Imaging Literature

10Nov08

Moretti’s book is an interesting read.  Not because it offers some cool ways to visualize and learn, but because it is so far from that way I learn and understand that I had to work a little harder to try to connect with it.  Applying a quantitative approach to literature is an interestng and yet somewhat surprising approach.

The quantitative approach to literature can take several different forms - from copmutational styilistics to thematic databases, book history and more. (4)

His approach to book history seems to be a different element from a study of literature.It seems to me a more opportunity for analytical approach to study book history. That is to say the study of the history of the book is different, in my eyes, than literary studies.  Then, what exactly are we to understand from Moretti’s book? Is it merely a tool by which we can try to visual or learning through mapping, and graphs? How can analytical analysis help better understand literature? I’m not entirely sold this idea simply because what we are ignoring is the how the beauty of language  of literature creates the literary experience. Reading this book reminded me of 9th grade English and sentence diagramming.  You lose something powerful that exists in the language when you create data sets of information out of these books.  Is there a sense that from a quantitative analysis you can find the art  within the literature as it is intended?  I think Tracy has a good point here in her blog post about Google.  I do not think we can find the artistry in literature by doing an analytical breakdown.  Perahps I’m misunderstanding what Moretti is really talking about or perhaps my response is too strong a knee jerk reaction.

And from my reaction that really gives Moretti’s models not an ounce of support to Burke’s response. His article does a great job of slapping me back to reality, as it were.  He allows for there to be a sense of finding that which could be useful in Moretti’s work.  Burke asks us to look at the modeling that Moretti has done and find the usefulness of this work- and he rightly points out that there could be uses for this work- as he shows through the Sherlock Holmes example.  One thing that struck me with Burke’s piece was that he points out that the weaknesses in Moretti is being able to accurately quantify the numbers and data that you are able to find.  His example of the “quantifying publication” of newspapers is especially telling. What Burke does gives me an opportunity to give Moretti another look. I like that.

I read Prof. Cohens’ article with great interest as it seems to have answered one of the larger questions of my own project. After poking around  on the syllabus finder, I am convinced that my project would have to go through a similar process.  If I were builidng my search tool I would follow the example that Dr. Cohen puts forth – only I’d be searching for older maps not syllabi.  I would want to have my map search tool that searches by “…stitching together and processing digital collections using server-to-server communications and programming algorithms.” I’m excited to think that I could possibly see how the search tools could be crated using this template.

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