The Digital Humanities face the problem of multiple hypothesis testing: Evermore hypotheses are tested until a desired pattern has been found. This practice is prone to mistaking random patterns for real ones. Instead, we should reduce the number of hypothesis tests to only test meaningful ones. We address this problem by using theory to generate hypotheses for statistical models. We illustrate our approach with the example of the European Reformation, where we test a theory on the role of opinion leaders for the adoption of Protestantism with a logistic regression model. Given our specific setting, including choice of data and operationalisation of variables, we do not find enough evidence to claim that opinion leaders contributed via personal visits and letters to the adoption of Protestantism. To falsify or to support a theory, it has to be tested in different settings. Our presented approach helps the Digital Humanities bridge the gap between the qualitative and quantitative camp, advance understanding of structures resulting from human activity, and increase scientific credibility.
{"title":"Theory-Driven Statistics for the Digital Humanities: Presenting Pitfalls and a Practical Guide by the Example of the Reformation","authors":"Ramona Roller","doi":"10.22148/001c.57764","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.57764","url":null,"abstract":"The Digital Humanities face the problem of multiple hypothesis testing: Evermore hypotheses are tested until a desired pattern has been found. This practice is prone to mistaking random patterns for real ones. Instead, we should reduce the number of hypothesis tests to only test meaningful ones. We address this problem by using theory to generate hypotheses for statistical models. We illustrate our approach with the example of the European Reformation, where we test a theory on the role of opinion leaders for the adoption of Protestantism with a logistic regression model. Given our specific setting, including choice of data and operationalisation of variables, we do not find enough evidence to claim that opinion leaders contributed via personal visits and letters to the adoption of Protestantism. To falsify or to support a theory, it has to be tested in different settings. Our presented approach helps the Digital Humanities bridge the gap between the qualitative and quantitative camp, advance understanding of structures resulting from human activity, and increase scientific credibility.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42057354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The status of theory in the Digital Humanities (DH) has been the subject of much debate. As a result, we find different theory narratives competing and entangled with each other. If at all, these narratives can only be grasped and examined from a somewhat detached perspective. Here, we attempt to investigate these elusive narratives by means of a conceptual history approach. In doing so, we define different theory dimensions, ranging from specific cultural and literary theory frameworks to more generic uses of the concept of theory. We examine the use and semantic changes of these theory notions in a large corpus of DH journals. Using a mixture of heuristic methods and approaches from the field of distributional semantics, we aim to create tellable conceptual stories of DH theory.
{"title":"Conceptual Forays: A Corpus-based Study of “Theory” in Digital Humanities Journals","authors":"Rabea Kleymann, A. Niekler, M. Burghardt","doi":"10.22148/001c.55507","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.55507","url":null,"abstract":"The status of theory in the Digital Humanities (DH) has been the subject of much debate. As a result, we find different theory narratives competing and entangled with each other. If at all, these narratives can only be grasped and examined from a somewhat detached perspective. Here, we attempt to investigate these elusive narratives by means of a conceptual history approach. In doing so, we define different theory dimensions, ranging from specific cultural and literary theory frameworks to more generic uses of the concept of theory. We examine the use and semantic changes of these theory notions in a large corpus of DH journals. Using a mixture of heuristic methods and approaches from the field of distributional semantics, we aim to create tellable conceptual stories of DH theory.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":"226 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41266401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article puts operationalization as a research practice and its theoretical consequences into focus. As all sciences as well as humanities areas use concepts to describe their realm of investigation, digital humanities projects are usually faced with the challenge of ‘bridging the gap’ from theoretical concepts (whose meaning(s) depend on a certain theory and which are used to describe expectations, hypothesis and results) to results derived from data. The process of developing methods to bridge this gap is called ‘operationalization’, and it is a common task for any kind of quantitative, formal, or digital analysis. Furthermore, operationalization choices have long-lasting consequences, as they (obviously) influence the results that can be achieved, and, in turn, the possibilities to interpret these results in terms of the original research question. However, even though this process is so important and so common, its theoretical consequences are rarely reflected. Because the concepts that are operationalized cannot be operationalized in isolation, operationalizing is not only an engineering or implementation challenge, but touches on the theoretical core of the research questions we work on, and the fields we work in. In this article, we first clarify the need to operationalize on selected, representative examples, situate the process within typical DH workflows, and highlight the consequences that operationalization decisions have. We will then argue that operationalization plays such a crucial role for the digital humanities that any kind of theory needs to take off from operationalization practices. Based on these assumptions, we will develop a first scheme of the constraints and necessities of such a theory and reflect their epistemic consequences.
