MLA Panel on Macroanalysis

I gave a paper at this year’s MLA on combining quantitative and qualitative analysis together with Hoyt Long and Richard So of the global literary networks group at the University of Chicago. My paper was titled “The Wertherian Exotext.” Using corpuses from the Hathi Trust in German, English and French of between 10,000-25,000 texts, I explored the use of community detection algorithms to identify the circulation of Werther in different transnational contexts. My aim is to think through both the kind of influence that computational modelling makes possible and the nature of unconscious communities that such models make visible.

You can read the full paper here and the slides here.