Every so often I need to remind myself what the point of my research is. I’m not exactly feeling it right now, but I guess it’s like this: I think most of the meaning of a literary work lies in a ‘vibe’ or 'style’ we sense when we consider all the myriad objects and phenomena that make up the imaginative landscape of the work as a kind of curated set of objects and phenomena. All of the machine-learning inspired theories and stuff in the dissertation are basically meant to tell a scientifically realistic story about how this might work.