Join us once a month for our recurring lecture series on the digital analysis of literature and culture. Each session features a distinguished researcher specializing in computational literary studies or other digital studies of culture, presenting their latest insights and findings. Following the talk, attendees are invited to participate in a lively discussion, delving deeper into the presented topics and exchanging ideas with fellow enthusiasts.

Upcoming talks:

Digital Humanities — an Ancient History

Who: Prof. Dr. John Dawson, Head of Head of the Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre (LLCC) at the University of Cambridge from 1974 to 2009.

When:  Nov 12, 2024, 04:00 PM (CET)

Register to take part: here 

Abstract:

The discipline now known as Digital Humanities has a long history. It began in 1946 when Roberto Busa began preparing a concordance to the works of Thomas Aquinas by mechanically sorting punched cards. The first of 56 volumes, prepared with help of many other labourers, was published in 1974. There are, of course, alternative historiographies of Digital Humanities, which take other events as starting points, but they all agree that DH has a long and diverse history.

The Literary and Linguistic Computing Centre (LLCC) at the University of Cambridge was established in 1964 and had to devise innovative methods for inputting, storing, and analysing text of many types and in several alphabets.

John Dawson was Head of LLCC from 1974 to 2009. During that time, advancements in computer storage, software techniques, and printing technology revolutionised Digital Humanities, but they also posed many new challenges for humanists. Two examples:

• In 1977 Chinese characters could only be drawn as simple line-drawings on a graph plotter, and there was no established way to sort and print the mixture of Chinese and English required for a Chinese–English dictionary.
• Concording the Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot required a large amount of computer store, three magnetic tapes, and 45 minutes of computer time on a mainframe computer. The Concordance had to be sent on magnetic tape to be printed on a Monotype typesetter at Oxford University.

The talk will show how some of these problems were overcome. Many of the techniques have been made redundant by modern technology, but lessons can still be learnt.

Previous talks:

Abstract

Over the past 20 years, fanfiction writing has been on the rise. This fan-driven practice presents an ideal case for digital literary studies, as the texts are digitized, widely available, and challenge the status quo of the canon. Many fanfiction scholars have underlined the importance of the participatory aspect in studying the phenomenon. In this presentation, I show how interactions on fanfiction websites can be investigated through metadata-based network analysis. This approach provides fresh insights into textual reception and reader engagement, while offering a more comprehensive perspective on how fanfiction communities interact with texts and reshape them. As a result of this process, various interpretive communities emerge, each with its own dynamic. Some span across multiple fandoms, while others demonstrate different perspectives on a single canon, such as communities in the “Harry Potter” universe where a distinctive cluster focused on Hermione becomes visible.

Abstract

The study of film adaptations of literature has gone through a variety of approaches from the early evaluative reviews of the 1950s through comparative analyses of the 1970s to a more intertextual view of the phenomenon starting with the 1990s. Our research looks both into quantitative and qualitative discussion of film dialogue and its translations and into the part that words play in film portrayals of various historical eras. This is especially important in films that adapt (or translate) literature as much of the viewers’ expectations is based on their perception of the literary original; at the same time, modern perception of the novels’ and films’ historical settings also come into play.

Quantitative approaches allow a whole series of comparisons between the dialogues of novels and their film “translations” (and into translations of that dialogue into other languages), from simple percentages of direct usage of dialogue (and narrative) to stylometric analyses of word frequencies and other linguistic items. But quantitative analysis can also look at visual elements such as character screen time or camera angle; this can then be compared between various adaptations of the same text and between the adaptations and the literary text in search for similarities and differences of perspective.

We illustrate our research with examples from a variety of adaptations of literature, with particular focus on various Pride and Prejudice films (1940, 2005) and TV miniseries (1980, 1995). Based on selected scenes taken from the four productions we show how recycled, reworked and re-vamped fictionalised dialogue interacts with other elements of the film’s structure to create different interpretations of apparently identical literary characters.

Abstract

Why do we often approach cultural data using ideas developed in the 18th and 19th century, before digital computers and big data? Can we think about cultural objects and histories without using categories? What can AI see in cultural artefacts, and what it remains blind to? 
Lev Manovich will discuss what he sees as some of the biggest challenges in looking at culture with computers, and suggest some ways to address those challenges. 

Abstract

Can the two classes "male" and "female" – often understood as a binary either-or distinction – actually be modeled as basic units ("primitives") that can be arranged into complex codes designating all facets of gender in its multiplicity? In this talk, an analogy between the technical binary code and the cultural code of gender is used to test the hypothesis that gender can be seen as a discrete phenomenon constructed through varying combinations of male and female features. Additionally, it is brought into question whether "neutral" should be seen as a third basic unit and whether there might be more “gender primitives”.

The presentation also includes a case study from Computational Literary Studies, in which several corpora consisting of literary texts in the German language are analyzed. In the study, gender roles such as ‘father’, ‘young girl’, or ‘person’ are classified according to basic gender units. By analysis of almost 400 character profiles, typical and atypical gender codes are defined, and a spheric notion of gender is introduced.

Abstraсt 

Does literature progress “one funeral at a time”, as Max Planck famously claimed about science? Is the change mainly driven by the turnover of “generations”, or cohorts? Who contributes more to change in literature and arts – “old masters” or “young geniuses”? And how can we separate the different causes of cultural change?

A trendline spanning a period of time is one of the most common graphs in the computational humanities. Often, such a trendline is explained with a single causal mechanism: a cause C is driving a trait T over a period P. For example, the proportion of negative words (T1) during the 20th century (P1) in literature is increasing due to “negativity bias” (C1). Or, the proportion of abstract words (T2) in the 19th century (P2) is growing due to urbanisation (C2). On the surface, this approach may look sufficient but, under the surface, there are rocks: not only there could be multiple causes, but also different parts of the trendline may be driven by different causes. In computational humanities, there is no effective method for “dissecting the trendline” and uncovering these hidden causal mechanisms.

The scholars of evolution, however, do have such a method: a simple and elegant – and famous – equation that was suggested by the mathematician George R. Price over 50 years ago, known as “the Price equation”. It allowed biologists to uncover the potential driving forces behind evolutionary change. The forces behind literary – and, more broadly, cultural – change are still little known – and much debated. The Price equation can give us the answers.

Stay tuned for upcoming talks and join us for an enriching experience!

Contact the organisers:

Daniil Skorinkin (skorinkinuuni-potsdampde), Digital Humanities Coordinator at the University of Potsdam