HOBAR/DH_OU Seminar Series 5

The Riddle of Literary Quality: can we measure literariness?

Speaker: Karina van Dalen-Oskam (Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands)

What is literature, and can we measure it using new methods developed in the Digital Humanities? That is the key question of the project The Riddle of Literary Quality. “The Riddle” is a research project of the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (Amsterdam) in collaboration with the Fryske Akademy (Leeuwarden) and the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (University of Amsterdam). The Riddle combines computational analysis of writing style with the results of a large online survey of readers, completed by almost 14,000 participants. Correlating readers’ opinions and stylometric analyses makes visible which linguistic features play a role, but also which biases are in place. Some authors and some works clearly have more prestige than others. Why? And what does this tell us about contemporary society?