Computational Literary Studies in the Context of Contemporary Czech Literary Studies – Especially the Concept of the Corpus of Czech Novels

A Cultural Ambassador East and West: J. Hillis Miller’s <i>Lectures in China</i>

Introduction: The Interactive Relations Between Science and Technology and Literary Studies

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

For centuries, the study of literature has been a traditional and inseparable part of all philological and language­‑teacher training study programmes. However, its focus and content have substantially changed over time, mostly in response to philosophical, social, and cultural developments. So why should university study of languages still involve the study of literature? What benefits does it bring? Why and how should students read literature? Some answers are provided in the present textbook which is intended to serve as guide for students beginning their study of literature today. As other similar study companions, it offers a concise and accessible discussion of central issues in the contemporary study of literary texts, including definitions of key terms such as literature and literary scholarship, periods of literary history, theoretical approaches to the study of literary texts, an overview of critical approaches, characteristics of language typical for literature, classification of literary kinds and genres, etc. Despite its similarities with other study guides, the present textbook is unique at least in one aspect: it integrates the knowledge coming from the international context of the study of Anglophone literatures with a specific cultural and geographical context of Slovakia (and Czech Republic), which establishes a space for constructive comparation and mutual beneficiation. The current text is an edited and extended version of the previous textbooks Focus on Literature (2003) and Understanding Literature (2006) by the same authors. The new and expanded edition is fully updated to include: a wider range of textual examples from Anglophone literatures, new developments in literary theory and criticism related to digital literature and digital humanities, updated resources, added online links, and DOIs to make the textbook usage more comfortable, and adapted references written in MLA style otvárané v novom okne (obvykle ide o externý odkaz) which is most commonly used to cite sources within the language arts, cultural studies, and other humanities disciplines. Compared to the previous editions, sections for independent study (lists of recommended sources and lists of literary terms) and self­‑regulated study (questions and check­‑yourself sections) were added to provoke students to discover and explore various ways of “understanding literature,” through their independent work in the libraries, on the internet, or by consulting other resources, all of which can significantly improve their appreciation and grasp of literature and its contexts.

Literary studies was established as an academic discipline within humanities divisions. This chapter asks what insights and intellectual dispositions it missed by being placed at institutional remove from the social sciences, also coalescing intellectually during the same period. Literary studies’ humanities base predisposed it to valorize specific texts over their common print medium; to focus on aesthetic evaluation rather than the economics of book production, distribution, and consumption; and to construct retrospective canons of emblematic texts rather than attending to contemporary literary developments. Granted, literary sociology has long existed as a marginal activity within English departments, imported from French social history, spurred by Marxist literary theory, and, in particular, prompted by book history’s reconceptualization of bibliography as ‘the sociology of texts’. Yet there are still other models for blending humanities and social science approaches, specifically the disciplines of media, communication, and cultural studies, though literary studies has had surprisingly fitful and uneven exchange with them. The present era of digital humanities, in which traditionally humanistic disciplines are reconsidering their relationship to print culture and to each other, presents an optimal time to reassess how institutionalization formed the mental horizon of academic English. Equally, the time is ripe to explore how the alternative intellectual schema of literary media studies can rejuvenate a discipline facing fundamentally altered circumstances. The chapter’s second half illustrates how combining traditional literary-studies close-reading and sociology’s attention to technological, economic, and legal structures illuminates a particular born-digital institution: Literary Hub—the world’s most popular English-language literary website.

