This course will concentrate on one of the first and most developed techniques in the digital humanities – textual analysis – and one of the newest – natural language processing. These two methods are used to study the range of language use, spanning from the literary to the informal. While the computational power of these programs is vast, the codes they use arise from the humanistic inquiries of careful readers, and are used to support critical analysis of texts. In these classes, textual and language analysis moves beyond counting and statistics to teach students to understand linguistics, genre, style, aspect, comparative analyses and literary interpretation in new ways.

Textual and Language Analysis addresses a range of language use, spanning from the literary to the informal. Computational programs allow for humanistic inquiry and support critical analysis of texts. Students in this area learn to understand linguistics, genre, style, comparative analyses and literary interpretation through the digital. Computational literary analysis is the quantitative study of literature using computational tools. This course serves as an introduction, and presumes no background in computer science. We will learn techniques of text analysis such as stylometry, topic modeling, and word embeddings, using the Python programming language. Novels to be read and analyzed include Wilkie Collins's mystery novel The Moonstone, and two short story collections: James Joyce's Dubliners and Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party and Other Stories. More info: github.com/JonathanReeve/course-computational-literary-analysis

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