facebook for the characters of 19th century fiction

there are few occasions when the computer science wing of a university gets together with the english department. don’t get me wrong, the english department is an insecure scrounger all too eager to take over bits and pieces from every other discipline. marxism? sure! gender studies? why not? semiotics? gimme gimme! but one thing that english has yet to grab up is compsci.

and yet this paper manages to unify both fields in one amazing topic: using computers to extract social networks from 19th century literary fiction. from the abstract:

We present a method for extracting social networks from literature, namely, nineteenth-century British novels and serials. We derive the networks from dialogue interactions, and thus our method depends on the ability to determine when two characters are in conversation. Our approach involves character name chunking, quoted speech attribution and conversation detection given the set of quotes. 

using the data presented in this paper, i mapped out the conversation network of the principal characters of jane austen’s mansfield park. the size of the oval is proportional to how often a character is mentioned (ie. their tumblarity) and the connection line weight is proportional to the conversation length. among other items, we can clearly see that edmund, despite fewer mentions, is clearly the central character of the book.

as i always feared, it was only a matter of time before our humanities professors were squeezed out of a job by a bad boy gang of robot scholars. 

phenakistiscope party ii

i finished my homework early and had some free time to renanimate another phenakistiscope disc. this one is called “politeness” and was published by thomas mclean in 1833. it depicts mozart and marie antoinette fanning each other’s farts.

phenakistiscope party

did you hear about this thing called animated gifs? it turns out that they’re excellent for reanimating the persistence of vision phenakistiscope discs of the 1800s. in this disc created by john dunn in the 1830s (and reanimated by yours truly 179 years later), we get a chance to see the idyllic scene of a mom working on her biceps and a dandy dad demonstrating his jazz hands and rejecting the embrace of his eager baby over and over and over forever.

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original disc image provided by room 26 cabinet of curiosities.

oh fwank, you so kwazy.

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source: nypl (1853)

for wunderkammer: police-issued victorian smelling salts

on one hand, corsets can give you a silhouette that will make hourglasses stop telling the time out of jealousy. on the other hand, they will also reduce the oxygen flow to your brain and cause you to lose consciousness for a few terrifying minutes.

fortunately, because of all the fainting going on around the british empire, constables were issued amonia-based smelling salts to jolt awake the many fainting women that they would encounter on their daily beats.

the specimen above is reminiscent of a bottle of bubbles and is stamped with the crown insignia. there are, however, some very interesting private smelling salts bottles also worthy of the wunderkammer. 

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photo source: bbc news

for wunderkammer: a victorian moustache guard.

what you need to understand about the differences between the victorian moustache and the ironic ones that you see hanging around park slope these days is that the victorians were deadly serious about their moutaches, oftentimes going to great pains to dye them just right, wax them perfectly, and curl them precisely. when a hairy dandy supped from his teacup, he was putting his exquisitely quaffed lip hair in peril. the hot tea could melt the wax, wilt the ‘stache, and send streaks of toxic hair dye into his favourite earl grey.

the solution was found in the moustache cup which had a special built-in guard. eventually, this guard was made portable so that if you were invited to tea at the estate of those not fortunate enough to own moustache prophylactic drinkware, you could plunk in your own and save the day.

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the book, mustache cups: timeless victorian treasures, is a great resource for collecting and is apparently the best guide since dorothy’s hammond’s 1972 book on the same subject.

also: you can instapaper this moustache cup essay for later perusal.

how to bookworm-proof your books (hint: poison)

i woke up early on saturday morning with the rational fear that a bunch of idiot bookworms might somehow infiltrate my edwardian-era study and make a smörgåsbord of all my best books.

so to keep my books safe, i dialed up an 1884 book pesticide recipe. the article suggests rubbing your books down with an extremely toxic chemical, and not just any toxic chemical, one that used to be used to treat syphilis and preserve severed body parts.

materials needed: clean rain water (1 imperial pint), feather (1), sponge tied to a stick (1), and some poisonous mercury chloride (1 ounce) 

Keeping books in a damp room, and moving them but seldom, will render them particularly liable to attack. For many years I have employed a solution of corrosive sublimate of mercury in clean rain-water, applied with a pen or feather, to destroy the grubs, both in books and furniture, and have applied it generally on book-covers, as well as on articles of furniture, by means of a sponge tied on the end of a short stick, to avoid wetting the fingers.

I have employed [this solution]… in consequence of reading in Thenard’s “Traité de Chemie,”  of a method first used by Dr. Chaussier of preserving dead bodies, by putting them into a saturated solution of this salt. Thenard says there that he has seen a human head thus preserved, which had been exposed to the sun and rain for a great many years, without having undergone the slightest alteration.

until monsanto invents a variety of paper that is resistant to bookworms, mercury chloride may be your best bet.

furniture smut

do you have a leg fetish? do you have a “thing” for feet. i won’t judge you, because i do as well. just feast your bloodshot eyes on this vintage leg & foot porn. sabre legs with scroll feet?!?!…oh baby, there goes my slipcover!

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source: how to recognize and refinish antiques

mrs. jack

the above image by john singer sargent is a portrait of boston’s grande dame isabella stewart gardner, here is another:

Mrs. Gardner didn’t drink tea; she drank beer… She didn’t go sleigh-riding; instead, she went walking down Tremont Street with a lion named Rex on a leash.

She gave at-homes at her Beacon Street house and received her guests from a perch in the lower branches of a mimosa tree. Told that “everybody in Boston” was either a Unitarian or an Episcopalian, she became a Buddhist; then when the pleasure of that shock had worn off she became such a High-Church Episcoplaian that her religion differed from Catholicism only in respect to allegiance to the Pope.

Advised that the best people Boston belonged to clubs, she formed one of her own named the “It” Club…Warned that a woman’s social position in Boston might be judged in inverse ratio to her appearance…she picked out her two largest diamonds, had them set on gold wire springs and wore them waving some six inches above her hair like the antennae of a butterfly.

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from: the proper bostonians by cleveland amory (1947).