Wine Dark Sea
Wine Dark Sea was the research blog of Michael Witmore, a literary scholar and former director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Posts deal with the computational study of literature, covering a period that included Witmore's ongoing collaboration with Jonathan Hope. The blog also captures important work by Eric Alexander, Anupam Basu, Mattie Burkert, Heather Froehlich, Mike Gleicher, Alan Hogarth, Victor Lenthe, Emma Pallant, Julie Park, Beth Ralston, Mike Stumpf, Robin Valenza, and Jason Whitt. The site is now a curated archive.
Essentials
- Text: A Massively Addressable Object
This post asks what becomes possible when a text can be addressed at any scale, from the single word to the whole corpus. The idea it sets out still organizes much of the work gathered here.
- Auerbach Was Right: A Computational Study of the Odyssey and the Gospels
A computational reading of the Odyssey and the Gospels takes up Erich Auerbach’s claim in Mimesis about two ancient ways of representing reality. The counts give a famous literary intuition a form that can be measured and checked.
- The Great Work Begins: EEBO-TCP in the wild
Jonathan Hope marks the moment when EEBO-TCP, the transcribed archive of early English books, entered wide scholarly use. The post takes the measure of a shift from dozens of texts to tens of thousands.
- A Genre Map of Shakespeare’s Plays from the First Folio (1623)
The first substantial experiment on the blog sorted the plays of Shakespeare’s First Folio by their linguistic signatures. The genre map it produced set the direction for years of later work.
- Comic Twelfth Night, Tragic Othello? (Part I)
This is the first of three posts on why Twelfth Night reads as comedy and Othello as tragedy at the level of language. The difference, it argues, lies in verbal texture and not only in plot.
- The Novel and Moral Philosophy 1: What Does Charlotte Lennox Have to Do with Adam Smith?
Julie Park opens a three-part study of Charlotte Lennox, Adam Smith, and the vocabulary of moral philosophy in the eighteenth-century novel. The series reads Euphemia and its contemporaries as evidence about how feeling and judgment were written.
- Visualizing English Print, 1530 -1800: The Corpus, Tag Sets, and Topics
An account of the corpora built for Visualizing English Print at Wisconsin, including their tag sets and topics. It records how a large archive of early modern books was prepared for computational reading.
- Finding “Distances” Between Shakespeare’s Plays 1
The first of two posts on what it means to measure the distance between Shakespeare’s plays. Its sequel projects those distances onto new axes using principal component analysis.
Collections
Read by project or collaboration rather than by reverse chronology alone.
Shakespeare and linguistic variation
Posts on genre, DocuScope, and the linguistic texture of Shakespeare’s plays, much of it written with Jonathan Hope over more than a decade of collaboration.
Novel and moral philosophy
Three posts with Julie Park on the eighteenth-century novel, Charlotte Lennox, and the language of moral philosophy.
Visualizing English Print
Documentation of the Visualizing English Print project at Wisconsin: its corpora, metadata, and maps of early print.
Student and guest work
Undergraduate and guest contributions that carried the methods into new corners of the archive.