This semester I encountered an interesting scenario in an undergraduate student essay. The student had counted the number of occurrences of a couple of words in a poem and concluded that, because the counts for word 1 and for word 2 were close, two concepts the words expressed were thematically related in the poem.

What the student got wrong:

• The student failed to get the counts right because she did a simple word search that did not account for morphological/spelling variants (this was a Middle English text) or close synonyms.
• Assuming that two concepts are related thematically because the words that express them occur in near equal numbers in a text is a logical fallacy.

What the student got right:

• The student tried to apply a quantitative method to understand the text in a new way.

Of course, there is nothing specifically “DH” about what the student did, other than using a browser’s search function. Before the days when this was possible, the technique would have been called “philology”, and that too is a good thing.  Regardless of whether or not the student’s inspiration was facilitated by the availability of a digital tool, I was really delighted to see a student using a methodology which is very unfamiliar to most literature students these days—even in a very limited way.… Read more…

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I’m a little under the weather, so this post might not be as coherent as I’d like, but I want to get it up before I get overwhelmed by the what is likely to be a very busy few days.

Over the weekend, I decided that an interesting exercise for my students reading the Alliterative Morte Arthure would be to have them compare two very different approaches to the poem, Kateryna Alexandra Rudnytzky’s article on Arthur’s battle with the giant of Mont Saint Michel, and Patricia DeMarco’s “An Arthur for the Ricardian Age”. The one examines the poem in terms of the transformation of its source material and connections with literary analogues; the other focuses on the poem’s engagement with military history. Both approaches add depth to our understanding of the text and its place in the medieval literary and cultural world, yet they are based on exactly the sorts of observations that students cannot make because they have not had the opportunity to read widely. Students are forced to read a few texts, those for which there is time during a single semester, in a virtual vacuum. Naturally, that’s why we have professors–to assign secondary literature and to draw students’ attention to this type of knowledge in class.… Read more…

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