Many areas of literary studies are concerned with questions of geography and national identity. By using digital libraries and computational techniques, we can address these areas in new ways. How, for example, did writing by migrants to Britain differ from that of their native-born peers in the years before World War II? Are American authors less international in their geographic outlook than are writers from other nations? To which kinds of social, political, and economic events does literature most directly respond? This talk will answer all of these questions, describe the specific methods involved, and offer suggestions for future research in the field.
Please read this paper by Matt Wilkens in advance! "Is American fiction too provincial?"
Matthew Wilkens is Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell University (USA). His work uses quantitative and computational methods to study large-scale developments in literary and cultural history. He is the director of the Textual Geographies project, a founding editorial board member of the Journal of Cultural Analytics, and the author of Revolution: The Event in Postwar Fiction.
4 Kommentare
Berenike Herrmann sagt:
"Danish authors, one presumes, write about Denmark more often and more deeply than do others. We don’t generally consider this a problem. And the United States naturally looms large in the imagination of writers around the globe, as do other wealthy, influential nations. So, we should expect differences from country to country and probably some overrepresentation of the United States across the board, especially in recent decades."
Berenike Herrmann sagt:
"our group assembled collections of books by American and British authors, and of books published in the United States and in Great Britain (regardless of their authors’ nationalities), that were released between 1850 and 2009. These collections are large, totaling more than 150,000 volumes."
Berenike Herrmann sagt:
"We then used computers to identify the named locations in each book and to match those locations with detailed geographic information. The resulting data allowed us to measure, for each book and collection, the fraction of its attention devoted to places inside and outside its nation of origin."
Berenike Herrmann sagt:
"Consistently, for more than 150 years, American authors have devoted almost 40 percent of their spatial attention to locations outside the US. Is that enough?"