Ted Underwood provides a data-driven counterargument to Thomas Piketty's claim that specific references to money disappeared from literature after World War I.
Writing for Slate with colleagues Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So, Ted Underwood argued against Thomas Piketty’s claim that specific references to money disappeared from literature after World War I. In this talk, Underwood walks us the methodology of his counterargument, using tools from computational linguistics and the social sciences to demonstrate that Piketty’s claim—and even the assumptions of literary critics—don’t line up with the data. Along the way, Underwood outlines guiding principles for those employing interdisciplinary methods in literary criticism.
Micromégas: The Very Small, the Very Large, and the Object of Digital Humanities
Introduction
by Franco Moretti
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Piketty’s Model: Literary History Without Fixed Objects
by Ted Underwood
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Paragraphs: The Forgotten Middle
by Mark Algee-Hewitt, Ryan Heuser, and Franco Moretti
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Small, Large, ‘What’ and ‘So What’: Perspectives and Challenges in Corpus Linguistics
by Susan Conrad
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From Numbers to Evidence: Computer-Assisted Scholarship in the Million-Book Era
by David Mimno
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