Lost Worlds and Found Words: A Prehistory of the Digital Humanities

FALL 2015 RESEARCH INCUBATION AWARDEES 

Maurice Lee (English)

This project used the digital humanities tool Voyant to track keyword frequencies across a corpus of American and British adventure novels from 1800-1920. The goal was to determine how the spread of quantitative methods influenced the use of numerical terminology and calculative concepts in novelistic traditions that, at least superficially, attempt to escape from modernity. This project advanced our understanding of the relationship between science and literature in the nineteenth century (an era that witnessed crucial divisions between both domains). It also told a deep history of the digital humanities by recovering the nineteenth-century relationship between numbers and literature. This project was completed fall of 2014.