Macroanalysis
Digital Methods and Literary History
Publication Year: 2013
Moving beyond the limitations of literary interpretation based on the "close-reading" of individual works, Jockers describes how this new method of studying large collections of digital material can help us to better understand and contextualize the individual works within those collections.
Published by: University of Illinois Press
Acknowledgments
Without initial support from John Bender, Lois Brooks, Mike Keller, Makoto Tsuchitani, and Ramón Saldívar, this work would not have been started. Without ongoing support from the Stanford University Department of English and ...
Part I Foundation
1 Revolution
An article in the June 23, 2008, issue of Wired declared in its headline “Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete” (Anderson 2008). By 2008 computers, with their capacity for number crunching and processing large-scale data sets, had revolutionized the way that scientific research gets done, so much so that the same article declared an end to theorizing in science. With so much data, ...
2 Evidence
While still graduate students in the early 1990s, my wife and I invited some friends to share Thanksgiving dinner. One of the friends was, like my wife and me, a graduate student in English. The other, however, was ...
3 Tradition
As noted previously, there is a significant tradition of researchers employing computational approaches to the study of literature and an even longer tradition of scholars employing quantitative and statistical methods for the analysis of ...
4 Macroanalysis
The approach to the study of literature that I am calling “macroanalysis” is in some general ways akin to economics or, more specifically, to macroeconomics. Before the 1930s, before Keynes’s ...
Part II Analysis
5 Metadata
This chapter offers a first example of how the macroanalytic approach brings new knowledge to our understanding of literary history. This chapter also begins the larger exploration of influence that forms a unifying thread in this book. The evidence ...
6 Style
In statistical or quantitative authorship attribution, a researcher attempts to classify a work of unknown or disputed authorship in order to assign it to a known author based on a training set of works of known ...
7 Nationality
The previous chapter demonstrated how stylistic signals could be derived from high-frequency features and how the usage, or nonusage, of those features was susceptible to influences that are external to what might we might call “authorial style,” ...
8 Theme
A typical complaint about computational stylistics is that such studies fail to investigate the aspects of writing that readers care most deeply about, namely, plot, character, and theme.* In the previous chapter, we saw how stylistic ...
9 Influence
Examining macro patterns in style and theme allows us to contextualize our close readings in ways that have hitherto been impossible or, at the very minimum, impractical. We see, for example, that while Melville may be ...
Part III Prospects
10 Orphans
I began this book with a call to arms, an argument that what we have today in terms of literary and textual material and computational power represents a moment of revolution in the way we study the literary record. I suggested ...
E-ISBN-13: 9780252094767
Print-ISBN-13: 9780252037528
Page Count: 328
Publication Year: 2013
OCLC Number: 829370513
MUSE Marc Record: Download for Macroanalysis