{"title":"From Concepts to Texts and Back: Operationalization as a Core Activity of Digital Humanities","authors":"Axel Pichler, Nils Reiter","doi":"10.22148/001c.57195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.57195","url":null,"abstract":"This article puts operationalization as a research practice and its theoretical consequences into focus. As all sciences as well as humanities areas use concepts to describe their realm of investigation, digital humanities projects are usually faced with the challenge of ‘bridging the gap’ from theoretical concepts (whose meaning(s) depend on a certain theory and which are used to describe expectations, hypothesis and results) to results derived from data. The process of developing methods to bridge this gap is called ‘operationalization’, and it is a common task for any kind of quantitative, formal, or digital analysis. Furthermore, operationalization choices have long-lasting consequences, as they (obviously) influence the results that can be achieved, and, in turn, the possibilities to interpret these results in terms of the original research question. However, even though this process is so important and so common, its theoretical consequences are rarely reflected. Because the concepts that are operationalized cannot be operationalized in isolation, operationalizing is not only an engineering or implementation challenge, but touches on the theoretical core of the research questions we work on, and the fields we work in. In this article, we first clarify the need to operationalize on selected, representative examples, situate the process within typical DH workflows, and highlight the consequences that operationalization decisions have. We will then argue that operationalization plays such a crucial role for the digital humanities that any kind of theory needs to take off from operationalization practices. Based on these assumptions, we will develop a first scheme of the constraints and necessities of such a theory and reflect their epistemic consequences.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43376490","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Instead of looking for new paradigms for Digital Humanities (DH), we present Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) as a methodological approach to frame digital research practices more reflectively. By turning to the epistemological and practical implications of digital tools like Topic Modeling and digital data sources like YouTube comments, we highlight the theoretical assumptions that are already in the game—and call for more explicitness and methodical monitoring. To explain the procedures of GTM and the proposed worth for DH, we present an example of a qualitative research project using machine learning techniques to narrow down a large scale of data to human interpretable resample. The methodically monitored resampling process provided valuable means to validly minimize the amount of data without losing a qualitative trajectory of the process itself. Defining and tracing relevant content in our original data set enabled us to find related comments and textual conversations to be analyzed further. We discuss the example iteration in two ways: Our prototype and procedure show on the one hand, how qualitative research and computational methods can be better intertwined without compromising their epistemological foundations. On the other hand, we argue for an understanding of DH as research practice, that should follow an abductive research agenda in order to ground its theories in data.
