Some literary scholars have claimed that predictive models can measure the strength of the boundaries that separate different cultural categories—genres, for instance, or market segments. But interpreting textual models as evidence about the strength of a cultural distinction has seemed a questionable move to many readers. We use book reviews to t…[Read more]

In August of 2014 a disgruntled ex-boyfriend of a female game designer posted a vicious diatribe on the net accusing her and the gaming media of corruption. (Quinn 2017) This launched a culture war in the gaming community that played out on Twitter and elsewhere under the rubric #Gamergate. In October, realizing how significant this controversy…[Read more]

The term ‘distant reading’ resonates across DH: It is played on in book titles (Distant Horizons, Underwood 2019) and adapted to new fields (‘Distant Viewing’, Arnold and Tilton 2019). It spurs alternative formulations (‘Scalable Reading’, Mueller 2012) and is present in mainstream media (“What is Distant Reading?”, Schulz 2011). It is a popular…[Read more]

We present results of a project examining the application of text visualization in the context of religious studies and sociology. Our goal is to analyze and compare the online communication of various religious directions. For this contribution we focus on the visualization of collocations for specific religious and spiritual key concepts. As a…[Read more]

Memes are a popular part of today’s online culture reflecting current developments in pop-culture, politics or sports and are created and shared in large scale on a daily basis. We present first results of an ongoing project about the study of online-memes via computational Distant Reading methods. We focus on the meme type of image macros. I…[Read more]

Oupoco (L’ouvroir de poésie combinatoire) is a project taking inspiration from Raymond Queneau’s book “Cent mille mille milliards de poèmes”, published in 1961. Queneau’s book is a collection of ten sonnets which verses can be freely recombined to form new poems. It would be tempting to develop a computer-based version of Queneau’s work, but Que…[Read more]

Art market studies have long relied on econometrics to explain the prices of works through a series of variables, such as the dimensions of the work, its medium, its date, whether or not its creator is alive, etc. However, this quantitative analysis fails to measure the qualitative opinion on the work, that can be found in exhibition or auction…[Read more]