[Edit June 8, 2015: This blog post has been rewritten and updated. See Seven Ways Humanists are Using Computers to Understand Text.]

This post is an outline of discussion topics I’m proposing for a workshop at NASSR2012 (a conference of Romanticists). I’m putting it on the blog since some of the links might be useful for a broader audience.

In the morning I’ll give a few examples of concrete literary results produced by text mining. I’ll start the afternoon workshop by opening two questions for discussion: first, what are the obstacles confronting a literary scholar who might want to experiment with quantitative methods? Second, how do those methods actually work, and what are their limits?

I’ll also invite participants to play around with a collection of 818 works between 1780 and 1859, using an R program I’ve provided for the occasion. Links for these materials are at the end…