The present article discusses and reflects on possible ways of operationalizing the terminology of traditional literary studies for use in computational literary studies. By »operationalization«, we mean the development of a method for tracing a (theoretical) term back to text-surface phenomena; this is done explicitly and in a rule-based manner, involving a series of substeps. This procedure is presented in detail using as a concrete example Norbert Altenhofer’s »model interpretation« ( Modellinterpretation ) of Heinrich von Kleist’s The Earthquake in Chile . In the process, we develop a multi-stage operation – reflected upon throughout in terms of its epistemological implications – that is based on a rational-hermeneutic reconstruction of Altenhofer’s interpretation, which focuses on »mysteriousness« ( Rätselhaftigkeit ), a concept from everyday language. As we go on to demonstrate, when trying to operationalize this term, one encounters numerous difficulties, which is owing to the fact that Altenhofer’s use of it is underspecified in a number of ways. Thus, for instance, and contrary to Altenhofer’s suggestion, Kleist’s sentences containing »relativizing or perspectivizing phrases such as ›it seemed‹ or ›it was as if‹« (Altenhofer 2007, 45) do by no means, when analyzed linguistically, suggest a questioning or challenge of the events narrated, since the unreal quality of those German sentences only relates to the comparison in the subordinate clause, not to the respective main clause. Another indicator central to Altenhofer’s ascription of »mysteriousness« is his concept of a »complete facticity« ( lückenlose Faktizität ) which »does not seem to leave anything ›open‹« (Altenhofer 2007, 45). Again, the precise designation of what exactly qualifies facticity as »complete« is left open, since Kleist’s novella does indeed select for portrayal certain phenomena and actions within the narrated world (and not others). The degree of factuality in Kleist’s text may be higher than it is in other texts, but it is by no means »complete«. In the context of Altenhofer’s interpretation, »complete facticity« may be taken to mean a narrative mode in which terrible events are reported using conspicuously sober and at times drastic language. Following the critical reconstruction of Altenhofer’s use of terminology, the central terms and their relationship to one another are first explicated (in natural language), which already necessitates intensive conceptual work. We do so implementing a hierarchical understanding of the terms discussed: the definition of one term uses other terms which also need to be defined and operationalized. In accordance with the requirements of computational text analysis, this hierarchy of terms should end in »directly measurable« terms – i. e., in terms that can be clearly identified on the surface of the text. This, however, leads to the question of whether (and, if so, on the basis of which theoretical assumptions) the terminology of literary studies may be traced back in this way to text-surface phenomena. Following the pragmatic as well as the theoretical discussion of this complex of questions, we indicate ways by which such definitions may be converted into manual or automatic recognition. In the case of manual recognition, the paradigm of annotation – as established and methodologically reflected in (computational) linguistics – will be useful, and a well-controlled annotation process will help to further clarify the terms in question. The primary goal, however, is to establish a recognition rule by which individuals may intersubjectively and reliably identify instances of the term in question in a given text. While it is true that in applying this method to literary studies, new challenges arise – such as the question of the validity and reliability of the annotations –, these challenges are at present being researched intensively in the field of computational literary studies, which has resulted in a large and growing body of research to draw on. In terms of computer-aided recognition, we examine, by way of example, two distinct approaches: 1) The kind of operationalization which is guided by precedent definitions and annotation rules benefits from the fact that each of its steps is transparent, may be validated and interpreted, and that existing tools from computational linguistics can be integrated into the process. In the scenario used here, these would be tools for recognizing and assigning character speech, for the resolution of coreference and the assessment of events; all of these, in turn, may be based on either machine learning, prescribed rules or dictionaries. 2) In recent years, so-called end-to-end systems have become popular which, with the help of neural networks, »infer« target terms directly from a numerical representation of the data. These systems achieve superior results in many areas. However, their lack of transparency also raises new questions, especially with regard to the interpretation of results. Finally, we discuss options for quality assurance and draw a first conclusion. Since numerous decisions have to be made in the course of operationalization, and these, in practice, are often pragmatically justified, the question quickly arises as to how »good« a given operationalization actually is. And since the tools borrowed from computational linguistics (especially the so-called inter-annotator agreement) can only partially be transferred to computational literary studies and, moreover, objective standards for the quality of a given implementation will be difficult to find, it ultimately falls to the community of researchers and scholars to decide, based on their research standards, which operationalizations they accept. At the same time, operationalization is the central link between the computer sciences and literary studies, as well as being a necessary component for a large part of the research done in computational literary studies. The advantage of a conscious, deliberate and reflective operationalization practice lies not only in the fact that it can be used to achieve reliable quantitative results (or that a certain lack of reliability at least is a known factor); it also lies in its facilitation of interdisciplinary cooperation: in the course of operationalization, concrete sets of data are discussed, as are the methods for analysing them, which taken together minimizes the risk of misunderstandings, »false friends« and of an unproductive exchange more generally.

