In a recent publication with Matt Erlin, we tested Pascale Casanova’s claim in The World Republic of Letters that literatures associated with minor languages will be more overtly nationalistic in order to gain attention on the world literary stage. We show that despite Casanova’s thesis …
Eve Kraicer’s lab collaboration (our name for working papers) is now out! It’s about the ways in which gender is represented in contemporary fiction looking at a collection of ca. 26,000 characters. Some of the salient findings: the ratio of women to men characters in …
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 …
Ever since Fotis Jannidis posted a graph on novel classification a few years ago I have been inspired to do something similar in English. What are the ways in which scholars over the past half-century have classified “the novel”? Using a collection of over 60,000 …
“What is your dissertation project?” This is one of the more common questions asked of graduate students in a PhD program. Lisa Teichmann – one of our graduate students at .txtLAB – answers in a 3-minute video about her work using computation to think about translation, space, …
I’ve been experimenting with using readability metrics lately (code for the below is here). They offer a very straightforward way of measuring textual difficulty, usually consisting of some ratio of sentence and word length. They date back to the work of Rudolf Flesch, who developed …
Eva Portelance presented her work this past week that was completed under an Arts Undergraduate Research Internship (ARIA). Her project focuses on the computational detection of narrative frames. It involves three steps that include a theoretical definition of a frame, writing code to detect narrative frames …
I am pleased to announce the publication of a new piece I have written that appears today in CA: Journal of Cultural Analytics. The aim of the piece is to take a first look at the ways in which fictional language distinguishes itself from non-fiction …