{"title":"Grounding Theory in Digital Data: A Methodological Approach for a Reflective Procedural Framework","authors":"A. Bischof, Konstantin Freybe","doi":"10.22148/001c.57197","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.57197","url":null,"abstract":"Instead of looking for new paradigms for Digital Humanities (DH), we present Grounded Theory Methodology (GTM) as a methodological approach to frame digital research practices more reflectively. By turning to the epistemological and practical implications of digital tools like Topic Modeling and digital data sources like YouTube comments, we highlight the theoretical assumptions that are already in the game—and call for more explicitness and methodical monitoring. To explain the procedures of GTM and the proposed worth for DH, we present an example of a qualitative research project using machine learning techniques to narrow down a large scale of data to human interpretable resample. The methodically monitored resampling process provided valuable means to validly minimize the amount of data without losing a qualitative trajectory of the process itself. Defining and tracing relevant content in our original data set enabled us to find related comments and textual conversations to be analyzed further. We discuss the example iteration in two ways: Our prototype and procedure show on the one hand, how qualitative research and computational methods can be better intertwined without compromising their epistemological foundations. On the other hand, we argue for an understanding of DH as research practice, that should follow an abductive research agenda in order to ground its theories in data.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49579988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this contribution we discuss what we call the “digital humanities-as-structuralism” narrative for the case of computational literary studies. To better understand the entailed criticism, we start with some background for the non-computational aspects in this narrative. First, we single out major criticisms against structuralism. We then introduce a general and theory-independent model of literary text analysis and discuss hypothesis development and justification in literary studies. This builds the ground for our analysis of structuralism criticisms in computational literary studies. In our discussion of the “digital humanities-as-structuralism” narrative, we examine the use of computational methods for the exploration and confirmation of interpretation hypotheses and its potential relation to structuralist issues. We argue that the “digital humanities-as-structuralism” narrative may be productive where it cautions against reductionist approaches, but it is not appropriate for describing exploratory or partial approaches and the presentation of their findings. There, the computational approaches should rather be seen as enabling connectivity and fostering the joint endeavor of understanding.
{"title":"Are Computational Literary Studies Structuralist?","authors":"Evelyn Gius, Janina Jacke","doi":"10.22148/001c.46662","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.46662","url":null,"abstract":"In this contribution we discuss what we call the “digital humanities-as-structuralism” narrative for the case of computational literary studies. To better understand the entailed criticism, we start with some background for the non-computational aspects in this narrative. First, we single out major criticisms against structuralism. We then introduce a general and theory-independent model of literary text analysis and discuss hypothesis development and justification in literary studies. This builds the ground for our analysis of structuralism criticisms in computational literary studies. In our discussion of the “digital humanities-as-structuralism” narrative, we examine the use of computational methods for the exploration and confirmation of interpretation hypotheses and its potential relation to structuralist issues. We argue that the “digital humanities-as-structuralism” narrative may be productive where it cautions against reductionist approaches, but it is not appropriate for describing exploratory or partial approaches and the presentation of their findings. There, the computational approaches should rather be seen as enabling connectivity and fostering the joint endeavor of understanding.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49227660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Digitization has commonly been marketed as a predictive technology that can enable humanity to intercede into the future. This faith in digital media’s prophetic powers, however, obfuscates the fact that digitization is unavoidably stuck in the past. In effect, digitization transforms the past into highly mutable and volatile data sets that are persistently rewritten by computer’s memory refresh circuits. While some lament this temporal incongruity as problematic to the archival process, African and diasporic futurist artists are utilizing digital distortion as an opportunity to emplace the archival process within the sea and reimagine the archive as an impermanent, transitory, and fluid practice that has the capacity to usher in a more culturally and scientifically nuanced understanding of memory. This article explores the capacity of the sea to reorientate digital humanities scholarship around the cyclical interplay between machinic, environmental, and human social systems and craft historiographical methods around envisioning a viable future for humanity.
{"title":"Sailing on Encrypted Seas: The Archive and Digital Memory in African and Diasporic Futurism","authors":"Amanda Furiasse","doi":"10.22148/001c.55508","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.55508","url":null,"abstract":"Digitization has commonly been marketed as a predictive technology that can enable humanity to intercede into the future. This faith in digital media’s prophetic powers, however, obfuscates the fact that digitization is unavoidably stuck in the past. In effect, digitization transforms the past into highly mutable and volatile data sets that are persistently rewritten by computer’s memory refresh circuits. While some lament this temporal incongruity as problematic to the archival process, African and diasporic futurist artists are utilizing digital distortion as an opportunity to emplace the archival process within the sea and reimagine the archive as an impermanent, transitory, and fluid practice that has the capacity to usher in a more culturally and scientifically nuanced understanding of memory. This article explores the capacity of the sea to reorientate digital humanities scholarship around the cyclical interplay between machinic, environmental, and human social systems and craft historiographical methods around envisioning a viable future for humanity.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47950608","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rabea Kleymann, M. Burghardt, Jonathan D. Geiger, Mareike Schumacher
This special issue deals with existing theory narratives and conceptions in DH scholarship. Introducing the neologism “theorytellings”, this special issue invites DH scholars to narrate and discuss their own theoretical contributions to the field.
