Technology is revolutionizing more than just how we shop, communicate and entertain ourselves. It is also changing how humanists analyze texts in a growing field called the digital humanities.
Now, scholars of literature and history can take thousands of digitized texts and use a variety of computational tools to engage in what some have called distant reading, a supplement to the close analyses that long have formed the basis of literary criticism or historical inquiry.
They can track word usage, spelling changes, publication patterns, the rise of a genre or the development of an idea. Programs even analyze an author’s style based on, for example, the number of times he or she uses a certain word.
SID Hastings/WUSTL Photos
Joseph Loewenstein, PhD, director of the Humanities Digital Workshop and the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities, is leading a “vertical seminar” to help senior and junior faculty, postdoctoral students, graduate students and staff better understand the digital humanities and use its techniques.
Scholars of all types are starting to use these tools. Joseph Loewenstein, PhD, director of the Humanities Digital Workshop and the Interdisciplinary Project in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, is leading a “vertical seminar” to help senior and junior faculty, postdoctoral students, graduate students and staff better understand the digital humanities and use its techniques.
“[Digital analysis] changes the way a humanist works,” said Loewenstein, a professor in the Department of English in Arts & Sciences. “Most of the time, we work by ourselves, but nobody has enough expertise to do alone the kinds of projects that our tools make it possible for them to imagine. The innovative digital scholar has to collaborate.”
Participants in the Vertical Seminar in the Humanities come from a spectrum of disciplines, including German, comparative literature, American culture studies, African and African-American studies, history and English. Two staff members from the Humanities Digital Workshop complete the group.
“One of the goals of the vertical seminar was to get the expertise and obsessions of people at different career stages and from different disciplines talking to each other,” Loewenstein said.
The seminar is part of a three-year, $500,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded to WUSTL in 2011 in support of five vertical seminars in the humanities. Steven Zwicker, PhD, the Stanley Elkin Professor in the Humanities and professor of English, applied for the grant and asked Loewenstein to teach this seminar.
Everyone in the course has a project. Lynne Tatlock, PhD, the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and director of the Comparative Literature program, is expanding on her book, “German Writing, American Reading: Women and the Import of Fiction 1866–1917.” The book explored what happened to translations of German texts when they reached America. How were they marketed? Who read them? How popular were they?
SID Hastings/WUSTL Photos
Lynne Tatlock, PhD, the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and director of the Comparative Literature program, leads a discussion during the seminar.
Tatlock used digital tools to keep track of all of the translations — she wrote about more than 100 books. But since she published the book, a database of circulation records from the late 1800s from a small public library in Muncie, Ind., has gone online. The library carried many translations of German books, and Tatlock is exploring how often they were checked out and by whom.
“I found out that even though my book was already in print, I still had a lot to do,” Tatlock said. “So that pulled me back into the digital humanities.
A collaboration with Matt Erlin, PhD, chair of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, also fostered Tatlock’s work with digital humanities tools. The pair co-edited “Distant Readings: Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century,” a collection of essays that grapple with digesting the huge number of publications released in Germany in the 19th century.
Anupam Basu, PhD, WUSTL’s Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Fellow in Digital Humanities, is also a member of the seminar. Basu, who always has been interested in computer science, but chose instead to study literature, learned about the digital humanities while working on his dissertation.
Sid Hastings/WUSTL Photos
Anupam Basu, PhD, the Mark Steinberg Weil Early Career Fellow in Digital Humanities, discusses his vertical seminar project as Joseph Loewenstein, PhD, listens.
“It was a really good way to complement and expand the horizons of the kind of research that I was already doing and other humanities scholars were doing,” Basu said.
He is particularly interested in Shakespeare and other Renaissance authors. Most of the books from this era have been digitized in Early English Books Online (EEBO-TCP), a collection of most of the printed works of England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and British North America from 1473 to 1700.
Because he already has advanced computer skills, Basu’s project for the seminar has been to develop tools to help scholars explore the EEBO-TCP database. Many of the tools that he and Steve Pentecost, senior digital humanities specialist, have created are online at earlyprint.wustl.edu.
For Basu, the seminar offers a chance for scholars to see their field or research question in a new light, by interacting with people from different disciplines and using new techniques to analyze familiar material.
“That wonderful dissociative alignment doesn’t happen in a normal seminar format where you don’t have such widely different perspectives,” Basu said.
“Sometimes you have someone discovering a new thing they can do that they haven’t thought of before, or that they didn’t know was possible before,” Basu said. “And in any sort of seminar or class, that’s the best thing you can have.”