'Reading by Numbers: Recalibrating the Literary Field' is the first book to use digital humanities strategies to integrate the scope and methods of book and publishing history with issues and debates in literary studies. By mining, visualising and modelling data from 'AustLit' - an online bibliography of Australian literature that leads the world in its comprehensiveness and scope - this study revises established conceptions of Australian literary history, presenting new ways of writing about literature and publishing and a new direction for digital humanities research. The case studies in this book offer insight into a wide range of features of the literary field, including trends and cycles in the gender of novelists, the formation of fictional genres and literary canons, and the relationship of Australian literature to other national literatures.

An exploration of the critical potential of digital humanities and quantitative methods to produce new knowledge about literary and cultural history.

About the Author

Katherine Bode is Head of the Digital Humanities Hub at the Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

Reviews

'It is not often - or often enough - that one is confronted by a work that has the power to transform a field of study, but this is precisely what Katherine Bode has achieved in her new history of the Australian novel. "Reading by Numbers" is as exciting as it is unsettling and it offers a major intervention in Australian literary history, not least in its power to challenge both sedimented accounts of that history and the methods used to the produce them.' - Maryanne Dever, 'Australian Literary Studies'

Book Information
ISBN 9781783083084
Author Katherine Bode
Format Paperback
Page Count 256
Imprint Anthem Press
Publisher Anthem Press