J.D. Porter

@jdporter.bsky.social

484 Followers 524 Following

https://www.jdporter.org/ Literature/DH scholar, Price Lab at UPenn | I work on text mining, canons, literature and philosophy, and so on | Writing in PMLA, Synthese, The Atlantic, Cultural Analytics, the Stanford Literary Lab pamphlet series, etc

A small dog enjoys the sun by the Delaware River, with the Ben Franklin Bridge in the background. She’s maybe a miniature poodle, black and tan coloring.
Scatterplot showing every NBA Finals MVP. The x axis shows how many shots each player took per game. The y axis shows the player's field goal percentage. The point of the graph is that Brunson took a lot of shots but didn't make very many—in fact, everyone who shot at least as often as him made more, and everyone who missed as many as him shot less. Players are sized by assists per game, and Brunson was a little below the median on that front, so it's not like he was making up for it with playmaking. Also the two players closest to him were great defenders, whereas he is one of the worst defenders ever to get the award. Players are colored more or less by their team when they won, although I was lazy about matching the colors exactly.
Cover of the novel The Celebrant, by Eric Rolfe Greenberg
Graph showing seasons for NBA MVPs since 1974, which is the first year the relevant data exists on Basketball Reference, where I got it. The x axis shows field goal attempts (FGA), reflecting how often a player shot in general. The y axis shows free throw attempts (FTA), reflecting how often a player shot free throws. Both are scaled per 75 possessions, to mitigate differences in pace from one season to the next. Dots are colored based on the team the player was on when he won MVP. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander is in the top right corner. His 2025 season is near a bunch of Michael Jordan years. His 2026 season is close to LeBron, Shaq, and Harden. SGA hasn't won MVP for 2026 yet, so maybe this is jinxing it for him, but whatever.
Graph showing seasons for NBA MVPs since 1974, which is the first year the relevant data exists on Basketball Reference, where I got it. The x axis shows field goal attempts (FGA), reflecting how often a player shot in general. The y axis shows free throw attempts (FTA), reflecting how often a player shot free throws. Both are scaled per 75 possessions, to mitigate differences in pace from one season to the next. You'd expect a clean correlation between FGA and FTA, since shooting is generally necessary for drawing shooting fouls, but these dots are pretty widely distributed. (R squared in a linear regression is .27, so FGA explains less than a third of FTA). This graph erases some nuance, e.g. you get fewer FTA if you tend to score when fouled (i.e., getting and-1s), but it's still a decent rough picture.
Graph showing the history of active NBA players with the highest scoring game. The x axis is time, and the y axis shows how much they scored in that game. The graph begins in November, 1946 with Ed Sadowski's 18-point game and ends in November 1959 on an Elgin Baylor 55-point performance.
Graph showing the history of active NBA players with the highest scoring game. The x axis is time, and the y axis shows how much they scored in that game. The graph begins in November, 1959 with Elgin Baylor's 64-point game, and goes to just after Bam Adebayo scored 83 in March of 2026.
Three passages from a NY Times piece that was effectively an ad for Claude, the tool used to generate them. Each has a highlighted excerpt with a characteristically AI-ish "not" clause: 1. "Not from cruelty, but from understanding..." 2. "The universe is not indifferent to us; we are made of it..." 3. "Ambiguity was not weakness. It was survival."
Snippet of one of the President's idiotic posts, asserting that "This Ballroom will be happily used for Generations to come!"
Dave Parker in a shirt he designed. It says “If you hear any noise, it’s just me and the boys boppin”. He’s also wearing what sort of looks like a cool version of a gardening hat.
The NY Times movie ballot image that everyone was sharing several days ago, showing that my ten favorite movies of this century so far are Certain Women, In the Mood for Love, Beau Travail, The Royal Tenenbaums, Ocean's 11, O Brother Where Art Thou?, Wall-E, Moonlight, Nomadland, and Inglourious Basterds.
Graph showing all of the 2025 NBA playoff games. The Y axis shows the total score of the game. The X axis shows when the Sufficient Bucket happened. The colors reflect the winning team. The label shows that team, plus the round and game. Example: Dončić made a technical FT to get the Lakers a Sufficient Bucket with 9:01 left in round one game 2, and the total score of the game was 179. So that's the purple dot labeled LAL 1-2 located just outside the third quarter line at the bottom of the graph.
Table showing that Trump's popular vote margin in 2024, about 1.47%, is in 5th place out of the seven 21st century elections, beating only those cases where the electoral college winner lost the popular vote.
A roughly life size cardboard cutout of Harris and Walz, looming over the NYC skyline, posed as though they’re about to star in a new legal procedural.
A graph showing a bunch of countries, arranged by the approximate percentage of the world's population (x axis) and the number of Nobel Prizes in Literature won by their citizens (y axis).
A network graph showing who speaks to whom in the Simpsons episode "Last Exit to Springfield". Nodes are sized according to betweenness centrality. Edges are directed and weighted. Colors reflect Gephi's Louvain community detection results.
Scatterplot showing the 500 best power/speed seasons in MLB history. The x axis shows stolen bases. The y axis shows home runs. This one is filtered to show just Willie Mays, who had 9 seasons that are still in the top 500.
Scatterplot showing the 500 best power/speed seasons in MLB history. The x axis shows stolen bases. The y axis shows home runs. This one is filtered to show just 1999, when 18 players made the top 500 list. Presumably a steroids thing.
Scatterplot showing the 500 best power/speed seasons in MLB history. The x axis shows stolen bases. The y axis shows home runs. This one is filtered for people who hit at least 54 home runs, and Shohei has stolen about 30 more bases than anyone else on the graph.
Scatterplot showing the 500 best power/speed seasons in MLB history. The x axis shows stolen bases. The y axis shows home runs. Recent seasons are differentiated with colors. The upshot is that Shohei is off on his own with the best blend of HR and SB ever.
Screenshot from a Defector article by Barry Petchesky. The highlighted part says: "it was his tum [sic] to repay the Turkish Official, by pressuring the New York City Fire Department ("FDNY") to facilitate the opening of a new Turkish consular building—a 36-story skyscraper—without a fire inspection, in time for a high-profile visit by Turkey's president."
An image certifying that I'm a Bluesky elder, because I was the 707,672nd person to join the site. When I joined, this place was the size of the Akron metro area, and now it's more like Chicagoland. Soon posting here could be like sending a postcard to everyone in Illinois. And like Illinois itself, we've built this together.
A yellow book titled "The Sun Also Rises and Other Stories" by Ernest Hemingway. Surrounding the title (like rays of the sun?!) are terms with widely varying degrees of association with Hemingway's work.
Transcript from the debate, showing Trump saying "Let me just tell you about world leaders. Viktor Orban, one of the most respected men -- they call him a strong man. He's a tough person. Smart. Prime Minister of Hungary. They said why is the whole world blowing up? Three years ago it wasn't. Why is it blowing up? He said because you need Trump back as president."
Screenshot of a Google search showing nonsensical junk about baseball statistics
Charlie Brown, happy about Willie Mays even in a time of loss
A table showing, among other things, that the number of authors in the Norton Anthology of American Literature has grown from 131 in the first edition to 288 in the most recent.
A character in Three Days of the Condor working at a computer with books in the background, proving the paranoid thriller potential of digital humanities
Screenshot of a Time magazine piece declaring Taylor Swift the master storyteller of the modern era
A robot coffee kiosk with a Bored Ape advertisement on one of its three iPads.