Canon/Archive: Studies in Quantitative Formalism - Softcover

Franco Moretti; Mark Algee-Hewitt; Sarah Allison; Marissa Gemma; Ryan Heuser; Matthew Jockers; Holst Katsma; Long Le-Khac; Dominique Pestre; Erik Steiner; Amir Tevel; Hannah Walser; Michael Witmore; Irena Yamboliev

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0997031875 ISBN 13: 9780997031874

Publisher: n+1 Foundation, 2017

Synopsis

For the past seven years, the Stanford Literary Lab, founded by Franco Moretti and Matthew Jockers, has been a leading site of literary scholarship aided by computers and algorithmic methods. This landmark volume gathers the collective research of the group and its most remarkable experiments. From seemingly ineffable matters such as the loudness of thousands of novels, the geographic distribution of emotions, the nature of a sentence and a paragraph, and the evolution of bureaucratic doublespeak, descriptions emerge. The Stanford Literary Lab lets the computers provide new insights for questions from the deep tradition of two centuries of literary inquiry. Rather than, like the rest of us, letting the computers lead.

The results are adventurous, witty, challenging, profound. The old questions can finally get new answers as the prelude to new big questions. Canon/Archive is the fulfillment and further development of distant reading, adding a rare, full-length monument to the piecemeal progress of the digital humanities. No student, teacher, or inquisitive reader of literature will want to be without this book just as no one interested in the new data-attentive methods in history, criticism, and the social sciences can afford to evade its summons.

About this title

Review:

Franco Moretti's work has helped to make computational criticism, and the digital humanities more generally, into a real intellectual movement . . . securing a permanent seat at the table for a new critical paradigm something that happens only rarely. --Joshua Rothman,New Yorker

The Literary Lab tackles literary problems by scientific means: hypothesis-testing, computational modeling, quantitative analysis. . . . For the Literary Lab, [evidence] suggests that there are formal aspects of literature that people, unaided, cannot detect. --Kathryn Schulz, New York Times Book Review

The experience of reading Moretti is never less than exhilarating. No one conveys better the sheer fun of literary research, or invests the discipline with such an air of discovery and possibility. --James English, Los Angeles Review of Books

About this edition

• Publisher: n+1 Foundation
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0997031875
• ISBN 13: 9780997031874
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336
• Editor: Franco Moretti