The Hip Hop Word Count, as detailed in this week's New Yorker, offers a great encapsulation of the basic ways in which algorithmic methods have and will become central to the study of language and literature. This database of rap and hip-hop lyrics, the brainchild of artist and academic Tahir Hemphill, compiles thousands of songs to allow for tracking, analysis, and comparison. Hemphill shows how, for example, the...
As a TA for NYU's British Literature II survey this semester, I've been encouraging students to consider printing history and the material qualities of texts in order to understand the complex literary and social satire we're encountering. Over and over again—in works from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress to Swift's Tale of a Tub, Addison and Steele's Spectator, and Henry Fielding's Tom Jones—we're finding that eighteenth-century authors spend inordinate amounts of time discussing...