Reading Modernism with Machines

Digital Humanities and Modernist Literature

Shawna Ross, James O'Sullivan, Shawna Ross, James O'Sullivan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781137595683
• eBook ISBN: 9781137595690
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book uses the discipline-specific, computational methods of the digital humanities to explore a constellation of rigorous case studies of modernist literature.

From data mining and visualization to mapping and tool building and beyond, the digital humanities offer new ways for scholars to questions of literature and culture. With the publication of a variety of volumes that define and debate the digital humanities, we now have the opportunity to focus attention on specific periods and movements in literary history. Each of the case studies in this book emphasizes literary interpretation and engages with histories of textuality and new media, rather than dwelling on technical minutiae. Reading Modernism with Machines thereby intervenes critically in ongoing debates within modernist studies, while also exploring exciting new directions for the digital humanities—ultimately reflecting on the conjunctions and disjunctions between the technological cultures of the modernist era and our own digital present. 

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. ModLabs
• 3. Modeling Modernist Dialogism: Close Reading with Big Data
• 4. Mapping Modernism’s Z-axis: A Model for Spatial Analysis in Modernist Studies
• 5. Textbase as Machine: Graphing Feminism and Modernism with OrlandoVision
• 6. Remediation and the Development of Modernist Forms in The Western Home Monthly
• 7. Stylistic Perspective Across Kenneth Fearing’s Poetry: A Statistical Analysis
• 8. In the End Was the Word: A Computational Approach to T. S. Eliot’s Poetic Diction
• 9. A Macro-Etymological Analysis of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• 10. Body Language: Toward an Affective Formalism of Ulysses
• 11. “We Twiddle … and Turn into Machines”: Mina Loy, HTML and the Machining of Information
• 12. CGI Monstrosities: Modernist Surfaces, the Composite and the Making of the Human Form
• Backmatter