects are therefore part of the history of twentieth-century poetry. And she did not limit her “tabular view” to literary history; her quantitative work also influenced her own poetic style and shaped the Verse Composition course she taught at Berkeley to poets like A. R. Ammons and Jack Spicer.

Replacing Busa with Miles has a second function: it can stand as an example of how we might write a history of literary scholarship that does not center originality and individual accomplishment. Though Busa had the help of many associates—Melissa Terras has tracked down and credited Busa’s female punch-card operators—their names were not credited in his published work. Miles, by contrast, quite carefully credited the women who worked on her projects. She gave the names of her two graduate student workers, Mary Jackman and Helen S. Agoa, on the cover of the Dryden index. She spoke in the preface and in later interviews about the importance of her collaboration with Penny Gee of Berkeley’s Cory Hall computing lab. And she emphasized that her Renaissance, Eighteenth-Century, and Modern Language in English Poetry: A Tabular View (1960) would never have been finally printed had not “an heroic woman” and “master typist” at the University of California Press offered to type the charts.[3]

Substituting “Miles” for “Busa,” then, allows us to imagine an origin story for computationally-assisted reading that comes from within the discipline of literary study, and involves a woman project lead who preserved the names of her female collaborators. Miles’s career also offers us another origin point for distant reading and quantitative methods of literary analysis. And it helps us see how Miles’s computational concordance project and her distant reading work informed one another, and together informed her own composition of poetry and teaching of poetic composition.

The Dryden Concordance

The Dryden project initially entered Miles’s life as something of a “departmental obligation and chore.”[4] When Miles’s colleague Guy Montgomery died in 1951, he left behind him 64 shoeboxes full of index cards towards a concordance to Dryden’s complete works. George Potter, the English department chair at Berkeley at the time, wrote to Montgomery’s former students, but none could take on the project. Potter asked Miles to do the job because her scholarship had focused for over a decade on concordances and tabulation. Miles remembers Potter saying, “’You use concordances so much, and so much counting, you ought to be able to handle this sixty-three shoeboxes of cards for the Dryden concordance which Guy Montgomery left when he died.’”  That project, Miles recalls, “led me into years of studying computers, and I did make a computer concordance” (Poetry, Teaching, 75). To transform the index-card concordance into a computer concordance, Miles applied for funding from the Faculty Research Committee, which she used to contract with the Electrical Engineering Department to use their IBM tabulation machine and their punch-card staff to create a new, corrected set of cards for tabulation. University President Robert Sproul granted funds for the photolithographic reproduction of the results for publication.

Writing to Montgomery’s one-time graduate student collaborator Lester A. Hubbard in 1957, Miles described the “experimental” and collaborative nature of the project: “[t]he Concordance underwent so many metamorphoses . . . that at least seven names would have had to be listed as editors” (letter to Hubbard). In her preface to the published volume, Miles thanked faculty from the English, French, and Speech Departments, but she especially singled out the female staff members from the computer lab who “worked under the guidance of Mr. Gordon Morrison and Mr. Boyd Judd at the Computer Laboratory,” including Shirley Rice, Odette Carothers, and Penny Gee, who had punched each card in the Concordance with a single word, a symbol corresponding to the title of the poem in which it appeared, and a line number.[5] Later, Miles remembered Gee as “very smart and good” and—most importantly—a true collaborator, as opposed to those “IBM people from San Jose” who would arrive periodically to flatly ask, “What can we do to help you?” “I’ve never been able to connect with them,” Miles explains, “ though I did with Penny Gee. She really taught me” (Poetry, Teaching, 126).

For the concordance’s publication, Miles elected to give editorial credit to the two graduate students, Mary Jackman and Helen S. Agoa, who had worked intensely on the concordance in its final stages, declining to place her own name on the cover; her name appears instead as the author of the Concordance’s Preface. Later, Hubbard would engage a lawyer to demand that he be acknowledged as co-author on the basis of the work he had done to generate the initial set of index cards with Guy Montgomery. Thin slips with Hubbard’s name on them were distributed to be pasted into the already-published volumes.

Miles’s Distant Reading

By the time the Dryden concordance was published in 1957, Miles had been using her own handmade word counts to analyze poetic language for almost twenty years. As a graduate student in the late 1930s at Berkeley, Miles’s dissertation examined Wordsworth’s language— specifically, whether he expressed emotions literally or through metaphor.  “I developed a method for doing this,” Miles later explained, “which involved counting, because I wanted to show actual proportions, that he did very little else but just state literally” (Poetry, Teaching, 65). Wordsworth and the Vocabulary of Emotion appeared in print in 1942, and was followed by Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century: A Study of a Changing Relation Between Object and Emotion (1942), and Major Adjectives in English Poetry From Wyatt to Auden (1946).

Miles employed graduate students at the rate of $25 for 20 hours of work to help her to tabulate the adjectives, nouns, and verbs of past poetry and their place within the syntax of the poem; at times students like “Miss Jean Warren” suggested modifications to “methods of analysis.”[6] In the following decade, The Continuity of Poetic Language (1951), Eras and Modes in English Poetry (1957), and Renaissance, Eighteenth-Century, and Modern Language in English Poetry: A Tabular View (1960) appeared.

