publications | Michael Falk

2025

Wikilambda the Ultimate

Michael Falk

Apr 2025

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In 2020, the Wikimedia foundation launched its first new project in nearly a decade. The new project consists of two main parts: (1) Wikifunctions, a library of programming functions; and (2) Abstract Wikipedia, a language-agnostic Wikipedia that will be dynamically translated into the reader’s native tongue. Lying beneath both Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia is a new system called Wikilambda, which can execute code in potentially any programming language, providing a massively flexible computing service drawing on Wikifunctions and powering Abstract Wikipedia. The entire system is designed to address a fundamental bias in Wikipedia, namely its bias towards majority languages like English and Spanish. In this paper, I present Wikilambda as an audacious attempt to realise a ‘perfect language’, as theorised by Umberto @eco_search_1995. Wikilambda provides a way of specifying functions that is supposed to transcend any particular 'native’ language. In this way, it provides editors of Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia with a way of contributing to the overall system no matter which ’native’ programming languages they know. More broadly, Wikilambda aims to achieve the ’democratization of programming’, by enabling any person to use any function without needing to know English or a particular programming language [@vrandecic_building_2021]. To analyse the technical and ideological aspects of Wikilambda, I apply the techniques of Critical Code Studies [@marino_critical_2020] to ’the orchestrator’, the JavaScript application that instantiates Wikilambda’s new functional programming language. In the absence of a formal specification of the language, the Abstract Wikipedia team have gradually hacked Wikilambda out of JavaScript, leaving a fascinating public record of their attempt to realise their vision for a universal programming system.

2024

Romanticism and the Contingent Self: The Challenge of Representation

Michael Falk

May 2024

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-49959-3

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This book offers a new critique of selfhood in Romantic literature. In the past, Romanticism has been seen as an individualistic movement, with writers believing in the ‘centrality’ of the self. Challenging this prevailing view of Romanticism and the modern self, this study unveils an alternative tradition of Romantic writing in which the self is fragile, degenerate, non-existent – or in a word, contingent. It combines philosophy, intellectual history, literary studies and digital humanities and takes a transnational approach both in its coverage of philosophical thought and literature, including case studies from England, Ireland, Scotland and colonial Australia, with examples from American and European works as well. The book also uses innovative digital techniques such as text analysis, sentiment mining and network analysis to enrich the exploration of text and context. It covers all major genres of Romantic writing: fiction (realist novels), poetry (the sonnet), non-fiction prose (biography) and drama (gothic tragedy). Providing a new framework for understanding the contingent self, this book is of interest to scholars and students of Romantic literature, philosophy of the self and digital humanities.
Afterword

Michael Falk

In Digital Humanities in the Indian Rim , Nov 2024

doi:10.11647/obp.0423.17

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What justifies the creation of a scholarly community in the "Indian Rim"? In this afterword, I justify the development of a Digital Humanities community in the region, by considering the parallel development of "postcolonial DH" in India and Australia.
How Australian places are represented on Wikipedia

Heather Ford, Francesca Sidoti, Michael Falk, and 2 more authors

Oct 2024

doi:10.5281/zenodo.13910503

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This year, the wikihistories team set out to understand how well Wikipedia represents Australian places and what kinds of editing practices drive those representations. Examining 35,000 articles about Australian places and interviewing volunteer editors, we found that English Wikipedia reflects an anthropocentric and neo-colonial image of Australia as a place.

2023

How Australians are represented in Wikipedia

Michael Falk, Heather Ford, Kelly Tall, and 1 more author

Dec 2023

doi:10.5281/zenodo.10296217

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The team at the wikihistories project is interested in how Wikipedia represents Australian people, places and events over time. National studies of Wikipedia are rare. The encyclopedia is usually treated as a representation of global trends. We now have excellent studies that have demonstrated how Wikipedia represents men at the expense of women (e.g. see Konieczny and Klein 2018), and people and places in North America and Western Europe rather than the Majority World (e.g. see Beytía 2020). But we have very few quantitative national studies of Wikipedia. In this, our first year of the wikihistories project, our focus is on how Wikipedia represents people. We ask how English Wikipedia represents Australians. Do we see the same trends in terms of gender and ethnicity so that globally studies of Wikipedia have identified? How well has English Wikipedia done over time to represent people in Australia?

