Austen and Computation 2.0

Capitalizing on the history of computational criticism in Austen studies and the emergence of digital humanities, this essay argues for reference to common statistics to increase speed, consistency, and accountability in the practice of textual analysis. It highlights the argumentative structure of a corpus and the enhancement of close reading within a corpus. It outlines a basic set of computational practices for analyzing Austen's oeuvre and gestures toward a future informed by systematic examinations and new statistically based commonplaces.