{"title":"Foreword to the Special Issue “Theorytellings: Epistemic Narratives in the Digital Humanities”","authors":"Rabea Kleymann, M. Burghardt, Jonathan D. Geiger, Mareike Schumacher","doi":"10.22148/001c.55593","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.55593","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue deals with existing theory narratives and conceptions in DH scholarship. Introducing the neologism “theorytellings”, this special issue invites DH scholars to narrate and discuss their own theoretical contributions to the field.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46902299","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper attempts to replicate the findings of the recent work, “The rise and fall of biodiversity in literature,” by Langer et al. (2021). Using a large corpus from Project Gutenberg (N = ~15,000) and a dictionary-matching method of over 240K biological taxa, Langer et al. find that the frequency and diversity of biological taxa have been declining steadily since the first half of the nineteenth century, echoing prior work in cultural analytics. This paper applies the original paper’s three primary measures to two additional data sets along with the original dataset and compares their dictionary-based method with an alternative supervised machine learning method. I find that the trajectory of biological tokens in fiction in the new data sets is directionally opposite to that shown by Langer et al. independent of the methods used (i.e. taxa rise rather than fall since the first half of the nineteenth century) but that their breakpoint estimation appears largely robust within +/- 15 years. Based on this analysis, I suggest that the discrepancy between our results is due to corpus construction rather than choice of method. I find that only conditioning on fiction in the original dataset generates results more similar to the two alternative datasets used here. In addition to emphasizing the importance of corpus construction for cultural analytics, these findings also raise larger questions about the difficulties of interpreting lexical items as indeces of social attitudes, pointing to a need for future work.
{"title":"Biodiversity is not declining in fiction","authors":"Andrew Piper","doi":"10.22148/001c.38739","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.38739","url":null,"abstract":"This paper attempts to replicate the findings of the recent work, “The rise and fall of biodiversity in literature,” by Langer et al. (2021). Using a large corpus from Project Gutenberg (N = ~15,000) and a dictionary-matching method of over 240K biological taxa, Langer et al. find that the frequency and diversity of biological taxa have been declining steadily since the first half of the nineteenth century, echoing prior work in cultural analytics. This paper applies the original paper’s three primary measures to two additional data sets along with the original dataset and compares their dictionary-based method with an alternative supervised machine learning method. I find that the trajectory of biological tokens in fiction in the new data sets is directionally opposite to that shown by Langer et al. independent of the methods used (i.e. taxa rise rather than fall since the first half of the nineteenth century) but that their breakpoint estimation appears largely robust within +/- 15 years. Based on this analysis, I suggest that the discrepancy between our results is due to corpus construction rather than choice of method. I find that only conditioning on fiction in the original dataset generates results more similar to the two alternative datasets used here. In addition to emphasizing the importance of corpus construction for cultural analytics, these findings also raise larger questions about the difficulties of interpreting lexical items as indeces of social attitudes, pointing to a need for future work.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-10-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42834109","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Olga Seminck, P. Gambette, Dominique Legallois, T. Poibeau
The way in which authors express themselves is unique but changes over their lifetime. However, quantitative studies of this idiolectal evolution are rare. Using the Corpus for Idiolectal Research (CIDRE) that contains the dated works of 11 prolific 19th century French fiction writers, we propose new methods to identify, quantify and describe the grammatical-stylistic changes that take place using lexico-morphosyntactic patterns, also called motifs. To examine the strength of the chronological signal of change, we developed a method to calculate if a distance matrix of literary works contains a stronger chronological signal than expected by chance. Ten out of 11 corpora showed a higher than chance chronological signal, leading us to conclude that the evolution of the idiolect is in a mathematical sense monotonic, supporting the rectilinearity hypothesis previously put forward in the stylometric literature. The rectilinear property of the evolution of the idiolect found for most authors in CIDRE subsequently enabled us to propose a machine learning task: predicting the year in which a work was written. For the majority of the authors in our corpus, the accuracy and the amount of variance that is explained by the model were high and we discuss why the technique might fail for others. After applying a feature selection algorithm, we examined the most important features, i.e. the motifs that have the greatest influence on idiolectal evolution. We find that some of those features are stylistic and have been previously identified in qualitative literature studies. We report some remarkable stylistic constructions revealed by our algorithm to illustrate which kind of stylistic patterns can be extracted using our method.
