video

Piketty's Model: Literary History without Fixed Objects

Ted Underwood provides a data-driven counterargument to Thomas Piketty's claim that specific references to money disappeared from literature after World War I.

Speaker: 
Ted Underwood

Speaker's affiliation
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Name of Series
Micromégas: the very small, the very large, and the object of digital humanities
Sponsoring Department
The Stanford Literary Lab
Event Date
Friday, February 13, 2015
Description

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

Piketty’s Model: Literary History Without Fixed Objects
by Ted Underwood

Paragraphs: The Forgotten Middle
by Mark Algee-Hewitt, Ryan Heuser, and Franco Moretti

Small, Large, ‘What’ and ‘So What’: Perspectives and Challenges in Corpus Linguistics
by Susan Conrad

From Numbers to Evidence: Computer-Assisted Scholarship in the Million-Book Era
by David Mimno


 

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