Academia can instigate policy debates. Data collection instruments like the Census are framed in a monolingual mindset that makes it difficult to obtain a full picture of language diversity, while the smart city concept can be applied to language to capture a wider range of data. In using language to determine origin and entitlement to refugee status, we interrogated prevailing concepts and enriched judicial procedures by offering new methods of analysis and interpretation, helping to ensure a more just consideration of claims. The chapter also describes the managerial culture of control over the public narrative around the value of modern languages that aimed essentially at protecting the sector and existing ontologies. The chapter concludes with a consideration of locality studies as a new, alternative framework through which to engage in the study of local languages and forge international connections.

This chapter introduces data-driven research methods for theatre and performance. Drawing on two case studies, the chapter demonstrates how to define and identify data, how to collect and organize it, and how to analyse it through computational methods. Careful attention is paid to the tension between a rigorous data model and the uncertainty and ‘messiness’ present in data’s sources. The conclusion promotes data-driven thinking as a way to expand the context and scope of TaPS analyses and to encourage explicit reflection on the mental categories and models within which we understand performance.

Since Kristeva invented the term in the late 1960s, intertextuality has become a dominant concern in Latin literature, despite the fact that Latinists often use the term in a narrow sense. A brief history of intertextuality enables this chapter to model different understandings of intertextuality across different genres and periods. Consideration begins with a passage of Virgil long recognised as a calque of Homer, and moves to other maximal cases of intertextuality in Plautus and Terence. Awareness of the dynamics and ideological power of intertextuality enables fuller consideration of the metaphors with which such passages as these comment on their situation in wider networks of text. The importance of historical context is discussed through several phenomena prevalent in late antiquity, namely cento poetry, compilation and typological interpretation. Developments across these periods in the technology of text focus attention on the cognitive and material dimensions of memory. The chapter closes by putting intertextual memory in Latin literature into dialogue with emerging methods of reading enabled by digital corpora, search algorithms, hypertext and linked data.

This chapter investigates the affordances of the digital edition (the ability to advance nonsequentially or randomly, the possibility for representing multiple modalities, the incorporation of interaction between networked readers via group comments, etc.) alongside the affordances of the printed book (the possibilities of manual annotation, the ability to display one’s collection on a bookshelf, the archivability of a book versus that of a digital edition, etc.). Often positioned as the dangerous other to the printed book, auguring its obsolescence, Brown argues that digital editions are and will remain in dialogue with printed books. Brown offers a sketch of a future for the digital edition – one of new “conventions and infrastructure to pry editions away from the legacy of print towards the wide range of affordances offered by digital instantiations of texts.” The digital edition of the future, she argues, carries with it the promise of another “sea change.”

This chapter explores the interpretive possibilities raised by computational visualizations of digitized literature and literary data. Taking Franco Moretti’s Maps, Graphs and Trees (2007) as a starting point, it considers what new insights these techniques of visualization, seldom employed in the humanities, can convey. Carter speaks with leading practitioners in the field to unpack the ways in which new techniques in digital data visualization are allowing scholars “to perform conventional work in new ways.” Applying these techniques to literary data for which they are not designed, however, also reveals a productive push and pull: as one of Carter’s interview subjects, Alex Christie, puts is, “We’re reading the literature on the technology, but we’re also seeing where the literature we’re trying to model pushes against the edges of the technical frameworks we have in hand.”

This chapter surveys the theory and practice of “distant reading,” the computational textual analysis of large corpora of digitized texts. Exploring descriptive, generative, and predictive modeling, Houston argues that these techniques, by “changing the scale at which texts are analyzed,” serve to “transform the object of study and thereby the kinds of questions that can be explored” in literary studies.

