This essay calls for a conceptual reorientation of how quantitative methods in literary studies are currently framed, arguing for an expansion from a linear model bounded by the endpoints of distant and close to a space defined by multiple dimensions of scale. I explore the axis bounded by visible and invisible as an example of one of the additional dimensions that might constitute this expanded conceptual frame. In demonstrating its potential for producing new knowledge, I examine the editorial work of two women abolitionists, Mary Ann Shadd (1823–93) and Lydia Maria Child (1802–80). I show how topic modeling and statistical analysis can help identify and describe their invisible editorial labor. I thus provide an additional layer of evidence in support of the argument that positions women, and black women in particular, at abolition's vanguard. I also show how both women employed editing as a method of community formation and world building. I conclude by extending the example of editorial work to the labor required to perform quantitative work today, underscoring the importance of expanding the frame in which quantitative methods in literary study are conceptualized and deployed. (LFK)

Literary histories of the twentieth century often emphasize how rapid technological innovation spurred writers to reimagine the novel's form and central concerns. This essay investigates that claim, comparing the presence of various information technologies in American fiction with their nonfictional presence in American households. What this comparison reveals is a pronounced lag: a gap in time between when a new technology becomes ubiquitous in the home and when it becomes ubiquitous in the novel. Moreover, the shape of this lag is consistent across multiple technologies, tracing a normative trajectory of fictional representation over time. Whereas more popular and more prestigious novels travel in tandem for much of the twentieth century with respect to their inclusion of technology, the two subfields diverge substantially at the close of the century, as conceptions of literary prestige become increasingly defined by an opposition to technologies of the present. (AM)

This essay brings together two methods of cultural‐literary analysis that have yet to be fully integrated: distant reading and the critique of race and racial difference. It constructs a reflexive and critical version of distant reading—one attuned to the arguments and methods of critical race studies—while still providing data‐driven insights useful to the writing of literary history and criticism, especially to the history and criticism of postwar African American fiction, in particular James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. Because race is socially constructed, it poses unique challenges for a computational analysis of race and writing. Any version of distant reading that addresses race will require a dialectical approach. (RJS and ER)

The digital humanities is today overwhelmingly visual. Even as DH has increased access to the humanities at an astonishing rate, it has also inadvertently narrowed our sensory access to information. It is time to add new dimensions to a field structured predominately by the flat screen. Emphasizing touch, we call for a textured digital that challenges the logic governing many notions of access—that is, the unproblematic translatability of information between the senses. As an epistemological intervention, texturing DH promises new ways to approach sensorial history and to engage diverse sensory abilities and experiences—past, present, and future. As an ethical intervention, it emphasizes our responsibility to evaluate carefully the structures of digital accessibility and to increase access for all. (SA and DW)

Numbers appear to have limited value for literary study, since our discipline is usually more concerned with exploring differences of interpretation than with describing the objective features of literary works. But it may be time to reexamine the assumption that numbers are useful only for objective description. Machine learning algorithms are actually bad at being objective and rather good at absorbing human perspectives implicit in the evidence used to train them. To dramatize perspectival uses of machine learning, I train models of genre on groups of books categorized by historical actors who range from Edwardian advertisers to contemporary librarians. Comparing the perspectives implicit in their choices casts new light on received histories of genre. Scientific romance and science fiction—whose shifting names have often suggested a fractured history—turn out to be more stable across two centuries than the genre we call fantasy. (TU)

Scientists have recently proposed 1610 as a candidate for the first year of the new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. They pinpoint the rise of European colonialism and the global movement of life among ecosystems it precipitated as the triggers for measurable changes in the earth system. We used digital humanities methods to mine historical archives to evaluate the relations among colonialism, early modern globalism, and the origins of the Anthropocene. We suggest that the Anthropocene was initiated by a premodern earth system that defined life across the globe in spatial terms, furthering the goals of empire—a regime of biopower that has not been adequately acknowledged in debates on the Anthropocene. We propose that the idea of empire, rather than Enlightenment narratives of progress and scientific modernity, must be considered in our definition of the Anthropocene. (JJL and JB)

How can the digital humanities help support humanities scholarship on diversity both ideologically and technically? This essay abandons the diversity paradigm prevalent in DH—the “big tent”—for a more technically functional one: the “stack.” It proposes that DH can create a “diversity stack” (conceptually like the “Internet protocol stack”) that combines technical and theoretical strategies for advancing scholarship on diversity. From low to high, crucial levels in such a stacked approach include technical methods for dealing with multilingualism, multimedia, unrepresentative corpora, geopolitical and temporal organizations of identity, and the theory of identity. (AL)