This paper is devoted to the issue of Digital Humanities (DH) in Czech literary studies. Over the last decade, various methods primarily connected with DH have had a substantial impact on the development of numerous areas of the humanities. In Czech literary studies, this impact is visible only from 2017 onwards, when official discussion between Czech scholars about the topic was initiated. The recent development of this tradition is the main reason why DH have not gained as strong position in Czech literary studies as they have abroad. However, there exists a tradition of the use of so-called exact methods in literary studies in the Czech scholarly milieu, and this tradition serves as an important domestic source for the full development of DH in Czech literary studies. While these exact methods are examined in the paper, its main purpose is to introduce two contemporary Czech DH projects in literary studies – the first being the Corpus of Czech Verse and the second the Corpus of Czech Prose, the latter of which currently serves as a base for a subject-project on Prague Fictional Topography. These two projects can be viewed as representatives of the situation and role of DH in contemporary Czech literary studies.

This chapter examines material published in the field of digital humanities in 2019. Key work published this year has grappled with longstanding conflicts at the heart of the field, on whether and how computational methods should be applied to humanities data, and who should validate such methodologies. The chapter begins with new work by Ted Underwood, who makes the case for hypothesis-driven methods and the modelling of humanities data. It discusses how recent work in computational literary studies had appeared to resist the trap into which much previous work had fallen, that is, work that was perceived to fall into the binaries of distant vs. close reading, computation vs. engagement, objectivity vs. subjectivity. The continued friction over the appropriateness of certain computational methodological approaches was amplified by new work that called into question the statistical methods of a number of key works in the field over past years. Nan Z. Da’s critique of computational literary studies through the lens of statistical rigour imploded the uneasy truce between computational methods and the more traditional questions and methods at the heart of literary studies. Da’s article reopens the debate about how digital humanities scholars use statistical methods, and how greater reliance on such methods may demand greater cross-disciplinary oversight to ensure that they are used in a way that is both robust and appropriate. Her contribution is examined alongside the rash of responses to it from key scholars in the field which produced an important snapshot of the fractures and fundamentals of data-driven literary studies. I then turn to new and timely work by James E. Dobson, which argues for a third way, a Critical Digital Humanities that engages critically with computational as well as humanistic scholarship.I survey important contributions on the impact of mass digitization, historicism and the archive, and how to study history in the age of digital archives and the historic web. Ian Milligan’s work provides a much-needed introduction to the potentials and pitfalls of studying recent history through the digital traces left behind. It self-consciously identifies areas in which greater cross-disciplinary scholarship and critical engagement will be needed as this area of study matures. Discussion then turns to work by Nanna Bonde Thylstrup on digital waste, which shows how connecting new media theory to waste studies can provide an important frame through which to examine issues of data toxicity and pollution. This work sets the stage for two landmark books on sex and race which implore us to take a more careful look at the toxic technologies we build and the questions we ask of them. Both Caroline Criado Perez and Ruha Benjamin examine the damage done by the reliance of data systems on the ‘default’, frequently a white male, forcing us to see anything that departs from this norm as deviant. These works make a powerful case for reinventing the systems we increasingly rely on, questioning the underlying prejudice that created them, and rethinking the modes of meaning-making ascribed to them, especially when that narrative so often assumes a benign neutrality. Finally, I examine these works alongside a new volume of essays on digital humanities and intersectionality edited by Barbara Bordalejo and Roopika Risam, which serves to amplify and contextualize the need for the approaches taken by Criado Perez and Benjamin, showing how deeply enmeshed within the field these power structures are.

