
Literary History, Seen Through Big Data’s Lens - ot
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/technology/literary-history-seen-through-big-datas-lens.html?pagewanted=all
======
tokenadult
From the interesting submitted article: "'Traditionally, literary history was
done by studying a relative handful of texts,' says Mr. Jockers, an assistant
professor of English and a researcher at the Center for Digital Research in
the Humanities at the University of Nebraska. 'What this technology does is
let you see the big picture — the context in which a writer worked — on a
scale we’ve never seen before.'" This is interesting. Simply considering more
data is likely to improve the inferences about which earlier authors were read
by and were influential on later authors. And "big data" insights into
patterns that are hard to notice when reading one book at a time in the usual
practiced manner of a literature scholar will produce hypotheses that can be
tested by going back to the familiar texts and looking for details that were
not noticed before.

As this work expands to include writings first published in languages other
than English, it will be interesting to see how turns of phrase from (for
example) French entered the English language when English-speaking authors
read translations of French literature. This will give a much more complete
picture of worldwide influences on the development of literature.

------
tcdowney
Another interesting data driven Digital Humanities project is the InPhO
project at Indiana University. The project has produced a network of influence
between philosophers and thinkers and some other interesting work.

<http://inpho.cogs.indiana.edu/datablog/>

There is going to be some exciting stuff coming from the Digital Humanities in
the upcoming years!

------
gailees
Data Driven Disruption is the way to move forward!

