In its early days, the methods and theories of the digital humanities promised to reform our understanding of the canon, or, given a comprehensive archive of literature and the tools for analyzing all of it, even abolish it all together. Although these earlier utopian hopes for digital archives and computational text analysis have proven to be ill founded, the points of contact between the canon and the digital humanities have had a profound effect on both. From studies that test the formal properties of canonical literature to those that seek to explore the depths of newly available archives, the canon has remained an object of significant interest for scholars working in these burgeoning fields. This chapter explores the fraught relationship between the canon and computational analysis, arguing that, in the hands of cultural analytics, the canon has transformed from a prescriptive to a descriptive technology of literary study.

Do short stories cohere into a genre, different from other prose fiction, merely by virtue of their length, or, as some critics have argued, are there narrative and thematic differences that go beyond the question of how long they are? In this chapter, we turn to Digital Humanities methods to explore these questions in a corpus of around 10,000 short stories published in twentieth-century women’s magazines. As we analyze the deployment of characters, the narrative patterns, and the linguistic variety of the short stories in our corpus, we reveal the ways that these popular short stories trace a new history of short story writing. The constraints of “mere” length, our analysis shows, allow short fiction to develop a new kind of narrative, one different from that of the novel. Rather than simply a side-effect of the genre, the shortness of the short story is fundamental to understanding its narrative possibilities.

Feminist literary retrieval projects in Ireland quickly embraced the bibliographical and hypertextual possibilities offered in the early 2000s by the then burgeoning field of digital humanities. This essay examines the printed prehistory of projects such as the Women in Modern Irish Culture Database and the Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (volumes IV and V), demonstrating how this genealogy has shaped the nature and impact of the online archive. The chapter argue that the continuing absence from university syllabi, and publishers’ lists, of many of the Irish women ‘discovered’ by digital research projects, indicates that presence is only the first step in securing real engagement with the literary archive of women’s writings. Looking to the future of the feminist digital, and the potential offered by big data, this chapter explores how long-standing digital questions of access, interoperability, and sustainability continue to influence the parameters of the field.