Reviewed by: The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture by Zara Dinnen James J. Hodge DINNEN, ZARA. The Digital Banal: New Media and American Literature and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018. 223 pp. $60.00 hardcover; $59.99 e-book. As counterintuitive as it may sound, digital media have recently gotten a bit lost in the shuffle. At least since the mid-2000s the nascent field of new media studies began to avoid the term ‘new’ and to refer to itself as digital media studies. This shift [End Page 584] corresponded with trends leaning away from its emergence from within literary studies. Notwithstanding having been trained in literary studies, many of the field’s most prominent scholars (Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Alexander R. Galloway, N. Katherine Hayles, Mark B. N. Hansen, Lisa Nakamura, Ian Bogost) moved discussion of digital technologies and cultures decisively away from figures familiar to the imagination of literary theory—an affinity that enabled the field initially to thrive in the 1990s, most obviously in George Landow’s theorization of hypertext in relation to Roland Barthes’s notion of text as a “tissue of quotations.” At roughly the same time, an explosion of trans-historical scholarship in the Digital Humanities displaced more local critiques of digital culture. Finally, with the rise of smartphones, ubiquitous networks, and social media, digital media could no longer be said to be new. They became instead quite ordinary, or as Zara Dinnen’s new book teaches us, something banal. In attending carefully to the pervasive presence of digital technologies and themes in contemporary literature and visual culture The Digital Banal provides a powerfully synthetic course correction to the too-often-divergent paths of digital media and literary studies. As Dinnen herself notes, a survey of scholarship would seem to indicate that the contemporary novel “is not interested in the technological devices, informational logic, and networked sociality of contemporary digital culture” (166). However, as Dinnen shows again and again in a wealth of insightful and original analyses, contemporary narrative culture remains deeply invested in these issues. The heart of the matter is that the logic informing such devices and networks—the codes and infrastructures making contemporary life possible—remain not only invisible but also obfuscatory by nature. The constantly withdrawing nature of digital media makes them something of a moving, receding target for critical thought. Even as much as they change the dynamics of social life, politics, and culture, digital media themselves seem to remove themselves from the scene. Adopting language from Lauren Berlant, Dinnen argues that this dynamic contributes to a block or impasse in the stretched-out now of the contemporary moment. Instead of encountering the novelty of “becoming-with” new technologies and recognizing their interruptive and disruptive novelty, we experience instead the digital banal, a lack of awareness of how much mediation colors experience. As Dinnen observes, this lack of awareness has narrative and affective coordinates. The popular version of the digital banal can be found in Apple’s slogan for the iPhone 4: “This changes everything. Again.” The digital banal refers to the ho-hum feeling of living through this type of reality, an affective posture of flatness in response to “the progress that was always going to come” (137). As its title indicates, the book’s main contribution to literary and digital media studies is the coinage and theorization of the term ‘digital banal.’ It is a term likely to ruffle some feathers, and it is certainly a worthwhile provocation. Dinnen’s focus on the banal notably departs from technicist discourses on ubiquitous computation and speculative philosophy often invoked to analyze it (Graham Harman, Alfred North Whitehead). Instead, The Digital Banal productively adopts a more affectively-oriented critical posture appropriate to the analysis of aesthetic texts. The choice of ‘banal’ also silently foregoes several critical alternatives, for example the everyday and the ordinary. This is a strong and polemical choice. The words ‘everyday’ and ‘ordinary’ themselves carry quite a bit of baggage, and Dinnen’s choice to privilege banality allows for a clear vision of digital media and culture to come into view. Banality provides a wealth of meanings to explore. However, the...

