Literary historians generally explain change by narrating it. Narrative history excels at identifying individual events, authors, and works that exemplify transformations of literary culture. On the other hand, narrative often struggles to represent continuous trends. Since numbers are designed to describe differences of magnitude, quantitative methods can trace a curve and give a more nuanced picture of gradual change. As quantitative methods have become more common in literary studies, it has become clear that many important aspects of literary history are in fact gradual processes extending over relatively long timelines. But there have also, certainly, been moments of rapid change – in some cases initiated by a single book or author. More crucially, readers seem to want the kind of meaning produced by narration. Thus, quantitative methods are never likely to entirely replace a periodized narrative; they merely provide an alternative mode of description.

This chapter surveys the theory and practice of “distant reading,” the computational textual analysis of large corpora of digitized texts. Exploring descriptive, generative, and predictive modeling, Houston argues that these techniques, by “changing the scale at which texts are analyzed,” serve to “transform the object of study and thereby the kinds of questions that can be explored” in literary studies.

This chapter considers the shift towards artisan production in comic books, a process that has led to the elevation of its creators to the status of auteurs. While acknowledging the continued relevance of the term graphic novel, Section 2.1 argues for the adoption of graphic narrative as a scholarly designation. This section also introduces a representative corpus of graphic narratives and reflects on sampling and digitization processes. The author shows how existing scholarship focuses on a remarkably small percentage of an increasingly diverse field, preferring titles created by single authors, published originally in book form, and within the subgenre of the graphic memoir. Section 2.2 argues that the growth of this publishing category has been driven by a complex pattern of appropriation, differentiation, and the reinvention of popular form. Demonstrating how formal features interact with the demands of the literary marketplace, the author traces the evolution of brightness and color – features that have rarely been the focus of sustained consideration.

Based on a distant reading of key periodicals, this chapter investigates the music and musicians that received the most contemporary attention – and how recognition developed – throughout the era. It demonstrates in the first instance that the Reich had its own practical repertoire that transcended any one area, national tradition, or group of composers. Contemporaries often referenced musical titles without identifying a composer despite the fact that works could circulate in multiple versions by a single musician, in various settings by different composers, and as adapted texts by dramatists and musicians. But evidence suggests that the years around 1785 marked a moment of increasing normalization during which topics already set to music would be generally avoided and pieces circulating in multiple settings were increasingly linked to the work of just one composer. Establishing which music and musicians received the most attention, their relative importance to one another, and how associations between them altered in time, this chapter demonstrates that the Reich cultivated a shared repertoire that was formed and informed by networks of information and communication.

Even as she engaged with contemporary innovations in science and technology, Margaret Cavendish cultivated a cautious approach toward both artificial tools and quantitative methods. In that sense, she anticipated the “productive unease” of modern digital humanities scholars, who derive principles of a critical praxis from the tension between traditional humanistic research and computational techniques. This chapter examines the intersection between Cavendish studies and the digital turn in order to demonstrate the impact of digitally aided methods on interdisciplinary inquiries into Cavendish’s life and works and also to consider the influence that Cavendish’s own philosophy can have on digital humanities practices. It examines the contributions of the community associated with the Digital Cavendish (digitalcavendish.org) collaborative, and then addresses the larger question of how Cavendish’s awareness of the social dimensions of knowledge production and her pragmatic concerns about the limits of artifice might generate insights into the institutions, forms, and models of digital humanities research.

The emergence of world literary studies and the digital turn in literary studies share a seminal text in Franco Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature.” Since that article was published in 2000, the ongoing digitization of cultural collections and emergence of new computational methods of analysis have only increased the excitement of some, and concern of others, that digital research will become a major, even a dominant, trajectory in world literary studies. But the associated claim – by critics and proponents alike – that digital approaches represent a paradigmatic shift ignores major continuities between digital research and the non-digital scholarship that preceded and continues alongside it, including in world literary studies. Much of the traction that Moretti’s “distant reading” has gained can be ascribed to commonalities in the conceptions of archives, and foregrounding of networks and patterns, in non-digital scholarship. And Moretti’s claim that “distant reading” dismantles traditional, specifically national and canonical, frameworks is not true of most digital literary projects, including the majority of Moretti’s own experiments. Such continuities, and the resulting disjunction between enactments of digital research and the global and democratic rhetoric in which new technologies are often couched, arise from the substantial ways in which pre-digital traditions, ideologies, and infrastructures shape digital resources and methods. Recognizing and interrogating this inheritance, an emerging group of digital projects advance key aims of world literary studies including situating literature “within a vast transnational library,” expanding “the canon of the literary properly to reflect global diversity,” and offering new conceptual frameworks that “adjust our reading of the novel to world scale” (Smith 92).

This chapter examines Whitman’s correspondence from a big data perspective, mapping out networks that formed around the poet’s outreach and self-promotion efforts in order to demonstrate how these are echoed in his literary output. Following the poet from the Civil War through Reconstruction to literary fame in old age, “Reading Whitman’s Epistolary Database” sheds new light on key developments in Whitman’s life and writing. Employing a variety of visualization methods and distant reading tools, the authors situate Leaves of Grass within a broader range of writing activity, one in which published poetry and prose are viewed not as separate from epistolary media and communication formats, but intimately tied to them. The chapter aims to be a starting point for a more comprehensive look at Whitman’s textual production, as well as an introduction of this still-underutilized dataset to a wider audience of Whitman scholars and digital humanists.