Enumerations is out!

My new book, Enumerations: Data and Literary Study, is now out with the University of Chicago Press. It’s a long-form exploration of the meaning of quantity in literature, from a study of punctuation in poetry, to plot structure in novels, to the semantics of character and the trajectories of writers’ careers. It represents many years of learning and thinking and experimenting and failing and trying again.

It is meant to provide a blueprint to integrating new methods in natural language processing and quantitative modelling with traditional scholarly questions about the history of literature. It covers two centuries of the novel, a collection of twentieth-century poetry in English, and a trilingual corpus of poets’ collected works. In addition to the book, I have made available over 7K lines of code and ~142,000 texts and tables of supplementary data. It is not meant to be the last word but a conversation starter. I look forward to a host of new work by others in this vein and watching the field blossom.

By “out” of course I mean available, not as in not available (out of stock) or unfashionable (out of style). At least I hope not.