How can computers supplement close reading in the humanities? In this presentation I will use Shakespeare as an example of ways that quantitative and qualitative methods ultimately inform each other. I will begin with the benefits of quantitative methods for asking broad questions, narrowing back down into close reading, and present ways corpus tools can help us move between distance and close reading.
Heather Froehlich (@heatherfro) is a PhD student at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, UK), where she studies representations of gender in the Early Modern London plays as part of the Mellon-Funded Visualizing English Print 1470-1800 project between Strathclyde, UW-Madison and the Folger Shakespeare Library. You can read more about this research at Wine Dark Sea. Her PhD is about the creation and implementation of a text analysis tool called Genderscope, which applies a universal metric of gendered terms to a given corpus. It is based around the framework of a rhetorical analysis software developed at Carnegie Mellon University by David Kaufer and Suguru Ishizaki called Docuscope.
Event Details
Monday, January 13, 2014
Hagstrum Room, University Hall 201, 5:15 PM
For more information, contact Andrew Keener.
Recommended Readings
- McEnery & Hardie, Corpus Linguistics: Method, Theory, Practice (2011, chapter 1)
- Mark Davies, “The Corpus of Historical American English, Google Books, and our new Google Books interface”