2022

Three Models of World Literature

Michael Falk

In Literary Cultures and Digital Humanities in India , Dec 2022

doi:10.4324/9781003354246-5

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In the early 2000s, digital literary studies took a new direction. For much of the 20th century, computational scholars had focussed on details, compiling exhaustive concordances of classic texts, densely tagged databases of stylistic examples, or comprehensive digital editions of famous writers. But in the 2000s, scholars acquired a new aspiration: to data mine the archive, and model world literature as a whole. In this chapter, I look back on these 20 years of effort, and take stock. What does it mean to “model” world literature? And how is such modelling affected by digital technology? I contrast three models of world literature: the canon, the cosmopolis, and the archive. In each case, I show how the particular model implies a certain research method, and then consider how that method may be assisted or transformed by digital technology. To conclude, I consider Kath Bode and Roopika Risam’s powerful materialist critiques of digital literary scholarship, and suggest that scholars should embrace orthogonality as the underlying principle of world literary history.

2021

Artificial stupidity

Michael Falk

Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, Apr 2021

doi:10.1080/03080188.2020.1840219

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Public debate about AI is dominated by Frankenstein Syndrome, the fear that AI will become superhuman and escape human control. Though superintelligence is theoretically possible, it distracts from a more pressing problem: the rise of Artificial Stupidity (AS). This article discusses the cultural roots of Frankenstein Syndrome, and provides a conceptual framework for evaluating the stupidity of artificial agents. It then identifies an alternative literary tradition that exposes the perils and benefits of AS. In the writings of Edmund Spenser, Jonathan Swift and E.T.A. Hoffmann, ASs replace, enslave or delude their human users. More optimistically, Joseph Furphy and Laurence Sterne imagine ASs that can augment human intelligence by serving as maps or as pipes. These writers provide a strong counternarrative to the myths that currently drive the AI debate. They identify ways even stupid agents can thwart human aims, and demonstrate the social and scientific value of literary texts.
XII Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period

Bysshe Inigo Coffey, Colette Davies, Ruby Hawley-Sibbett, and 3 more authors

The Year’s Work in English Studies, Sep 2021

doi:10.1093/ywes/maab012

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Abstract This chapter has four sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Drama. Section 1 is by Bysshe Inigo Coffey; section 2 is by Colette Davies and Ruby Hawley-Sibbett; section 3 is by Michael Falk and Shane Greentree; section 4 is by Miranda Kiek.
Embodiment in 18th Century Depictions of Human-Machine Co-Creativity

Anna Kantosalo, Michael Falk, and Anna Jordanous

Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Sep 2021

Publisher: Frontiers

doi:10.3389/frobt.2021.662036

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Artificial intelligence has a rich history in literature; fiction has shaped how we view artificial agents and their capacities in the real world. This paper looks at embodied examples of human-machine co-creation from the literature of the Long Eighteenth Century (1650-1850), examining how older depictions of creative machines could inform and inspire modern day research. The works are analysed from the perspective of design fiction with special focus on the embodiment of the systems and the creativity exhibited by them. We find that the chosen examples highlight the importance of recognising the environment as a major factor in human-machine co-creative processes and that some of the works seem to precede current examples of artificial systems reaching into our everyday lives. The examples present embodied interaction in a positive, creativity-oriented way, but also highlight ethical risks of human-machine co-creativity. Modern day perceptions of artificial systems and creativity can be limited to some extent by the technologies available; fictitious examples from centuries past allow us to examine such limitations using a Design Fiction approach. These examples vividly capture some of the ideals concerning creativity support and co-creativity during the time, which can be used as inspirations for future work.
Digital Humanities