Literary scholars draw comparisons more often than they reflect on the practice of that drawing. Our study of comparisons in hermeneutic practice shows that comparative study is not merely a characteristic of general and comparative literary studies. It can also be found as a (generally qualitative) practice within the monolingual disciplines. The comparison of texts with similar themes is particularly widespread and popular, typically discovering through this comparison the differences and similarities of the literary treatment, in order to prove the aesthetic worth of a work and thus to make increased aesthetic pleasure possible. In addition, there are also studies which, through comparison of sample texts test the validity of statements about literary history or the typology of genres. The practice is particularly associated with comparative literary studies, which claims thus to overcome the limitations of monolingual literary studies. In principle, this form of test study can be extended to an unlimited number of cases, whereby philologists can, among other things, demonstrate how well-read they are. Nevertheless, this form of comparison, too, has to date mostly been used qualitatively, without exploring the potential of a quantitative expansion of the study. Making reference to Descartes’ thesis (1628) that every growth in knowledge is always grounded in a comparison, it is discussed under what circumstances individual case studies may be understood as technically comparative in nature. In this regard one should be careful not to rob the concept of the comparison of the element of differentiation. Therefore, in what follows, we only class studies as comparative when they consider at least two cases (e. g. at least two works), although the main interest of the study may be reserved for one case. Further, in literary studies, comparisons may be used both to discover the characteristics of the object investigated (›discovery function‹) and as a (sometimes comparatively conceived) control testing the scope of assertions or hypotheses (›control function‹). The emphasis of the use of comparison, as a rule, lies on the qualitative description of the complexity of individual selected cases, whose aesthetic value and place in literary history may thus be judged. By contrast, quantitative comparisons of a few variables within many cases are seldom used by literary scholars. Literary studies have to date hardly taken into account the contrast between quantitative and qualitative comparisons which has been so thoroughly discussed in social science, nor of the attempts to overcome this contrast (for instance through multi-value comparative quantitative analysis, which takes account not only of the need to revise hypotheses, but also the possible necessity of the revision of categories during or after the drawing of comparisons). Instead, an appeal to the ›incomparability‹ of literary art, made as early as 1902 by Benedetto Croce frequently recurs, or the argument, borrowed from Ethnology and Religious Studies, for the need for necessary ›respect for the unique and different nature‹ (Haupt 2013) of the object of study is often made. Earlier attempts at empiricisation, for instance the empirical study of literature movement of the 1970s (cf. Schmidt 2005), were unable to establish themselves, much less become part of the regular course of German Studies. This was partly because the fundamentally hermeneutically oriented field of literary studies could not accept the empiricists’ rejection of hermeneutic methods (cf. Ort 1994). There was an almost reflex professorial defence of interpretative reading. Consequently, we think it important that empiricism should no longer be conceived of as an argument against hermeneutic approaches to philological objects of study, but rather to make it available as a useful aid to the improvement of established methods of literary study (cf. Groeben 2013). Literary studies can thus work against the reproach that its generalisations are based at best on insufficient data, and at worst on mere intuition. Building on the often overlooked, but well established philological technique of comparing parallel passages, we wish to demonstrate how, where, and to what extent, the corpus technology offered by the digital humanities can help to empiricise literary studies. Corpora offer, in the first instance, the possibility of qualitative comparison of verbal parallels, but also to make parallels of content in the form of intersubjectively explicable, repeatable search procedures more transparent (cf. Fricke 1991, 2007). In this respect, the comparison of parallel passages, an old established hermeneutic method can be made empirical. In a further step, we will discuss the possibilities of quantitative comparisons in corpora (i. e. hypothesis-led variables oriented comparisons): on the one hand, the statistical description of corpora through stylometrics, which allows texts as a whole to be described, for instance in terms of word and sentence length, or the frequency of specific graphemes; on the other the analysis of collocations and the determination of »usuelle Wortverbindungen« (common multi-word expressions), which allow for the study of individual textual characteristics. In this connection, we discuss the necessity and usefulness of comparative corpora for the scope of statements determined via corpus analysis, as well as the dependence of the quality of the comparison of parallel passages on the quality of the chosen corpus. To what extent literary studies as a field will adopt these statistical comparative techniques as a philological method in the age of the digital humanities, remains to be seen. We are, given the aversion to statistical matters which this predominantly hermeneutically oriented discipline has shown to date, somewhat sceptical. We are also sceptical about whether corpus linguistic quality standards of corpora composition will be accepted. We would therefore consider not only statistically based procedures for composing corpora, but also other means of plausibilization, such as the explication of the texts studied, and an argument for their selection, to be not only legitimate but appropriate. Despite the field of literary studies’ continued reluctance to use quantitative methods, we still see a possibility that quantitative textual comparisons could provide a stimulus to standardisation. Corpus based comparisons make us aware that the comparison of many texts presupposes explicit assumptions about the comparability of what is compared. This requires a precise formulation of the questions to be explored, as well as a precise explication of the textual phenomena studied, so that exact statements about the relationships between the characteristics compared become possible.

