Date: Tuesday, November 26, 2013
Time: 18:30-22:30
Location: Lab111 (Arie Biemondstraat 111, Amsterdam)
Tickets: 15 euros (three course dinner, excluding drinks).

Abstract

For most literary scholars, computers and literature do not fit together very well yet. Searching databases or the internet is okay, perhaps even reading an e-book, but analyzing literary texts using special software is considered to be a token of arrogance or plain stupidity. Still, the possibilities are endless: we can find out who is the most probable author of an anonymous text, we can compare styles of authors, we can deduce the genre or the time of writing of a text. We can even find out whether the author was male or female. It is difficult to convince literary scholars to try and learn to apply some of the new tools, but at the moment, things are slowly changing. More and more scholars are interested in new kinds of analyses and in smart tools. Why did this take so long? And how will literary studies change? In my talk, I will describe how I ended up in what I call “Computational literary studies”. I will pay special attention to the currently running project The Riddle of Literay Quality. The aim of this project is to computationally analyze novels to find out which features in the texts possibly contribute to them being valued as good or bad, very literary or not very literary by their readers. This quest for quality has led to varying reactions in the field of scholarly research and beyond.

Speaker Bio

Karina van Dalen-Oskam is research leader of the department of Textual Scholarship & Literary Studies at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands and professor of Computational Literary Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the analysis of literary style making use of digital corpora and computational methods.

More on Karina van Dalen-Oskam.

Sponsor

Poster

Click on poster for printeable version (designed by Coline Pannier).