Enumerations: Data and Literary Study

258 Pages·2018·3.183 MB·English

by  Andrew Piper

Enumerations

Enumerations
Data and Literary Study
Andrew PiPer
The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2018 by The University of Chicago.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced
in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in
the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more
information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 East 60th Street,
Chicago, IL 60637.
Published 2018
Printed in the United States of America
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ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 56861- 4 (cloth)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 56875- 1 (paper)
ISBN- 13: 978- 0- 226- 56889- 8 (e- book)
DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226568898.001.0001
The University of Chicago Press gratefully acknowledges the
generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
of Canada toward the publication of this book.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Piper, Andrew, 1973– author.
Title: Enumerations : data and literary study / Andrew Piper.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018003977 | ISBN 9780226568614 (cloth : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9780226568751 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226568898 (e-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Criticism—Statistical methods. | Criticism—Data processing. |
Digital humanities.
Classification: LCC PN98.E4 P56 2018 | DDC 801/.95—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003977
♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48– 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
to my parents

Contents
Preface ix
Introduction (Reading’s Refrain) 1
1 Punctuation (Opposition) 22
2 Plot (Lack) 42
3 Topoi (Dispersion) 66
4 Fictionality (Sense) 94
5 Characterization (Constraint) 118
6 Corpus (Vulnerability) 147
Conclusion (Implications) 178
Acknowledgments 187
Appendix A 191
Appendix B 199
Data Sets 203
Notes 205
Index 241

Preface
This book is part of a longer exploration of the relationship
between technology and reading, one that has occupied
me for most of my career. In Dreaming in Books, I studied
how romantic literature made sense of the bibliographic re-
organizations that were sweeping across Europe and North
America at the turn of the nineteenth century. Romanti-
cism was, in this reading, a movement deeply invested in
understanding material and technological changes that
we are in many ways still grappling with. Book Was There
sought to understand the recent technological upheavals
around books by paying attention to more embodied di-
mensions of reading. Whether it is the touch or sight of
the page or the places and practices of note- taking, game-
playing, sharing, storing, or consuming books, I wanted to
show how these experiences differ profoundly between print
and digital media. Finally, Interacting with Print turned to
the ways historical actors engaged with their reading mate-
rial to produce new kinds of social communities, new mod-
els of creativity, and new structures of knowledge. Written
with twenty- two coauthors, Interacting with Print put theory
into practice in an elaborate process of scholarly interactiv-
ity of its own.
This then is the intellectual background to the book you
are reading. Enumerations is about how computation par-
ticipates in the construction of meaning when we read. It
argues that data and computation unquestionably have a
role to play in understanding literature, but that the way
we have so far approached this problem rests on a num-
ber of flawed premises. The notions of distance, bigness, or
ix