Notice new location! 1584-124

Distant Reading - the use of computational methods to study patterns of language and form in large corpora of cultural texts - represents one major strain in the recent "Digital Humanities" turn in literary and historical studies. The method is still quite nascent with limited achievements thus far, but one major lacunae is an attention to race and racial difference. The challenges are obvious: historically, the use of quantitative methods to study race and racial identity have all too often been implicated in process of racial stratification and inequality.

In this talk I will attempt to do the following: (1) register and extend recent critiques of race and computation through both qualitative and quantitative analysis; (2) use such critiques to transform existing methods in artificial intelligence/pattern recognition to create a critical form of distant reading that does not simply reify identity and racial difference; and (3) use such a new method to develop a case study focused on the post-war US novel and racial discourse, asserting the outlines of a new history of race and the novel.