American/Australian tour In March-April 2014, I’ll be in the USA giving a series of talks and conference presentations based around Visualising English Print, and our other work. In June I’ll be in Newcastle, Australia for the very exciting Beyond Authorship symposium. I’ll address a series of different themes in the talks, but I’ll use this […]
Category Archives: Early Modern Drama
Macbeth: The State of Play
We have a new chapter on the language of Macbeth which appears in this book from Arden. The chapter surveys previous work on the language of the play, and then offers some new analysis we’ve done, chiefly using WordHoard. Along the way, we consider the role of word frequency in literary analysis, and especially the word […]
Fuzzy Structuralism
Several years ago I did some experiments with Franco Moretti, Matt Jockers, Sarah Allison and Ryan Heuser on a set of Victorian novels, experiments that developed into the first pamphlet issued by the Stanford Literary Lab. Having never tried Docuscope on anything but Shakespeare, I was curious to see how the program would perform on […]
Also posted in Quant Theory, Uncategorized
Tagged biological constraints, entailment, entailment entity, genre, Stanford Literary Lab
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What happens in Hamlet?
We perform digital analysis on literary texts not to answer questions, but to generate questions. The questions digital analysis can answer are generally not ‘interesting’ in a humanist sense: but the questions digital analysis provokes often are. And these questions have to be answered by ‘traditional’ literary methods. Here’s an example. Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, head […]
Also posted in Shakespeare
Tagged Farah Karim-Cooper, Hamlet, log likelihood, pronoun I, Wordhoard
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Shakespeare’s mythic vocabulary – and his invisible grammar
Universities in the UK are under pressure to demonstrate the ‘impact’ of their research. In many ways, this is fair enough: public taxes account for the vast majority of UK University income, so it is reasonable for the public to expect academics to attempt to communicate with them about their work. University press offices have […]