Franco Moretti

We know that the era of "big data" has already fomented great change in book publishing. But it's also making waves in book scholarship. Academics are exploring new and fascinating ways of analyzing literature not as specific works but as corpora: huge bodies of works spanning decades and even centuries.

In his new book, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods & Literary History (University of Illinois Press), Matthew L. Jockers, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln Assistant Professor of English, takes readers into what he modestly calls "this thing I'm doing." "To call it a field is perhaps premature," he says.

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