Stanford Humanities Center Newsletter

by Ed Finn, graduate student coordinator for Literary Studies and the Digital Library: Beyond Search and Access.

Odds are, you found this website through a search engine. The efficiency of text searching online has improved so much in recent years that it’s hard to remember what life was like before “Google” became a verb.

In fact, web searching is now so powerful that most of us know hardly anything about it. When we plug in a search term, a whole series of complex algorithms and database exchanges take place before the results pop up on screen. That’s all well and good for checking the news or finding that hilarious video, but what does this kind of advanced information retrieval mean for research in the traditionally book-bound humanities?

As universities, libraries and publishers digitize more of their stores of knowledge, scholars are experiencing a sea change in their work. While archival sources will always be vital to the humanities, a flowering of new databases and digital tools is opening up exciting possibilities for entirely new kinds of projects. The Stanford Humanities Center’s Literary Studies and the Digital Library: Beyond Search and Access is an interdisciplinary workshop pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the digital humanities today and collaborating to test some of these new tools and methodologies through new research.

The workshop is headed up by Matt Jockers, a digital humanist and technology specialist in the English department. One of our most dedicated participants is Franco Moretti, a professor of English and Comparative Literature who is well known for his groundbreaking work on ‘distant reading’ and statistical literary analysis. In our first year of operation, we brought in speakers on the cutting edge of digitization, statistical text analysis and related disciplines to tell us about their work.

This year, the workshop is working on incubating new projects organized by our own interdisciplinary group of faculty, technologists, and graduate students. For example, we have been working with Joe Shapiro, a graduate student in the English department, to analyze the use of narrative and description in 19^th century American novels. In addition to animated discussions about these terms, methodologies, and research goals, we have generated a training set of tagged sample texts and a set of tools we can use in other projects evaluating linguistic and stylistic choices across a variety of textual sources.

The workshop is already applying these lessons and tools to another project proposed by Sarah Allison, a graduate student in English who is exploring modes of ethical language in George Eliot’s Middlemarch and other 19^th century British novels. Both Joe and Sarah will be presenting papers as part of a Beyond Search panel at the Digital Humanities Conference in Finland this June. Matt Jockers helped organize the panel and will be presenting a paper as well, as will another regular participant, Digital Information Services Librarian Glen Worthey.

As the year progresses, Beyond Search and Access will continue to foster innovative, collaborative research between faculty and graduate students across departments and groups ranging from English and Comparative Literature to Computational Linguistics and the Stanford Library. The tools and relationships we are building will contribute to a new generation of scholarship and a better understanding of our emerging digital archives.

LINKS: 

Literary Studies and the Digital Library: Beyond Search and Access: http://shc.stanford.edu/workshops/literarydigital_0708.htm