There is a set of statistical measures developed mostly in corpus and computational linguistics and information retrieval, known as keyness measures, which are generally expected to detect textual features that account for differences between two texts or groups of texts. These measures are based on the frequency, distribution, or dispersion of words (or other features). Searching for relevant differences or similarities between two text groups is also an activity that is characteristic of traditional literary studies, whenever two authors, two periods in the work of one author, two historical periods or two literary genres are to be compared. Therefore, applying quantitative procedures in order to search for differences seems to be promising in the field of computational literary studies as it allows to analyze large corpora and to base historical hypotheses on differences between authors, genres and periods on larger empirical evidence. However, applying quantitative procedures in order to answer questions relevant to literary studies in many cases raises methodological problems, which have been discussed on a more general level in the context of integrating or triangulating quantitative and qualitative methods in mixed methods research of the social sciences. This paper aims to solve these methodological issues concretely for the concept of distinctiveness and thus to lay the methodological foundation permitting to operationalize quantitative procedures in order to use them not only as rough exploratory tools, but in a hermeneutically meaningful way for research in literary studies. Based on a structural definition of potential candidate measures for analyzing distinctiveness in the first section, we offer a systematic description of the issue of integrating quantitative procedures into a hermeneutically meaningful understanding of distinctiveness by distinguishing its epistemological from the methodological perspective. The second section develops a systematic strategy to solve the methodological side of this issue based on a critical reconstruction of the widespread non-integrative strategy in research on keyness measures that can be traced back to Rudolf Carnap’s model of explication. We demonstrate that it is, in the first instance, mandatory to gain a comprehensive qualitative understanding of the actual task. We show that Carnap’s model of explication suffers from a shortcoming that consists in ignoring the need for a systematic comparison of what he calls the explicatum and the explicandum. Only if there is a method of systematic comparison, the next task, namely that of evaluation can be addressed, which verifies whether the output of a quantitative procedure corresponds to the qualitative expectation that must be clarified in advance. We claim that evaluation is necessary for integrating quantitative procedures to a qualitative understanding of distinctiveness. Our reconstruction shows that both steps are usually skipped in empirical research on keyness measures that are the most important point of reference for the development of a measure of distinctiveness. Evaluation, which in turn requires thorough explication and conceptual clarification, needs to be employed to verify this relation. In the third section we offer a qualitative clarification of the concept of distinctiveness by spanning a three-dimensional conceptual space. This flexible framework takes into account that there is no single and proper concept of distinctiveness but rather a field of possible meanings depending on research interest, theoretical framework, and access to the perceptibility or salience of textual features. Therefore, we shall, instead of stipulating any narrow and strict definition, take into account that each of these aspects – interest, theoretical framework, and access to perceptibility – represents one dimension of the heuristic space of possible uses of the concept of distinctiveness. The fourth section discusses two possible strategies of operationalization and evaluation that we consider to be complementary to the previously provided clarification, and that complete the task of establishing a candidate measure successfully as a measure of distinctiveness in a qualitatively ambitious sense. We demonstrate that two different general strategies are worth considering, depending on the respective notion of distinctiveness and the interest as elaborated in the third section. If the interest is merely taxonomic, classification tasks based on multi-class supervised machine learning are sufficient. If the interest is aesthetic, more complex and intricate evaluation strategies are required, which have to rely on a thorough conceptual clarification of the concept of distinctiveness, in particular on the idea of salience or perceptibility. The challenge here is to correlate perceivable complex features of texts such as plot, theme (aboutness), style, form, or roles and constellation of fictional characters with the unperceived frequency and distribution of word features that are calculated by candidate measures of distinctiveness. Existing research did not clarify, so far, how to correlate such complex features with individual word features. The paper concludes with a general reflection on the possibility of mixed methods research for computational literary studies in terms of explanatory power and exploratory use. As our strategy of combining explication and evaluation shows, integration should be understood as a strategy of combining two different perspectives on the object area: in our evaluation scenarios, that of empirical reader response and that of a specific quantitative procedure. This does not imply that measures of distinctiveness, which proved to reach explanatory power in one qualitative aspect, should be supposed to be successful in all fields of research. As long as evaluation is omitted, candidate measures of distinctiveness lack explanatory power and are limited to exploratory use. In contrast with a skepticism that has sometimes been expressed from literary scholars with regard to the relevance of computational literary studies on proper issues of the humanities, we believe that integrating computational methods into hermeneutic literary studies can be achieved in a way that reaches higher explanatory power than the usual exploratory use of keyness measures, but it can only be achieved individually for concrete tasks and not once and for all based on a general theoretical demonstration.

While digital humanities has emerged as a cutting-edge research trend in the humanities over the past two decades, its application in literary research is still scarce. At present, the field of digital humanities for literary studies is largely focused on theoretical development, critical reflections, and infrastructure building. This article aims to explore the potential of digital humanities in advancing literary research through critical practices and elucidates the distinctive advantages of employing digital humanities methodologies in the study of literature. In this article, a dozen of children’s editions of Robinson Crusoe from different historical periods are used as the corpus, and methods such as word cloud, keyword extraction, and sentiment analysis using Python are used to examine the adaptation of Defoe’s original novel in children’s editions and to uncover a positive inclination throughout the diachronic evolution of children’s literature adaptations. It has also revealed some patterns within the intricate details of the different children’s editions. In doing so, the article demonstrates the unique advantages of digital humanities in literary studies and proposes new ways of applying digital humanities to literary criticism.

