The Digital Humanities: Big Data and Literary Criticism

Data techniques used to tackle literary criticism? A growing controversy in the digital humanities.

Yes. I've been waiting for this one. A very interesting article from Fast Company addressing a growing controversy in the digital humanities: Should We Teach Literature Students How to Analyse Texts Algorithmically. Machine learning and data visualisation surveying the canon!

So many professorial 'man hours' have been spent on minutiae such as the use of the singular 'their' in Jane Austen or the occurrences of 'yes' in Ulysses. Now the power algorithms are tackling the life works of authors and whole swathes of Google Scholar. What are they generating? Very unusual and novel correlations and hypotheses that academics couldn't hope to find in research journals. The algorithms do not understand what they are examining but that is not their job. Their job is to sift through massive data and find meaningful patterns.

Historical documents and sociological data have been the focus and now it is literature. Really, I can't wait to see what we find in Finnegans Wake!
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