{"title":"The Evolution of the Idiolect over the Lifetime: A Quantitative and Qualitative Study of French 19th Century Literature","authors":"Olga Seminck, P. Gambette, Dominique Legallois, T. Poibeau","doi":"10.22148/001c.37588","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.37588","url":null,"abstract":"The way in which authors express themselves is unique but changes over their lifetime. However, quantitative studies of this idiolectal evolution are rare. Using the Corpus for Idiolectal Research (CIDRE) that contains the dated works of 11 prolific 19th century French fiction writers, we propose new methods to identify, quantify and describe the grammatical-stylistic changes that take place using lexico-morphosyntactic patterns, also called motifs. To examine the strength of the chronological signal of change, we developed a method to calculate if a distance matrix of literary works contains a stronger chronological signal than expected by chance. Ten out of 11 corpora showed a higher than chance chronological signal, leading us to conclude that the evolution of the idiolect is in a mathematical sense monotonic, supporting the rectilinearity hypothesis previously put forward in the stylometric literature. The rectilinear property of the evolution of the idiolect found for most authors in CIDRE subsequently enabled us to propose a machine learning task: predicting the year in which a work was written. For the majority of the authors in our corpus, the accuracy and the amount of variance that is explained by the model were high and we discuss why the technique might fail for others. After applying a feature selection algorithm, we examined the most important features, i.e. the motifs that have the greatest influence on idiolectal evolution. We find that some of those features are stylistic and have been previously identified in qualitative literature studies. We report some remarkable stylistic constructions revealed by our algorithm to illustrate which kind of stylistic patterns can be extracted using our method.","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41815815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
New phenomena such as digital social reading, instapoets, and the “rating culture” expressed in online reviews challenge traditional literary criticism in newspapers and journals. Millions of reviews on platforms such as Amazon or Goodreads are part of this culture of participation and a counterweight to professional criticism. At the same time, successful instapoets such as Rupi Kaur reject the expertise of the gatekeepers of “prestigious literary circles” and try to establish a direct connection with readers. The aim of this paper is to build the proper methodological framework to capture these changes in the current literary system. To do this, the phenomenon of online reviewing has to be contextualized within the history and the praxis of assigning literary value to literary texts, the so-called canonization. In addition, literary theory needs to be able to analyze quantitative data and to integrate numbers into its models (engaging in a procedure that is called operationalization).
{"title":"Literary value in the era of big data. Operationalizing critical distance in professional and non-professional reviews","authors":"M. Salgaro","doi":"10.22148/001c.36446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.22148/001c.36446","url":null,"abstract":"New phenomena such as digital social reading, instapoets, and the “rating culture” expressed in online reviews challenge traditional literary criticism in newspapers and journals. Millions of reviews on platforms such as Amazon or Goodreads are part of this culture of participation and a counterweight to professional criticism. At the same time, successful instapoets such as Rupi Kaur reject the expertise of the gatekeepers of “prestigious literary circles” and try to establish a direct connection with readers. The aim of this paper is to build the proper methodological framework to capture these changes in the current literary system. To do this, the phenomenon of online reviewing has to be contextualized within the history and the praxis of assigning literary value to literary texts, the so-called canonization. In addition, literary theory needs to be able to analyze quantitative data and to integrate numbers into its models (engaging in a procedure that is called operationalization).","PeriodicalId":33005,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Cultural Analytics","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2022-06-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45947401","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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