Distributed Character: Quantitative Models of the English Stage, 1550–1900

The concepts offered by quantitative analyses operate across scales in ways that are often foreign to literary study. They demand new kinds of abstraction: ones that can take into account minute effects in single texts replicated across a corpus that numbers in the hundreds, or thousands. Establishing metrics, finding patterns and linking these metrics and patterns with meaningful concepts of literary criticism: these are tasks that digital humanities now faces. In doing so, it must ask new questions about the nature of what it studies and how computational results can be made compatible with the established practices of literary criticism. This essay poses these questions through a quantitative analysis of English dramatic history. How can the transformation and abstraction of a play into a network, and then into a metric, reveal new facets of the evolution of drama since the early modern period? How does the process of abstraction, necessary to create a network out of a play, compare to the abstractions of literary history? What kinds of new concepts that describe character, plot, or structure, are made possible by quantitative metrics? And, how can the patterns of similarity and difference revealed by the quantitative measurement of these abstractions be reconciled to our already extensive critical understanding of English drama?