Matt Warner, Quinn Dombrowski; Apr 13, 2023
We're pleased to introduce the new website for the Stanford Literary Lab; it's the first overhaul of the site since 2015, and the first time the site has moved off of WordPress. Read more.
Erik Fredner, Mark Algee-Hewitt; Jul 18, 2020
For a discipline committed to rejecting reductionism, literary studies relies on typicality more than it would care to admit. For example, Frederic Jameson describes an "unexpected" change in a character’s life in the novel Demos (1886) as something that would “normally generate a properly Utopian narrative” (Jameson 184, emphasis added). Of course, the subversion of his expectation is what interests Jameson. Yet so much literary criticism seeks to explain subverted expectations that critics tend to ignore an equally fascinating question: What exactly is being subverted in such moments? Our project uses computational methods in an attempt to turn away from these transgressions and toward expectations. Read more.
Charlotte Lindemann; Feb 7, 2020
Richard Dyer's 1979 *Stars* introduces the concept of a star image or star text as the aggregate of every public appearance of, or reference to a given Hollywood studio actor. Read more.
Erik Fredner; Nov 9, 2019
We are working on a new collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution about the histories of fame and celebrity in the United States. To ground ourselves in public discourse surrounding these topics, we began by analyzing ProQuest’s Historical Newspapers corpus. Read more.
J.D. Porter; Oct 29, 2018
Shortly after the Lab released my recent pamphlet on the structure of the literary canon, New York magazine ran an article about the 21st century canon, in which a panel of judges pick an early version of the literary canon from the century so far. Read more.
J.D. Porter; Mar 5, 2018
One of the goals of the Techne blog as a whole is to highlight technical issues in Digital Humanities—the kinds of in-the-weeds ideas that are interesting to specialists but don’t necessarily make the cut of a final paper. Read more.
David McClure; Aug 10, 2017
Last week I looked at some of the clusters of words that fluctuate together across narrative time in the Lab’s corpus of ~27k American novels. A lot of these are pretty semantically “legible,” in the sense that it’s not hard to map them back onto the experience of actually reading novels. Read more.
David McClure; Jul 31, 2017
I wanted to pick back up quickly with that list of the 500 most “non-uniform” words at the end of the last post about word distributions across narrative time in the American novel corpus. Read more.
David McClure; Jul 10, 2017
Over the course of the last few months here at the Literary Lab, I’ve been working on a little project that looks at the distributions of individual words inside of novels, when averaged out across lots and lots of texts. Read more.
Erik Fredner; Mar 14, 2017
Not for the first time, I find myself wanting to know how big the field of the novel is. Granted, finding the precise number of novels published in English is impossible. And even if we had an exact figure, the number of published novels doesn’t directly address the question of the genre’s cultural extent since it wouldn’t account for self-publishing, personal writing shared among friends, fan fiction, etc. Read more.