Where does literature play into our modern world? Well, we have Kindles and iPads and the Internet and a thousand other ways to never own a book. According to a recent article in the New York Times, entitled “Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers“, technology now has another application in the literary world.
Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, two historians of science at George Mason University, have begun a project which aims to chart how frequently certain words — such as “God,” “love,” “work,” “science” and “industrial” — appear in British book titles from the French Revolution in 1789 to the beginning of World War I in 1914.
They hope to use these findings “to test some of the most deeply entrenched beliefs about the Victorians, like their faith in progress and science”.
However, there are also those who are very much opposed to and fearful of this area of research. They question whether such an analysis will reduce literature and history to a series of numbers and key words.
I believe that this area of research is a truly innovative one, and while I am excited about its potential, I am also fearful. Research will certainly be much easier, and I am sure many interesting connections may be unearthed between pieces of text. However, I hope that such collection of data will not discourage people from reading texts for the sake of texts. I, for one, am an avid reader and I would hate to imagine a world where literature holds lesser significance.
This is an interesting example of the curious intersection of the latest technology and the enormous canon of existing literature. I wonder what the actual value is of merely counting the instances of a particular word. It might be like counting the C major chords in every Bach chorale (or every piece of Chopin’s). You can get an accurate count, but the meaning of the count is far from obvious. We are at the very beginning of an era where we have technological tools, but no clear purpose for them. It will be interesting to see what falls out of this line of inquiry. I guess I am still a dinosaur in that I think the most effective “tool” for analysis of ANY kind (musical, cultural, literary) is a well trained and disciplined human brain. Interesting post.