Presentation by Matt Warner on “Queer literature, theory and computational methods.”

On January 20th, 2022 Matt Warner presented his recent work on “Queer literature, theory and computational methods.”

The first two decades of the twenty first century saw both the emergence of computational literary studies, and an exponential increase in the publication of novels for and by queer and LGBTQIA+ readers. Historically, however, computational studies of literature have had relatively little to say about the queer, and it is easy to caricature the only field of literary criticism with an interest in binary classification as fundamentally at odds with queer studies. Instead, however, this talk explores some of the messy, imperfect results that emerge from turning traditional computational methods on queer texts, and what those results can tell us about the state of our current methods and corpora.