Media historians speak of three “medium shifts” in the history of literature: from orality to writing, from writing to print, and from print to digital. This chapter investigates the history and the significance of the most recent shift, while questioning the notion of an absolute “rupture” with orality, manuscript, and print, all of which remain vital parts of the global literary ecosystem. Drawing on Benjamin Peters’s tripartite approach to the digital in terms of pointing, counting, and manipulating, Foxman argues that the developments in the digital representation of texts have continued to challenge divisions long held to be immutable – not least, those separating content, author, and reading. As we arrive in the digital present, Foxman argues, we are left questioning all our traditional beliefs about what text is.

This chapter uses digital humanities approaches to discover the computational signature of the idea of government in the British eighteenth century. Data mining techniques are applied to the large dataset Eighteenth Century Collections Online in order to ascertain the precise composition of the idea of government and to track its evolution over the entire century. The connections between government and despotism are explored in the concluding argument.

This chapter uses methods in text mining in order to trace the history of the idea of liberty between 1600 and 1800. It seeks to investigate the standard account of this idea developed most rigorously by Quentin Skinner over many years. Using quantitative methods and the tools created by the Cambridge Concept Lab, it discovers a slightly different history from the standard accounts that complements and augments that history.

This chapter models the idea of economic growth in the period of the Enlightenment in Britain. Using methods developed in the Cambridge Concept Lab, it demonstrates that the ideas of improvement and progress supported the slow evolution of the notion of economic growth as a necessary good. It tracks the thinking of the philosopher and political economist Adam Smith as he formulated his ideas with respect to size and operation of modern capitalist economies.

This chapter outlines a novel method for discerning the structure and history of concepts and their aggregation as ideas. Based on the analysis of co-ocurrence data in large data sets, the method creates a measure of ‘binding’ that allows one to inspect the larger constellations of words and concepts that comprise ideas which can be tracked diachronically. The chapter also describes the method used for ascertaining the ‘binding’ between concepts, and for modelling ‘ideas’. A detailed account of how the ‘shared lexis tool’ was built is also included.

This essay provides an overview of literary scholarship on W.G. Sebald: the developments and trends as well as common themes and approaches. It highlights examples of existing scholarship that introduce Sebald’s life and work, discuss his literary criticism, and approach his works through a comparative lens. Special consideration is given to Sebald’s prose form, in particular the ethical implications of his way to combine fact and fiction. Finally, the essay suggests possibilities for future research that considers the unpublished materials (manuscripts, correspondence, and images) in Sebald’s literary estate, held at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, and that approaches his works via digital tools and methods (e.g., mapping, visualizing, network analysis, distant reading).

In this introduction to Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition: The 1890s, the editors, Dustin Friedman and Kristin Mahoney, situate the contents of the collection in relationship to the larger objectives of the Nineteenth-Century Literature in Transition series, which aims to move beyond existing preconceptions of individual decades within the nineteenth century by producing new characterizations enabled by recent critical methodologies. This volume highlights in particular the role that work attending to the transnational, ecocriticism, digital humanities, and new approaches to gender and sexuality might play in reshaping our understanding of a period often referred to as “the Naughty Nineties.” This work, the editors argue, enhances our understanding of the nineteenth century’s closing years in their full complexity, dynamism, and intellectual ferment and makes a case for the relevance of perspectives from the 1890s regarding issues that still preoccupy us today.

Situating little magazines as media in transition – emerging in the 1890s and continuing to circulate today in both material archives and digital editions – this chapter examines the form within the framework of media history and takes the periodical itself as the object of study. Using an interdisciplinary methodology informed by book history, the digital humanities, and periodical studies, this chapter takes the titles remediated in digital editions on Yellow Nineties 2.0 as its case study. It argues that the little magazine is an arrangement of elements organized, in Caroline Levine’s terms, through the determinants of “whole, rhythm, hierarchy, network.” Understanding the little magazine as a countercultural form requires the analysis of the “whole” of a title’s editorial agenda and mode of production, while paying due attention to the sociopolitical hierarchies expressed in its aesthetic design, the ways in which its serial rhythms position bodies in relation to time, and the complex, ongoing, and changing networks of its transnational makers and readers.