digital humanities

What Isn't Data in Literary Studies?

When I began thinking about this, I had to ask “What isn’t data in literary studies?” Everything is data, in some sense, and it depends on the position of the analyst and the nature of the project. So I want to narrow the question by situating it: what is data to whom? and for what? In this talk, “data” is that which can serve as input for computer analysis, by someone working with texts using the type of Natural Language Machine Learning I’ve worked with to isolate significant word clusters, topic modeling.

Peter Logan's blog

Description as Data in Literary Studies

Addressing the question, "what is data in literary studies," offers the chance to enlarge our interpretational procedures to include new methods and materials. But also to apply existing methods of analysis to new materials and questions. Quantitative approaches to archives and texts developed by digital humanists have offered one such expansion. These approaches often treat literature as a data mine. In response, I propose that literature is a heuristic for managing and conceptualizing data.

Heather Houser's blog

Benjamin's "Work of Art" in the Age of Production

This post could also be called: Walter Benjamin in the Age of Me Noodling Around with Small Data.

Andrew Goldstone's blog

What can topic models of PMLA teach us about the history of literary scholarship?

(Co-written by AG and Ted Underwood.) Of all our literary-historical narratives it is the history of criticism itself that seems most wedded to a stodgy history-of-ideas approach—narrating change through a succession of stars or contending schools.

Andrew Goldstone's blog

The Tolson Exception: The Anthology in the 21st Century

Whenever a new anthology of modern U.S. poetry comes along, it seems that some distinguished critic or other is fated to take up arms, defending his or her vision of canonical distinction against the treachery of "inclusiveness." The latest eminence to cast herself as such a centurion is Helen Vendler, who reproaches Rita Dove's Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011) in a review that has garnered no shortage of sensational, morbid attention ("Are These the Poems to Remember?," NYRB, November, 2011).

Harris Feinsod's blog

When Reading Fails

In light of several recent posts around here about reading (as genre, as practice, and as cultural marker), I thought I'd take the occasion of my first post to complicate reading—and all that it entails—a little more.

Lauren Klein's blog

N-gram, Corpus, Field

A quick reaction to "Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books."

Andrew Goldstone's blog

Group Think: Notes on the present + future of collaboration

I’ve had two quite different occasions this summer to think about collaboration in the Humanities. The first: a course I taught on blogging in July, which explored how writing, as a first-person and personal craft, is (and is not) changing in the era of social media and digital communities.

Allison Carruth's blog

tvtropes.org, the Future of the Humanities

I have seen the future of the digital humanities--and it is full of hope! It is also full of many happy afternoons spent following hyperlinks into fascinating, and extremely nerdy, cultural niches. Let me explain...