Is there as much to be gained by counting books instead of reading them?
In an article on Saturday, the second part of a series on how technology is transforming humanities scholarship, I look at how two professors at George Mason University in Virginia are searching nearly 1.7 million books in Google’s vast databases for new insights about the Victorians.
On the West Coast, professors at Stanford University’s Literature Lab are similarly experimenting with digital technology. Matthew Jockers who co-directs the lit lab with Franco Moretti, is studying the development of the novel by electronically scanning some 3,400 novels from the 18th and 19th centuries. His point of comparison is “Rise of the Novel,” a seminal book written by Ian Watts in 1957 that uses three writers, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding, to build a theory about how the novel originated.
“Traditionally we’ve studied literature piecemeal — one book at a time,” Mr. Jockers explained in the Stanford Report, the university’s newsletter.? “But computation and the digitalization of libraries have now made it possible to study literature as a much larger system.”
Mr. Jockers uses the term “non-consumptive research,” because you don’t consume — i.e. read — the books. Did the folks at the Literature Lab try to come up with a particularly un-catchy phrase? Readers, I’m sure you can do better. Send in your suggestions for a more felicitous phrasing.
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