Linguistic forms -- Search -- Studies -- "Was it for this?" and the study of influence -- Act as if and useful fictions -- WWJD? and the history of imitatio christi -- Milton's depictives and the history of style -- Conclusions -- Shakespeare's constructicon -- God is dead, long live philology

A groundbreaking study of how abstract linguistic signs circulate in literature, intellectual history, and popular culture. Linguistic forms are essential to meaning: like words, they make a semantic contribution to the things we say. We inherit them from past writers and speakers and fill them with different words to produce novel utterances. They shape us and the ways we interpret the world. Yet prevalent assumptions about language and the constraints of print-finding tools have kept linguistic forms and their histories hidden from view. Drawing on recent work in cognitive and construction grammar along with tools and methods developed by corpus and computational linguists, Daniel Shore’s Cyberformalism represents a new way forward for digital humanities scholars seeking to understand the textual past. Championing a qualitative approach to digital archives, Shore uses the abstract pattern-matching capacities of search engines to explore precisely those combinatory aspects of language—word order, syntax, categorization—discarded by the “bag of words” quantitative methods that are dominant in the digital humanities. While scholars across the humanities have long explored the histories of words and phrases, Shore argues that increasingly sophisticated search tools coupled with growing full-text digital archives make it newly possible to study the histories of linguistic forms. In so doing, Shore challenges a range of received metanarratives and complicates some of the most basic concepts of literary study. Touching on canonical works by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Kant, even as it takes the full diversity of digitized texts as its purview, Cyberformalism asks scholars of literature, history, and culture to revise nothing less than their understanding of the linguistic sign.

Dive into the heart of the metaverse, a reality where physical space is no longer a limitation. This fascinating journey explores how the convergence of virtual and augmented realities is redefining our social, work, and educational interactions. From virtual offices and immersive classrooms to concerts and events that transcend borders, this book offers a window into the future of our digital existence. Its pages unravel the ethical, privacy, and inclusion implications accompanying this new era. Get ready to explore a world where distances fade and experiences intensify, promising a revolution in how we live, work, and connect.

Digital Milton is the first volume to investigate John Milton in terms of our digital present. It explores the digital environments Milton now inhabits as well as the diverse digital methods that inform how we read, teach, edit, and analyze his works. Some chapters use innovative techniques, such as processing metadata from vast archives of early modern prose, coding Milton’s geographical references on maps, and visualizing debt networks from literature and from life. Other chapters discuss the technologies and platforms shaping how literature reaches us today, from audiobooks to eReaders, from the OED Online to Wikipedia, and from Twitter to YouTube. Digital Milton is the first say on a topic that will become ever more important to scholars, students, and teachers of early modern literature in the years to come.

Ideas about how to study and understand cultural history—particularly literature—are rapidly changing as new digital archives and tools for searching them become available. This is not the first information age, however, to challenge ideas about how and why we value literature and the role numbers might play in this process. The Values in Numbers tells the longer history of this evolving global conversation from the perspective of Japan and maps its potential futures for the study of Japanese literature and world literature more broadly. Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application to literature together with critical reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Chapters guide readers through increasingly complex techniques while making novel arguments about topics of fundamental concern, including the role of quantitative thinking in Japanese literary criticism; the canonization of modern literature in print and digital media; the rise of psychological fiction as a genre; the transnational circulation of modernist forms; and discourses of race under empire. Long models how computational methods can be applied outside English-language contexts and to languages written in non-Latin scripts. Drawing from fields as diverse as the history of science, book history, world literature, and critical race theory, this book demonstrates the value of numbers in literary study and the values literary critics can bring to the reading of difference in numbers.

Exploring how DH shapes and is in turn shaped by the classroom How has the field of digital humanities (DH) changed as it has moved from the corners of academic research into the classroom? And how has our DH praxis evolved through interactions with our students? This timely volume explores how DH is taught and what that reveals about the field of DH. While institutions are formally integrating DH into the curriculum and granting degrees, many instructors are still almost as new to DH as their students. As colleagues continue to ask what digital humanities is, we have the opportunity to answer them in terms of how we teach DH. The contributors to What We Teach When We Teach DH represent a wide range of disciplines, including literary and cultural studies, history, art history, philosophy, and library science. Their essays are organized around four critical topics at the heart of DH pedagogy: teachers, students, classrooms, and collaborations. This book highlights how DH can transform learning across a vast array of curricular structures, institutions, and education levels, from high schools and small liberal arts colleges to research-intensive institutions and postgraduate professional development programs. Contributors: Kathi Inman Berens, Portland State U; Jing Chen, Nanjing U; Lauren Coats, Louisiana State U; Scott Cohen, Stonehill College; Laquana Cooke, West Chester U; Rebecca Frost Davis, St. Edward’s U; Catherine DeRose; Quinn Dombrowski, Stanford U; Andrew Famiglietti, West Chester U; Jonathan D. Fitzgerald, Regis College; Emily Gilliland Grover, Notre Dame de Sion High School; Gabriel Hankins, Clemson U; Katherine D. Harris, San José State U; Jacob Heil, Davidson College; Elizabeth Hopwood, Loyola U Chicago; Hannah L. Jacobs, Duke U; Alix Keener, Stanford U; Alison Langmead, U of Pittsburgh; Sheila Liming, Champlain College; Emily McGinn, Princeton U; Nirmala Menon, Indian Institute of Technology; James O’Sullivan, U College Cork; Harvey Quamen, U of Alberta; Lisa Marie Rhody, CUNY Graduate Center; Kyle Roberts, Congregational Library and Archives; W. Russell Robinson, Alabama State U; Chelcie Juliet Rowell, Tufts U; Dibyadyuti Roy, U of Leeds; Asiel Sepúlveda, Simmons U; Andie Silva, York College, CUNY; Victoria Szabo, Duke U; Lik Hang Tsui, City U of Hong Kong; Annette Vee, U of Pittsburgh; Brandon Walsh, U of Virginia; Kalle Westerling, The British Library; Kathryn Wymer, North Carolina Central U; Claudia E. Zapata, UCLA; Benjun Zhu, Peking U. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

The Dangerous Art of Text Mining celebrates the bold new research now possible because of text mining: the art of counting words over time. However, this book also presents a warning: without help from the humanities, data science can distort the past and lead to perilous errors. The book opens with a rogue's gallery of errors, then tours the ground-breaking analyses that have resulted from collaborations between humanists and data scientists. Jo Guldi explores how text mining can give a glimpse of the changing history of the past - for example, how quickly Americans forgot the history of slavery. Textual data can even prove who was responsible in Congress for silencing environmentalism over recent decades. The book ends with an impassioned vision of what text mining in defence of democracy would look like, and why humanists need to be involved.