Knight Moves: Russifying Quantitative Literary Studies

Abstract

Computational approaches to literary studies have tended to fetishize Russian Formalism. The evolving canon of Digital Humanities scholarship shows persistent leanings on Formalism and the theoretical movements that emerged in its wake, including Prague School structuralism, discourse analysis, and semiotics. Twenty-first-century scholars relive the evolutions, embattled stances, and fraught histories of modern literary theory and its founding figures, whom they claim as their predecessors – from historical poetics to the social turn of discourse analysis. As scholars working in Digital Humanities and Russian literary studies, we attempt to examine the suggestive continuities between Russian literary theory and computational literary analysis. Focusing on the posited link between discourse analysis and topic modelling, we offer a case study of topic modeling using the full run of the academic journal Slavic Review. We briefly review the process of topic modeling for literary analysis, consider some insights from topic modeling Slavic Review and, for comparison, briefly consider two other prominent journals in the field – Slavic and East European Journal and Russian Review.