“Word Count: Literature and Data Analysis, 1875-1965”

FAIN: FT-291405-23

Yohei Igarashi
University of Connecticut (Storrs, CT 06269-9000)

Research and writing leading to a book on the early history of academic literary computing and the role of data in American literary analysis from the late nineteenth-century to the 1960s. 

There is a pervasive assumption that literary study has historically lagged behind other disciplines in thinking in terms of data and data analysis. Yet my book project, “Word Count," draws on archival research to trace how data analysis was integral to the discipline formation of “English” in the later nineteenth century in the United States, and maintained a sidelined yet significant presence in the discipline up through the 1960s. The first history of academic literary computing before electronic computing--and blending disciplinary history with histories of computing and information management--my project argues that literary scholars were thinking about data, and what it means to treat verbal artworks as data, much earlier and more extensively than has ever been recognized. Revealing the roots of the qualitative vs. quantitative tension in literary study can enhance ongoing attempts to understand the place of computation in the humanities today.