Simon Burrows, and Michael Falk

In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature , Jan 2021

doi:10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.971

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The article offers a definition, overview, and assessment of the current state of digital humanities, particularly with regard to its actual and potential contribution to literary studies. It outlines the history of humanities computing and digital humanities, its evolution as a discipline, including its institutional development and outstanding challenges it faces. It also considers some of the most cogent critiques digital humanities has faced, particularly from North American-based literary scholars, some of whom have suggested it represents a threat to centuries-old traditions of humanistic inquiry and particularly to literary scholarship based on the tradition of close reading. The article shows instead that digital humanities approaches gainfully employed offer powerful new means of illuminating both context and content of texts, to assist with both close and distant readings, offering a supplement rather than a replacement for traditional means of literary inquiry. The digital techniques it discusses include stylometry, topic modeling, literary mapping, historical bibliometrics, corpus linguistic techniques, and sequence alignment, as well as some of the contributions that they have made. Further, the article explains how many key aspirations of digital humanities scholarship, including interoperability and linked open data, have yet to be realized, and it considers some of the projects that are currently making this possible and the challenges that they face. The article concludes on a slightly cautionary note: What are the implications of the digital humanities for literary study? It is too early to tell.
Stationers, Papetiers and the Supply Networks of a Swiss Publisher: The Sociéte Typographique de Neuchâtel and the Paper Trade 1769–1789

Simon Burrows, Michael Falk, Rachel Hendery, and 1 more author

In The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Materials, Networks , Apr 2021

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What can be learned about the paper trade from digital and archival sources on the business of a single publishing house? Would the lessons it teaches be of merely local interest, or can such a case study reveal wider information about the, rhythms, networks and scale of the trade? These are questions we seek to address in this study. In the process we hope to shed fresh light on the practices, materials, and networks of the early modern paper trade in Europe, particularly the mechanisms by which printers and publishers attempted to ensure a regular supply of paper to their workshops. By analyzing the supply and demand for paper from a single company’s business records across a time span of almost two decades, our study illuminates the business practices of paper traders, and the interplay of supply networks and purchasing strategies of major paper buyers in early modern Europe.

2020

Sad Realities: The Romantic Tragedies of Charles Harpur

Michael Falk

Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, Aug 2020

Number: 23 Publisher: Cardiff University Press

doi:10.18573/romtext.65

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Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 is an open-access journal committed to foregrounding innovative Romantic-studies research into bibliography, book history, intertextuality and textual studies.We publish material in a number of formats: peer-reviewed articles, reports on individual/collaborative research projects, bibliographical checklists and biographical profiles of overlooked Romantic writers. Romantic Textualities also carries book reviews and a regularly updated blog and Twitter feed. The journal was relaunched in 2017.
XII Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period

Bysshe Inigo Coffey, Colette Davies, Ruby Hawley-sibbett, and 3 more authors

The Year’s Work in English Studies, Dec 2020

doi:10.1093/ywes/maaa012

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This chapter has four sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Drama. Section 1 is by Bysshe Inigo Coffey; section 2 is by Colette Davies and Ruby Hawley-Sibbett; section 3 is by Michael Falk and Elias Greig; section 4 is by Miranda Kiek.

2019

The Endless Forms of Things: Harpur’s Radicalism Revisited

Michael Falk

Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, Feb 2019

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Charles Harpur was the oustanding radical intellectual of early nineteenth-century New South Wales. His particular brand of spiritualised republicanism has long been of interest to scholars, but hitherto analysts of his politics have focussed mainly on the content of his opinions, rather than the form in which he expressed them. In this essay, I present a formalist analysis of Harpur’s poetry, revealing how he structured his verse to express his radical convictions. His finest poems are inevitably perspectival and progressive. He was a pluralist who sought to represent reality from a range of perspectives; and he was an idealist who described objects in terms of their progressive growth toward higher forms. If we recognise these two elements of his poetics, we can come to a truer understanding of his politics and a fairer assessment of his achievement as a poet.
XII Literature 1780–1830: The Romantic Period

Maxine Branagh-Miscampbell, Barbara Leonardi, Elias Greig, and 2 more authors

The Year’s Work in English Studies, Dec 2019

Publisher: Oxford Academic

doi:10.1093/ywes/maz010

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Abstract. This chapter has four sections: 1. General and Prose; 2. The Novel; 3. Poetry; 4. Drama. Section 1 is by Maxine Branagh-Miscampbell; section 2 is by

2018

Frankenstein’s Siblings: Self-Deformation in Romantic Literature

Michael Falk

University of Kent , Dec 2018

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2017

The Nightjar’s Shriek: Nature’s Variety in the Sonnets of John Clare and Charlotte Smith

Michael Falk

John Clare Society Journal, Dec 2017

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2016

Making Connections: Network Analysis, the Bildungsroman, and the World of The Absentee

Michael Falk

Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, Dec 2016

doi:10.1080/20512856.2016.1244909