In the “Fortunata” chapter of his landmark study, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality, Eric Auerbach contrasts two representations of reality, one found in the New Testament Gospels, the other in texts by Homer and a few other classical writers. As with much of Auerbach’s writing, the sweep of his generalizations is broad. Long excerpts are chosen from […]
Tag Archives: Docuscope
Auerbach Was Right: A Computational Study of the Odyssey and the Gospels
Posted in Counting Other Things, Quant Theory
Also tagged Auerbach, criticism, translation
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The very strange language of A Midsummer Night’s Dream
I just got back from a fun and very educative trip to Shakespeare’s Globe in London, hosted by Dr Farah Karim-Cooper, who is director of research there. The Globe stages an annual production aimed at schools (45,000 free tickets have been distributed over the past five years), and this year’s play is A Midsummer Night’s […]
Posted in Early Modern Drama, Shakespeare, Uncategorized
Also tagged A Midsummer Night's Dream, Euston Tap, LATtice, Shakespeare's Globe, Wordhoard
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Visualizing Linguistic Variation with LATtice
The transformation of literary texts into “data” – frequency counts, probability distributions, vectors – can often seem reductive to scholars trained to read closely, with an eye on the subtleties and slipperiness of language. But digital analysis, in its massive scale and its sheer inhuman capacity of repetitive computation, can register complex patterns and nuances […]
Comic Twelfth Night, Tragic Othello (Part 2)
Here is a second comic exchange from Twelfth Night. Maria’s plan has worked wonderfully. Malvolio has arrived cross-gartered and is quoting to Olivia little bits of the love letter he believes she has written to him. The blue and red strings, First Person and Interaction, are again appearing fast and thick as the incomprehension builds. […]
Comic Twelfth Night, Tragic Othello? (Part I)
Twelfth Night is one of the classic Shakespearean comedies and so it is unsurprising that it appears in the Comedy quadrant that we obtained in our initial analysis. What is it about the language in this play that pushes it toward this quadrant, and would we recognize this comic “itness” if we saw it in the […]