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Podcast: New Books in Communications
Episode: Michael Gavin, "Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies" (Stanford UP, 2022)
Description: Across the humanities and social sciences, scholars increasingly use quantitative methods to study textual data. Considered together, this research represents an extraordinary event in the long history of textuality. More or less all at once, the corpus has emerged as a major genre of cultural and scientific knowledge. In Literary Mathematics: Quantitative Theory for Textual Studies (Stanford UP, 2022), Michael Gavin grapples with this development, describing how quantitative methods for the study of textual data offer powerful tools for historical inquiry and sometimes unexpected perspectives on theoretical issues of concern to literary studies.Student-friendly and accessible, the book adva...