Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Maurice S. Lee
Victorian Studies, Volume 54, Number 1, Autumn 2011, pp. 87-94 (Article)
Maurice S. Lee
M
y grandfather used to get uncomfortable when the grand-
kids fiddled with his VCR. He used the machine regularly
enough, but it still felt mystical and fragile. I feel a bit like
my grandfather when I see students slinging around their laptops or
using them as food trays in the student union. It’s not that they under-
stand the technology better than I (though many do); it’s more that it
has been so integrated into their lives as to inspire little wonder or fear.
Something similar appears to be happening with literary critics and
databases. The digital humanities for literary scholars was once the
domain of pioneering specialists doing seemingly alien work, and
much research in the field still emphasizes technical questions of
informatics and database construction. The digital humanities may
remain a foreign land represented by a handful of ambassadors, and
yet databases have become so basic to mainstream critical practices
that even non-technical scholars of a certain age can begin to take
them for granted. What follows attempts to reclaim some discomfort
and wonder by asking what is gained and lost by using search engines
to gather evidence, a question that can turn us toward Dickens and
Poe, who both confronted the problem of identifying evidence during
their own information revolution.
Well before the digital humanities 2.0 was offered to the
public, Jerome McGann and Katherine Hayles signaled what in retro-
spect might be called the domestication of the digital humanities,
arguing that the future of the field depended on discipline- and media-
specific interpretation. As predicted, the digital revolution in literary
studies now seems less PC and more Mac, less directed by technical
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NOTES
1. Note that the Google Books data are approximations based not on compre-
hensive index searches but on Google’s algorithmic predictions. The total number of
texts is based on searches for “the.” The expected correlation of “Ahab” and “slavery”
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(253) is not generated by simply multiplying instances of each and dividing by the total
sample number, but rather by applying a more accurate strength of associativity
formula pioneered by Jonathan Lansey and Bruce Bukiet that accounts for the different
sizes of documents. Z-scores are a standard statistical tool for measuring deviations
from a mean. Many thanks to Jonathan Lansey for the statistical expertise he brought
to this essay.
2. See Patten; Irwin; Whalen; Clayton 148–64; McGill 109–37, 141–217.
WORKS CITED