Corpus Linguistics for the Humanist: Notes of an Old Hand on Encountering New Tech

Abstract

Corpus linguistics offers literary scholars a way of investigating large bodies of texts, but these tools require new modes of thinking. Literary scholars will have to recover a kind of interest in linguistics that was lost when the discipline abandoned philology. Scholars will need to think statistically and will have to start thinking about cultural evolution in all but Darwinian terms. This working paper develops these ideas in the context of a topic analysis of PMLA undertaken by Ted Underwood and Andrew Goldstone.

Keywords: corpus linguistics, topic analysis, digital humanities, PMLA, philology, description, computing, theory, literary theory, digital humanities