Entire new worlds of scholarship and research are emerging from a synergy of technology, problem solving, and statistical analysis. Our interdisciplinary group joins researchers in Old English, statistics, and computer science to show by example how the development and application of computational stylistic tools across an entire corpus enables the large scale exploration and discovery of patterns and trends that go undetected by the unassisted eye and brain, yet generate novel sets of hypotheses for subsequent scholarship both digital (through further pattern recognition and analysis) and traditionally humanistic.

From one direction this proposal approaches texts in the same way as genomics (the analysis of DNA texts): we seek information-rich patterns in a long string of letters. From the other direction we come from literary studies, looking for meaning, influence, symbolism, reference, source material, and interpretation. We then meet in the middle, providing a way for literary scholars, computer scientists, and statisticians to work collaboratively to solve complex problems, problems that are so new and so difficult that we really need all the tools we can get. We posit this interdisciplinary tack as a significant contribution to Humanities scholarship: a myriad of new questions can be expected by embracing the tools and techniques that require computational and statistical expertise and linking these approaches with some of the traditional methods of humanistic research. (More)

This work is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities - Digital Humanities Initiative, Grant #HD-50300-08.