Emory University / ENG 385W-3 / Fall 2025
One of the primary strands of digital humanities scholarship is quantitative literary analysis: the use of quantitative methods to study literary texts. These practices raise many questions: What does large-scale analysis reveal about literature that cannot be discerned by reading alone? What happens when literary texts are converted into numbers, as they must be for any quantitative analysis to take place? What does it mean, both ethically and intellectually, to borrow methods developed in the sciences and/or from industry for literary and cultural studies scholarship? And what of the core concerns of literary and cultural studies? Can ideas about language, metaphor, style, labor, and power, among many others, be quantified, modeled, and/or otherwise explored at scale?
This course will take on these questions in both theory and practice, focusing our inquiry around several core methods of quantitative literary analysis, each paired with a set of literary texts we will employ them on. This first-hand experience will support our semester-long investigation into the uses and limits of quantitative methods for literary analysis.
Participating students should have some familiarity with Python or a willingness to learn.
- Syllabus
- Course Calendar
- Course on Canvas (Emory students only)
- Email to Lauren!