How Computational Analysis Is Teaching Us to Read in New Ways
It won’t replace traditional literary studies, but it can still yield great insights
By Dan Sinykin
I earned a PhD in literature the traditional way, reading a lot and reading carefully. By the end, though, I began to wonder at the provenance of the books I studied. What led them to me? What forces guided me to read one book and not another? Hoping to find out, I followed the money. In 1960, basically every U.S. publisher was independent, not owned by a greater entity. By 2000, 80 percent of trade books were published by six global conglomerates. What had that shift done to literature?
Making sense of a problem at that scale was beyond the scope of my training. It would require tracing trends and patterns across thousands of books, a feat beyond the capacities of a single human mind. To do it, I turned to computation and the burgeoning field of cultural analytics. As I learned these new methods, I came to realize how little we know about books and reading.
Computation is already making available a vast terrain of new knowledge about literature. With its help, scholars are asking questions about how the book you’re reading now ended up in your hands, and why it reads like it does. What are the forces…
