This is a personal research and news blog. Its aims are to engage discussion with colleagues interested in computational text analysis (now often called Computational Literary Studies), to serve as an observatory of trends, issues and advances in computational text analysis, and to give visibility to the burgeoning and diverse field of computational text analysis. Comments as well as guest posts are welcome! All texts on this blog are published under the following license: Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC-0 Licence).
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The dragonfly’s gaze presents a rich and multi-faceted picture of the world. Each of the dragonfly’s compound eyes has numerous lenses, each of which produces an image of a small section of the surrounding world; these images are stichted together to allow the dragonfly its particular vision of the world. The dragonfly’s gaze is a model both for this blog and for computational text analysis. On the one hand, this blog aims to look out in all directions and bring together bits and pieces concerning tools, projects, methods, publications, people and news in the area of computational text analysis. On the other hand, the blog serves to report on my personal work with computational text analysis. This is a reading practice based on the capacity of the computer to inspect many small features simultaneously and bring them together to form a bigger picture.
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Der Blick der Libelle besteht aus einem facettenreichen Bild der Welt. Jedes der Komplexaugen besteht aus zahlreichen Einzelaugen, von denen jedes das Bild eines kleinen Ausschnittes der Umgebung aufnimmt; diese Bilder werden zusammengesetzt und ermöglichen der Libelle ihre besondere Sicht auf die Welt. Der Blick der Libelle ist ein Modell sowohl für diesen Blog als auch für die computergestützte Textanalyse. Einerseits möchte dieser Blog in viele Richtungen Ausschau halten und verstreute Informationen zu Tools, Projekten, Methoden, Veröffentlichungen, Personen oder Neuigkeiten zusammentragen. Andererseits wird der Blog über meine eigene Arbeit im Bereich der computergestützten Analyse literarischer Texte berichten. Diese Lektürepraxis beruht auf der Fähigkeit des Computers, viele kleine Merkmale zu analysieren und zusammenzubringen, sodass sie ein übergreifendes Bild ergeben.
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This blog is maintained by Christof Schöch. When I started this blog, I was a researcher at the Chair for Digital Philology of the University of Würzburg, working in the DARIAH-DE project (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, WP Research and Education Liaison). After studying Romance languages, English and Psychology in Freiburg (Germany) and Tours (France), I went on to obtain my PhD in 2008 with a study of La Description double dans le roman des Lumières 1760-1800. My interests in research and teaching are the French Enlightenment, computational literary studies, and the contemporary French novel, particularly popular genres like crime fiction and science fiction. From 2011 to 2019, I was a member of the editorial team of the blogging platform de.hypotheses.org. Since 2017, I am professor for Digital Humanities at Trier University, Germany.