Nov 04 2012

Global Literary Networks

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A Project Funded by the University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society and Cornell University’s Grants Program for Digital Collections in Arts and Sciences

Global Literary Networks explores quantitative approaches to the sociology of literary and cultural production. It is a project with a long historical arc which we, as literary scholars, approach with a healthy dose of skepticism. But in the past few years, social network analysis and corresponding visualization tools have opened up many new possibilities for how we approach literary history, particularly questions about influence and affiliation.

 

Graphs of the linkages between authors, texts, publications and similar data have proved useful not only for computational analysis of large-scale social data, but also for interactive and exploratory interfaces that lead to a more productive dialogue with the literary archive. We apply these techniques to modern poetry, particularly as it flourished in the “little magazines” of the pre-war period, to see what they can tell us about patterns of artistic affiliation and collaboration in specific national contexts (United States, Japan, China), but also in the transnational and comparative contexts within which this production was embedded.

 

Project Team:

Hoyt Long, East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago

Richard Jean So, English, University of Chicago

Tom McEnaney, Comparative Literature, Cornell University

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