ENG 612/MLL 772 Topics in DH: Humanities Data Spring 2022

Additional Reading

Here you will find additional readings that there wasn’t space for on the course syllabus. You may use these readings when conducting research for your lab notebook entries and/or final project; you may also use one of the below readings as your proposed reading for week 11 (if appropriate). Those readings not available online are included in the “Additional Reading” folder in our class Google drive folder (unless they are books). The readings are roughly organized by theme.

Foundations, Introductions, Overviews

  • Louis T. Milic, “The Next Step,” Computers and the Humanities (1966)
  • Roberto Busa, “Why Can a Computer Do So Little?”, ALLC Bulletin (1976)
  • Daniel J. Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, “Becoming Digital,” from Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (2005)
  • Susan Hockey, “The History of Humanities Computing,” A Companion to Digital Humanities (2004)
  • Rosanne G. Potter, “Literary Criticism and Literary Computing: The Difficulties of a Synthesis,” Computers and the Humanities (1988)
  • Yohei Igarashi, “Statistical Analysis at the Birth of Close Reading,” New Literary History (2015)
  • Melissa Terras and Julianne Nyhan, “Father Busa’s Female Punch Card Operatives,” Debates in the Digital Humanities 2016 (2016)

Digital Archives

Objectivity and Quantification

  • C. P. Snow, “The Two Cultures” (1959)
  • Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Ch 1 “Epistemologies of the Eye,” from Objectivity (2010)
  • Jacqueline Wernimont, Numbered Lives: Life and Death in Quantum Media (MIT Press, 2018)

Collecting, Cleaning, and Exploring Humanities Data

  • Ted Underwood, “Theorizing Research Practices We Forgot to Theorize Twenty Years Ago,” Representations (2014)
  • Katherine Bode, “The Equivalence of ‘Close’ and ‘Distant’ Reading; or, Toward a New Object for Data-Rich Literary History,” Modern Language Quarterly (2017)
  • Ryan Cordell, “‘Q i-jtb the Raven’: Taking Dirty OCR Seriously,” Book History (2017)
  • Fotis Jannidis and Julia Flanders, “A gentle introduction to data modeling,”, from The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities (2019)
    • This link will take you to this chapter on EBSCO e-books. If the link doesn’t work for you, you can search for the collection The Shape of Data in Digital Humanities via our library and access the e-book that way.
  • Data-Sitters Club books 4, and 8-11 (each explores a different method of text analysis):

Data and Computation in Literary Studies

  • Several books in literary studies utilizing computation, data, and/or quantitative methods have been published over the past 5-10 years. Some of them include:
    • Andrew Piper, Enumerations: Data and Literary Study (University of Chicago, 2018)
    • Ted Underwood, Distant Horizons: Digital Evidence and Literary Change (University of Chicago, 2019)
    • Richard Jean So, Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (Columbia UP, 2020) (we are reading the intro and ch 1 in this class)
    • Ryan Cordell, David A. Smith, Abby Mullen, Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, Avery Blankenship, Going the Rounds: Virality in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers (2019-2020)
  • Ryan Cordell, “Reprinting, Circulation, and the Network Author in Antebellum Newspapers,” American Literary History (2015)
  • Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So, “Turbulent Flow: A Computational Model of World Literature,” Modern Language Quarterly (2016)
  • Andrew Piper and Eva Portelance, “How Cultural Capital Works: Prizewinning Novels, Bestsellers, and the Time of Reading,” Post45 (2016)
  • Dennis Yi Tenen, “Toward a Computational Archaeology of Fictional Space,” New Literary History (2018)
  • Rachael Scarborough King, “The Scale of Genre,” New Literary History (2021)
  • Generally speaking, journals focused on work in the humanities and/or literary studies that utilizes computation, data, and/or quantitative methods include: