The English department will be offering ENGL 279: Digital Literary Analysis in Spring 2020. This course fulfills ACE 3 and is a part of both the Digital Humanities and Informatics minors.
English 279 Digital Literary Analysis
Prof. Jonathan Cheng
MWF, 10:30-11:20
BURN 126
What does it mean to turn a collection of books into quantitative data? How can one quantify words in order to analyze stories and how they’re written? How can we use quantitative methods to analyze other forms of writing (ex. fan fiction, ratemyprofessor reviews, tweets)? And how do industries use these methods to recommend what media you consume (ex. Netflix, Spotify, Goodreads, etc.)? In order to explore these questions, this course is organized as both an introduction to the established field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and as a survey of emerging applications in Computational Literary Studies (CLS).
On the one hand, this course does what you would normally expect in an English survey course: It will introduce students to the important readings, terms, and concepts of Computational Literary Studies. Much like a course on a specific literary historical period, or a course on a particular approach to literature (ex. a gender perspective), we will read texts that are important to the conversation and discuss how they affect our understanding of literature. More specifically, students will be introduced to new discoveries that professors have made about literary history using data approaches. In this regard, this course will feel like your traditional English discussion course.
On the other hand, part of this course is also meant to prepare students to navigate the growing role of computers and data science in our daily reading experiences. Whether it’s recommendation systems encouraging you to read particular kinds of content, or using computers to study stylistic patterns, data plays a growing role in understanding the ways we read. As such, this course will introduce the terms and systems they will encounter if they choose a career in literary research or the publishing industry. This means two things for students. One, we will read introductory texts, ranging from the fields of computational linguistics and computer science. Two, we will have hands-on lab experiences so students have an understanding of what these processes look like (at a very elementary level). The emphasis here is on breadth over depth. Because this is an introductory course, there are no hard prerequisites for enrolling. This course is, however, highly recommended for students with interests in the study of literary history or the role of technology in culture.