Data & Literary Study:
A Research Lab

HUM 475 / ENG 475

Course Logistics

Class Meetings: Monday and Wednesday 1:30-2:50pm

Course Location: CDH Classroom (Firestone, Floor B) + Zoom (see Canvas site for link)

Instructor: Dr. Sierra Eckert

Email: sceckert@princeton.edu

Office Hours: Wednesdays 3:00 - 4:00PM and by appointment (see Zoom link on course Canvas site)

Course Website: https://sceckert.github.io/Data-and-Literary-Study-Spring2022/

Course Description

In this upper-level seminar, we’ll ask what methods in the sociology of literature and computational literary studies can help illuminate about literature as an institution. From publishing houses to lending library records and course syllabi, we will focus on how cultural works are produced, consumed, consecrated, and distributed––approaching literary works and the people associated with them as part of larger systems of relations between people, texts, technologies, and institutions. We’ll learn important methods from the sociology of literature, materialist book history, and computational literary studies. We’ll pay particular attention to nineteenth-century fiction––examining and troubling its role in debates about literary value and in the archives of 20th- and 21st-century digital humanities. We will draw on quantitative and computer-assisted methods of reading as part of a longer genealogy of interpretative methods for thinking about the data of literary study and for examining literature in relation to its material and cultural contexts. Along the way, this course will introduce more advanced research methods for the study of literature and its cultural formations, including computational methods for surfacing patterns in large collections of text, advanced techniques for text analysis and classification, network analysis, and supervised and unsupervised literary modeling, with the goal of using these methods to help better understand patterns in textual production, consumption, and circulation. As part of the course, we will delve into collecting practices, including the Morris Parrish Collection of Victorian fiction, held in Firestone Library special collections.

This course is intended to provide students with more advanced training in quantitative methods and sociological approaches to the study of texts and cultural analytics. As part of the three primary goals of the course, students will: 1) engage critically with key debates and concepts in the sociological study of texts, including the interventions made by critical archival studies and the sociology of literature, 2) develop a basic understanding of the quantitative methods in the study of literature––including advanced text mining, network analysis supervised and unsupervised modeling in Python, 3) gain hands-on, practical experience using literary data in their own collaborative research project.

Acknowledgments

This syllabus has drawn inspiration from the teaching materials of many others. A partial list of syllabi that have consulted in the process of assembling this course includes Ted Underwood’s “Data Science in the Humanities,” Andrew Goldstone’s “Literary Data: Some Approaches,” Zoe LeBlanc’s “Introduction to DH,” Meredith Martin and Rebecca Munson’s “Data, Literature, Interpretation,” Melanie Walsh’s “Introduction to Cultural Analytics & Python,” Mellisa Reynold’s “A History of Words: Technologies of Communication from Cuneiform to Coding,” Nora Benedict’s “Introduction to Digital Humanities: Global Encounters and Perspectives,” Jim Casey’s “Weird Data,” and Miriam Posner’s “Introduction to Digital Humanities.”