Let’s say that we believe we can learn something more about what literary critics call “authorial style” or “genre” by quantitative work. We want to say what that “more” is. We assemble a community of experts, convening a panel of early modernists to identify 10 plays that they feel are comedies based on prevailing definitions […]
Tag Archives: genre
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 […]
Posted in Early Modern Drama, Quant Theory, Uncategorized
Also tagged biological constraints, entailment, entailment entity, Stanford Literary Lab
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The Time Problem: Rigid Classifiers, Classifier Postmarks
Here is a thought experiment. Make the following assumptions about a historically diverse collection of texts: 1) I have classified them according to genre myself, and trust these classifications. 2) I have classified the items according to time of composition, and I trust these classifications. So, my items are both historically and generically diverse, […]
The Ancestral Text
In this post I want to understand the consequences of “massive addressability” for “philosophies of access”–philosophies which assert that all beings exist only as correlates of our own consciousness. The term “philosophy of access” is used by members of the Speculative Realist school: it seems to have been coined largely as a means of rejecting everything […]
Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 Figures
The color figures below correspond to those published in black and white in the print edition of Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore, “‘The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of ‘Green Sleeves’: Digital Approaches to Shakespeare’s Language of Genre,” Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (fall 2010), Special Issue: New Media Approaches to Shakespeare, edited by Katherine Rowe. These figures can also […]