Christopher Ohge, Lecturer, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, London, UK
Strand Campus, Bush House South East Wing, Room 1.01, 25 April 2019, 1-2pm
Computation and Digital Text Analysis of Melville’s Reading
Melville’s marked and annotated page of Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Courtesy Melville’s Marginalia Online.
How can computational techniques reveal literary influence? Once detected, what kinds of analysis are required to establish why an author was influenced by other writers? Focusing on existing corpora of Herman Melville’s reading and writing, editors at Melville’s Marginalia Online are using computational approaches to analyse literary influence from reading evidence with XML technologies and the R programming language. Enhanced analytical capability and visualisation tools reveal linguistic analyses of Melville’s reading. The approaches demonstrated in this seminar indicate that an author’s record of marginalia and lifetime of reading constitute a valuable data set in its own right, demonstrating new means for assessing his influences, source use, and conceptual development.
Registration is free but please register here.
Biography
Christopher Ohge is Lecturer in Digital Approaches to Literature at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. His focus is on literary appreciation, and on deploying the tools of a scholarly editor to guide more people to that appreciation. He engages with digital methods to facilitate a better knowledge of cultural heritage. For more details, see his CV.