I have written an article entitled, “Latour, the Digital Humanities, and the Divided Kingdom of Knowledge” which will be appearing in a special issue of New Literary History. The article grows out of a presentation I made in September 2015 at a University of Virginia conference, organized by Rita Felski, “Recomposing the Humanities with Bruno Latour.” (My presentation […]
Author Archives: Michael Witmore
Auerbach Was Right: A Computational Study of the Odyssey and the Gospels
In the “Fortunata” chapter of his landmark study, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality, Eric Auerbach contrasts two representations of reality, one found in the New Testament Gospels, the other in texts by Homer and a few other classical writers. As with much of Auerbach’s writing, the sweep of his generalizations is broad. Long excerpts are chosen from […]
Posted in Counting Other Things, Quant Theory
Tagged Auerbach, criticism, Docuscope, translation
Comments closed
Finding “Distances” Between Shakespeare’s Plays 2: Projecting Distances onto New Bases with PCA
It’s hard to conceive of distance measured in anything other than a straight line. The biplot below, for example, shows the scores of Shakespeare’s plays on the two Docuscope LATs discussed in the previous post, FirstPerson and AbstractConcepts: Plotting the items in two dimensions gives the viewer some general sense of the shape of the data. “There are more items […]
Finding “Distances” Between Shakespeare’s Plays 1
In honor of the latest meeting of our NEH sponsored Folger workshop, Early Modern Digital Agendas, I wanted to start a series of posts about how we find “distances” between texts in quantitative terms, and about what those distances might mean. Why would I argue that two texts are “closer” to one another than they are to a […]
Now Read This: A Thought Experiment
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 […]