Matthew Jockers presents keynote address at LAS workshop

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Matthew Jockers argues that literary scholars can no longer simply “close read” literature.

The keynote speaker kicking off the Oct. 11 College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ workshop “Exploring Data-Rich Environments” will demonstrate how big data is, he explained, “driving, even forcing, new ways of studying literature at the macro scale.”

Matt Jockers, assistant professor of English, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will demonstrate how big data is driving new ways of studying literature at the Oct. 11 LAS workshop.

Jockers, a researcher in literary text mining and computational text analysis, speaks at 1 p.m. Friday, Oct. 11, to lead off the College of LAS Signature Research Themes workshop at Benton Auditorium in the Scheman Building. His one-hour presentation, titled “Data Driven Criticism: A (Literary) Lab Report,” is free and open to everyone and no registration is required.

Those wanting to participate in the remainder of the workshop, however, need to register by emailing Kristin Doerder (kjandrsn@iastate.edu) by noon on Friday, Oct. 4. A free buffet dinner is provided (see the workshop schedule below).

Jockers, an assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, will discuss the challenges associated with studying a corpus of 3,500 novels using traditional techniques. He said he will explain how he leveraged machine learning and statistics in order to uncover “latent correlations between literary themes, literary representations of place, and the emotions or sentiments most often associated with these places and themes in the literature.”

His talk will conclude with a demonstration of why close reading is impoverished as a means of studying literary history. Jockers will offer a case study related to Jane Austen’s legacy and the more or less forgotten work of Austen’s literary mentor, Maria Edgeworth.

Jockers, also a Faculty Fellow at Nebraska’s Center for Digital Humanities Research, previously was a lecturer and academic technology specialist in the Department of English at Stanford, where he co-founded the Stanford Literary Lab. Jockers is a researcher in literary text mining and computational text analysis. His publications include Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (University of Illinois Press, 2013), and his research has been featured often in the news media, including The New York Times and NBC News.

Matthew Jockers presents keynote address at LAS workshop

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