Columbia University Researcher to Speak on Computational Literary Analysis

How can computers help us to better understand literature? Computational literary analysis, a subfield of digital humanities, is a new discipline applying the quantitative methods of computer science to questions of literary criticism. This talk presents an overview of some recent computational approaches to literary analysis, including works in progress at the Literary Modeling and Visualization Lab at Columbia University, such as:
– Sentence structure analyses of the works of Henry James
– Statistical approaches to the study of character voice in James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Richardson
– Macro-etymological analyses of the works of Chaucer, Milton, and Joyce
– Diachronic analyses of the literary criticism surrounding George Eliot’s Middlemarch
– Linguistic fingerprinting of the chapter in 45,000 novels

On March 14, Columbia University’s Jonathan Reeve will be giving two talks on these topics:

“New Computational Approaches to the Study of Literary Style in the Digital Humanities”
Center for the Digital Humanities, Schmitt 135
12:00 – 1:00 pm

“The Open Scholarly Editions of James Joyce’s Ulysses and A Portrait of the Artist“
University Hall 2031
8:30 – 10 am

Both talks are free and open to the public.

Jonathan Reeve is a graduate student and researcher in the Literary Modeling and Visualization Lab at Columbia University, working in the intersections between English literary study and computational text analysis. His latest publication is “A Macro-Etymological Analysis of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” in Reading Modernism with Machines, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Read about his latest work at jonreeve.com.

Sponsored by the English Department’s Visiting Writers Committee and the CHSS Center for Digital Humanities.