Literary DNA and Google Books

Can digital tools help us to trace literary inheritance and influence? In my dissertation, I claim that Washington Irving helped to originate a tradition of bachelor sentimentalism in American literature that Donald Grant Mitchell extended in Reveries of a Bachelor, Melville satirized in Pierre and “Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids,” and Henry [...]

Imagining new tools for humanities scholars

In my last post, I noted that most humanities scholars seem to want pretty basic tools that are rooted in immediate needs, tools that would, for example, allow them to convert files from one format to another, easily compose and exchange documents that use Unicode fonts, and find information quickly. Such tools [...]

What tools do humanities scholars need?

This week my colleague and I met with some of the leading philologists at Rice to discuss how they do their research and what tools would help make them more productive and innovative. I was primed to talk about text analysis and visualization tools, collaboration tools, collection-building tools, etc., but instead the conversation focused [...]

Woman vs. machine? Analyzing texts…

Since it took me five years before I could steel myself to look at my dissertation again, I had forgotten some of the main points that I made in it. To uncover key terms in Chapter 1, which explores the popular literature of bachelorhood in 19th century America, I decided to use text analysis [...]

Collaboration Tools: Scary or Revelatory?

Words like community bring out the warm fuzzies in me, until I start to think about the complexities of actually working in a community and negotiating among different perspectives. I’m wondering what scholarship might mean in an intensely collaborative and social Web 2.0 environment, so I began by trying to wikify my research project [...]