The star of large-scale literary data-gathering rises and falls in different eras, and Miles worked at a time in which the making of data sets was regarded as feminized and mechanical.[7] Accordingly, she experienced difficulties convincing publishers to reproduce her data, and she had trouble finding a reception among literary critics who viewed her datasets as merely preparatory to the true work of evaluation. As Miles described it, her projects fell between the “two stools” of linguistic research and literary study. She didn’t identify with the linguists, for linguistic analysis was “too alien to the text.” Meanwhile, literary critics wished to absorb the “interesting” claims of her books while discarding “all the tables and charts that she throws in there” (Poetry, Teaching, 133).

The Tabular View and Mid-century Criticism

Miles’s intent was to bring criticism and data together; she viewed her tabulations as correctives to the critics who “turn discussions of what poetic language is to prescriptions for what it ought to be,” adding that “not only theorists like Richards but also historians like Bateson do more evaluating than tabulating” (Major Adjectives, 305). Christopher Rovee describes her as a “rogue formalist of the early new-critical period,” and indeed, she was very much in conversation with the poet-critics and the formalist theorists of mid-century.[8] Miles’s tabulations of the grammatical tendencies of past poets revealed not only the forms of past poetry, but showed the degree to which poetic values of the mid-twentieth-century overdetermined critics’ sense of the past, turning poets like Blake or Donne or Wordsworth or Yeats into “mirrors” of present poetry.[9]

We may think of Blake, for example, as “active, rebellious, and eccentric,” but Miles’s work showed how he “as wholeheartedly as any accepted the material of his kind and time,” using language in which “nouns and adjectives . . . strongly dominated verbs,” sentences that were “phrasally compounded,” and rhymes that “stressed not limits, periods bound and conclusions .  . . but rather interior units and correspondances, in echo and onomatopoeia” (Eras, 87).

In the case of Donne, Miles described how “modern critics” like Cleanth Brooks and I.A. Richards, who “emphasize the poem as aesthetic object,” necessarily ignore or distort the “language of conceptual reference and argument” which the tabular view reveals to be dominant in Donne’s poetry (31). Likewise, Miles shows mid-century’s Wordsworth to be almost a complete fabrication, noting that modern critics “ignore the mass of Wordsworth’s work” and cherry pick unrepresentative poems like “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” with its “rocks, and stones, and trees” that represent “our own great concreteness” rather than Wordsworth’s more typical style of subtle generalization (128). Yeats, too, is praised in the terms of the present, yet Miles’s work revealed that the language of his later volumes—Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921) The Tower (1928), and The Winding Stair (1933)—became less predicative, bending back instead to the balanced and classical mode of his earliest work.

Modern Poetry and the “Middle Distance”

Miles’s tabular views not only rescued past poets held hostage by present-day poetic values, they revealed entirely new genealogies linking past to present. Nearly all of Miles’s scholarly essays contain illuminating and original asides about modern poets. She notes, for example, how the “Donne tradition” lives on in “the Cavalier lyricism of Cummings and Millay” as much as “the metaphysical meditation of Frost and Auden” (Eras, 27). She describes how the dominance of the “family relations of father, mother, son” to be found in the old ballads reappears in “such poets as Auden or Lowell,” while Ezra Pound and Robert Penn Warren and Federico Garcia Lorca develop upon “Coleridge’s ballads of night and strangeness” (107). She sees T. S. Eliot as attempting to “strike a balance” between Miltonic phrasal poetry (qualitative, coordinate) and Donnic predicative poetry (clausal, conceptual, full of logical subordination) (24).

Against her era’s critical truisms—its emphasis on the image, its separation of poetry from prose, its figuration of the poem as object—Miles carved out an alternative view of modern poetry’s challenges and strengths. In her view—one that looked at poems as sentences, and traced the pendulum swings of each century from verbs to adjectives and back again—poets of the 1950s faced the same challenges as “Pope or Thomson” did in the 18th century: they had at their disposal a “stifling amount of device to deal with a stfling amount of objects and sensations.” Modern poetry, contended Miles, needs “a Wordsworth of its own, to be the generalizer and steadfast interpreter of its own terms” (Eras, 125).

Miles’s own poetry reflected her aspirations to pull back enough from poetic matter to become a “generalizer and steadfast interpreter of . . . terms” but not so much as to become “alien to the text.” Reviewing several volumes of Miles’s poetry in a 1959 article titled “Distance and Surfaces: The Poetry of Josephine Miles,” Robert Beloof described Miles’s achievement in terms of her point of view. She “sees her world from one of the most difficult of artistic points of view . . . the middle distance,” Beloof writes. From this vantage, “she is never aware of it as a great metaphysical scheme on the one hand, nor, on the other, as a stream of detail which is itself the the ultimate reality.” The “middle-distance viewer is close enough to see the figures, and their principal attitudes, but not to feel an indissoluble unity with them. Nor is he far enough away that his impression is totally of the over-reaching structure. There is no ease. He is drawn in both directions, to the individuals of the community, and to the great abstractions which order them.”[10]

Miles, drawn in two directions, made a third—and deserves to have pride of place in our methodological origin stories.

Notes