A report on the reports of the stanford literary lab

A reason why the digital humanities may find it difficult to change literary history

Datos Bibliográficos

ID4474201
AutoresDaniel Candel, Daniel Candel Bormann (0000-0003-4320-4639, Universidad de Alcalá, autor de correspondencia)
Año2018
Volumen2018
Número224
Páginas111-134
Fecha de publicación2018-09-25
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaSemiotica (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0037-1998 • E-ISSN: 1613-3692
EditorialWalter de Gruyter GmbH (PUBLISHER • DE)
DOI10.1515/sem-2016-0223
OpenAlexW2887174993
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas2
Referencias citadas24

The present article studies eight of the twelve reports of the Stanford Literary Lab (SLL) to understand why the revolutionary practices of the lab, and by extension of the digital humanities, have not yet changed literary history, as the lab itself admits. The article examines the reports with two related cultural-semantic tools, each of which is introduced via the Pixar movieBrave. First, the interpretations of the reports are placed within a basic semantic grid organized into four quadrants by a nature-society axis and a past-present axis, which shows that the interpretations are invariably situated in the present-society quadrant. This analysis, while necessary, merely proves that SLL operates within a certain cultural climate. The real test lies in ascertaining whether this cultural climate affects the interpretation of novel data. To do so, the article looks for the reaction of SLL to novel data in two reports. The reports are shown to domesticate novelty by explaining it through standard alethic/deontic patterns, even though the data are novel precisely because the patterns largely fail to explain them. The article closes by asking whether such patterns limit or enable thinking and what this means for the digital humanities

Art · Digital humanities · Epistemology · Extension (predicate logic) · Humanities · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Literature · Novelty · Situated · Sociology · Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science · Digital Games and Media · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · History · Narrative Theory and Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology