Time: 5:30pmVenue: ArtsTwo Lecture Theatre, Mile End Campus, E1 4NS
Digital tools allow us to 'read' vastly more text than any human could manage in a lifetime. They also allow us to make comparisons between texts, genres, and periods based on projections of those books into multi-dimensional spaces. Some have hailed the advent of 'culturomics' - but what kind of 'reading' is this, and how can we 'read' spaces which are beyond the imaginative capacity of human minds? I'll consider the promise, and the opportunities, of digital methods applied to large collections of texts - and I'll also consider how these tools and methods might change the nature of our object of study. Most of my examples will be drawn from Shakespeare and the Early Modern period.