Language and literary studies have studied style for centuries, and even since the advent of ›stylistics‹ as a discipline at the beginning of the twentieth century, definitions of ›style‹ have varied heavily across time, space and fields. Today, with increasingly large collections of literary texts being made available in digital form, computational approaches to literary style are proliferating. New methods from disciplines such as corpus linguistics and computer science are being adopted and adapted in interrelated fields such as computational stylistics and corpus stylistics, and are facilitating new approaches to literary style.The relation between definitions of style in established linguistic or literary stylistics, and definitions of style in computational or corpus stylistics has not, however, been systematically assessed. This contribution aims to respond to the need to redefine style in the light of this new situation and to establish a clearer perception of both the overlap and the boundaries between ›mainstream‹ and ›computational‹ and/or ›empirical‹ literary stylistics. While stylistic studies of non-literary texts are currently flourishing, our contribution deliberately centers on those approaches relevant to ›literary stylistics‹. It concludes by proposing an operational definition of style that we hope can act as a common ground for diverse approaches to literary style, fostering transdisciplinary research.The focus of this contribution is on literary style in linguistics and literary studies (rather than in art history, musicology or fashion), on textual aspects of style (rather than production- or reception-oriented theories of style), and on a descriptive perspective (rather than a prescriptive or didactic one). Even within these limits, however, it appears necessary to build on a broad understanding of the various perspectives on style that have been adopted at different times and in different traditions. For this reason, the contribution first traces the development of the notion of style in three different traditions, those of German, Dutch and French language and literary studies. Despite the numerous links between each other, and between each of them to the British and American traditions, these three traditions each have their proper dynamics, especially with regard to the convergence and/or confrontation between mainstream and computational stylistics. For reasons of space and coherence, the contribution is limited to theoretical developments occurring since 1945.The contribution begins by briefly outlining the range of definitions of style that can be encountered across traditions today: style as revealing a higher-order aesthetic value, as the holistic ›gestalt‹ of single texts, as an expression of the individuality of an author, as an artifact presupposing choice among alternatives, as a deviation from a norm or reference, or as any formal property of a text. The contribution then traces the development of definitions of style in each of the three traditions mentioned, with the aim of giving a concise account of how, in each tradition, definitions of style have evolved over time, with special regard to the way such definitions relate to empirical, quantitative or otherwise computational approaches to style in literary texts. It will become apparent how, in each of the three traditions, foundational texts continue to influence current discussions on literary style, but also how stylistics has continuously reacted to broader developments in cultural and literary theory, and how empirical, quantitative or computational approaches have long ­existed, usually in parallel to or at the margins of mainstream stylistics. The review will also reflect the lines of discussion around style as a property of literary texts – or of any textual entity in general.The perspective on three stylistic traditions is accompanied by a more systematic perspective. The rationale is to work towards a common ground for literary scholars and linguists when talking about (literary) style, across traditions of stylistics, with respect for established definitions of style, but also in light of the digital paradigm. Here, we first show to what extent, at similar or different moments in time, the three traditions have developed comparable positions on style, and which definitions out of the range of possible definitions have been proposed or promoted by which authors in each of the three traditions.On the basis of this synthesis, we then conclude by proposing an operational definition of style that is an attempt to provide a common ground for both mainstream and computational literary stylistics. This definition is discussed in some detail in order to explain not only what is meant by each term in the definition, but also how it relates to computational analyses of style – and how this definition aims to avoid some of the pitfalls that can be perceived in earlier definitions of style. Our definition, we hope, will be put to use by a new generation of computational, quantitative, and empirical studies of style in literary texts.

The Difference an Editor Makes

How the books on digital literary studies are proliferating, let me count the ways. Within a two-year period, Ted Underwood’s long-awaited Distant Horizons has come out with Chicago; Roopika Risam’s New Digital Worlds has been published with Northwestern; Punctum Books has brought us Dorothy Kim and Jesse Stommel’s Disrupting the Digital Humanities; and I will add to the noise with Close Reading with Computers, at Stanford, to name just a few examples.1 It is onto such a crowded dance floor that Andrew Piper’s Enumerations: Data and Literary Study makes its moves.