Andrew Piper, Enumerations: data and literary study, The University of Chicago Press, 2018

Abstract

Over the past two decades, computational criticism has emerged from the conjunction of literary scholarship and Digital Humanities, consisting in the employment of digital data research tools (text and data mining, big data, machine learning) as operative instruments of literary interpretation. In adopting practices that develop within empirical fields, computational criticism has often been deemed a form of intellectual colonialism, insofar as its attempt at positivist objectivity seems to contradict the very rationale behind literary practice and its main critical tool, subjective exegesis. Its rise marks the encounter of the two unreconciled (and apparently irreconcilable) epistemic traditions of the humanities and the (conventionally) quantitative disciplines, and has been enveloped in a consistently polemic rhetoric.