Lexomics: Gaining Acceptance

[UPDATE: and our Old English Newsletter item which gives explanations and links to the Lexomics website, where you can play with it or download all the tools, is now up on the we here at the Old English Newsletter]

Our huge methodological paper on lexomic analysis was accepted by JEGP a while back. Now, just before leaving for the Kalamazoo conference, I learned that our paper that uses lexomic methods to analyze Guthlac A was accepted by Modern Philology. So at some point in the future you'll be able to read:

Drout, Michael D. C., Michael J. Kahn and Mark D. LeBlanc. “Of Dendrogrammatology: Lexomic Methods for Analyzing the Relationships Among Old English Poems,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology.

Downey, Sarah, Michael D.C. Drout, Michael J. Kahn and Mark D. LeBlanc. “’Books Tell Us’: Lexomic and Traditional Evidence for the Sources of Guthlac A. Modern Philology.

I am in the very home stretches of the final proofing and indexing of the new edition of J.R.R. Tolkien's Beowulf and the Critics but I notice that the publisher has put 2011 as the copyright date, so I guess it will be out after Christmas. It will be printed primarily in paperback, but I'm trying to convince the publisher that there would be interest in a collector's edition if they can make it leather bound or otherwise really nice looking -- the last time I checked the out-of-print edition was selling for over $150.00 on Amazon (and what's really sad is that I have no extra copies to take advantage of this price).

Also, the new technical book is going well and, with a lot of luck will be done and off to a reviewer by the middle of June. Right now the title is: Tradition and Influence: Memetics, Literature and Tenth-Century Anglo-Saxon Culture. It includes chapters on the problems of genre, influence (and uses lexomics), aesthetics, authorship and the "anxiety of influence." Right now I'm struggling to draw "adaptive landscapes" and could really use a pointer to a cheap or free tool that can draw wire-frame terrain (by hand, not by inputting a bunch of data).

The Tolkien book, The Tower and the Ruin, is moving along in parallel, and I'll be switching to a primary focus on that one soon. As part of the process of writing it, I'm going to be recording a new Tolkien audio course, significantly different from my Rings, Swords and Monsters (also sold as Of Sorcerers and Men) that I did for recorded books. The new course will be called something like Tolkien and the West and I expect to do the recording in the beginning of July. Then I'll teach Tolkien this fall, testing out the chapters of the new book in class, so that that book will probably go out for review in December (though it could go earlier).

And Tolkien Studies volume 7 is mostly at the printer and needs only final proofing of some sections. We had some snags this year and are a little late, but hopefully we will still be out in July as we usually are.

Too much stuff! And I'm heading off to NY for the Audie awards next week (though I don't expect that I'll win, it's great to be a finalist in such a big group). But it's better to be busy than be bored.