Moby Dick

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.

Fast Company has an article and video today on Polish art student Waldek Węgrzyn's ebook/pbook hybrid, an El Lissitzky-inspired project for his masters degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. Węgrzyn's project, a more or less hardwired physical book that interacts with a digital interface as it's read, is beyond mesmerizing. Plus, we give high marks to any and all El Lissitzky references. —Brian Howard

From the article: "The concept is as obvious as it is radical: instead of making readers choose between physical and digital, why not give them the best of both?"

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