Computational Literary Studies
When you’re trying to figure out how best to use all these wonderful tools we now have for the computational analysis of literary texts (such as the stylometry scripts, MALLET, WEKA, and many more), you tend to get into situations where you wish your knowledge in statistics was more solid, recent, broad, and thorough. (I did study psychology as a...
It is high time to talk about Poetic Justice by Mitzi Morris, the recent stylometric mystery novel I have been promising to write about in my post on Amanda Crosses Poetic Justice, also in the series on Computers and Literature in Fiction. (Sorry for not linking to the place where you can buy the book, but it’s already bad enough...
For a while now, I have been wondering how working with digital data, tools and methods changes the way we work in the humanities. Qualitative tagging of literary phenomena leads to a formalization of them and to the ability to model complex phenomena, for example. And quantitative text analysis can give us a much more distant and broader view of...
Some time ago, I briefly reported on reading Mr Penumbra’s 24-hour bookstore by Robin Sloan, the recent fantasy-mystery novel in which the contrast between the all-digital and old-style book culture was played out in the most entertaining way. Back then, I was wondering whether there were more such novels about computers and literature, and indeed there are! This time, the...
Sure, there have been a few traces of digital humanities and computer-supported literary scholarship in literary texts before, most notably in David Lodge’s wonderful campus novels. There must be more, and maybe some of you can point them out to me. An early example comes from David Lodge’s Changing Places (published in 1975!), which contains an episode where reputed Jane Austen...
(The following blog post is in German, because it reflects on an excellent talk by Stephen Ramsay, “Stanley and me“, which most of my readers outside Germany will have read anyway; it has been retweetet thorougly on Twitter and was Digital Humanities Now’s Editor’s Choice some days ago. Sorry folks, but you’re not missing anything.) Ein weit verbreitetes Missverständnis in...
[Update, 2012-01-28: The bibliography has changed its name, has received a new URL, and has been thoroughly reorganized. All stuff related to text analysis is now in the collection called, well, “Analysis”. The tagging system has been simplified, too.] Release early, release often, and talk about it. Isn’t this one of the credos of the digital humanities? In any case,...
Recently, Dan Cohen posted the pre-print to an article on his blog that struck a chord with me, and on which I would comment on here. (Dan Cohen’s blog, by the way, is currently the “featured blog” here.) The article, co-written with Fred Gibbs, treats an issue Toma and me touched upon briefly last week in the comment section to...
