This is an accepted article with a DOI pre-assigned that is not yet published.This article explores the development and application of a historian’s macroscope, a computational framework that enables multiscalar exploration of medieval Korean biographical records using Neo4j. While digitization has greatly expanded access to historical sources, existing methodologies struggle to integrate large, heterogeneous datasets while maintaining interpretive rigor and contextual specificity. This research demonstrates how a graph database model enhances historical inquiry by enabling the dynamic traversing of patronage and kinship networks. Unlike conventional network visualization tools, which often impose a rigid divide between individual detail and macrostructural patterns, Neo4j facilitates seamless transitions across different levels of analysis. This discussion illustrates how the macroscope helps historians uncover obscured relationships, refine analytical focus, and generate new research questions. More broadly, it highlights the need for methodologies in digital history that move beyond large-scale visualization to critically engage with the complexities of historical sources.

This paper examines the formal and aesthetic patterns of AI-generated poems through a series of computational experiments. Through analyses of rhyme and rhythm, it reveals how large language models (LLMs) exhibit a stubborn, formal stuckness in their outputs. The paper demonstrates that LLMs often ossify poetic forms by producing formally conservative texts that adhere more rigidly to traditional poetic conventions than even the most formally strict periods of literary history. The paper interprets these findings as evidence of a computational logic of idealization that privileges the satisfaction of formal expectation over its artful frustration, regularity over variation, and conformity over contradiction. It proposes “generative formalism” as a critical framework that extends traditional as well as quantitative and formalist methods to understand how generative systems process, flatten, and reify cultural production.

Despite frequently avowed commitments to formalist methodologies, computational literary studies (CLS) has insufficiently accounted for the importance of the formal architectures of the computational models it employs—particularly deep learning neural networks. Arguing against the tendency to treat neural networks with an abstract gloss of their operation or to focus attention on the outputs, this article posits that architecture is not merely a technical detail but a crucial site where meaning is made and historicity registered. By examining the genealogy of neural network architectures—from Frank Rosenblatt’s Perceptron to contemporary transformer-based models—this article demonstrates how these architectures materially shape the capacities, outputs, and interpretive possibilities of machine learning models.

Conceptions of the literature of the Global South, and of India in particular, have been powerfully shaped by the work of a small number of well-known authors writing in English. The possible distortions resulting from this limited canon have garnered significant scholarly attention in the past two decades, which has typically focused on how works produced by these writers are shaped by their own positionality as well as the exigencies of catering to an Anglo-European metropolitan audience. The concern expressed in such reflections often boils down to that of offering incomplete, skewed, or overly accommodationist representations of the cultures and countries being represented. A corollary of this position is that these same metropolitan readers would be confronted with a different, and potentially quite valuable perspective on the countries and cultures for which these authors have been presumed to speak, were they to encounter a broader swath of the writing produced by local authors writing in indigenous languages. This essay attempts to evaluate and concretize this presumption by way of a computationally assisted analysis. We compare a collection of contemporary English-language novels written by authors of South Asian descent with a corpus of contemporary fiction translated from South Asian languages into English. Using a series of quantitative proxies for two qualities seen as typical of English-language originals — literariness and cosmopolitanism — we aim to establish 1) whether and how the works of the authors writing in English can be seen to constitute a distinctive corpus vis-à-vis the translated works and 2) whether and how the former converge with literary fiction translated from two languages considered to possess high literary capital: French and German. By situating the postcolonial bestsellers within this broader context, we intend to provide a starting point from which to understand the differential pressures exerted by the “otherness industry” on literary production, as well as how reader perceptions of South Asia might be different if they were exposed to a broader range of translated texts.

Eclecticism has been among the most central concerns in the sociology of cultural consumption for 30 years, but hardly any research has been done on the eclecticism of readers. We have been using data from Goodreads to address this blind spot. Our research enables us to describe some general patterns of breadth vs narrowness in the reading habits of highly active Goodreads users, which largely resemble the socially hierarchized schema of omnivore vs univore discerned by scholars in other fields of cultural practice. But our analysis also highlights the limitations of our model, and indeed of eclecticism itself, a concept rife with problems that have have often gone unremarked in the sociological literature. These problems involve the relationship of eclecticism to temporality; the slippages between preference (taste) and practice (habit); and the sheer variety of equally legitimate but incommensurate ways to classify works of literature and culture.

The present paper is an attempt at importing network analysis as a method and applying it to a field that has hitherto been examined in different ways: the study of national cinema. The approach was motivated by the perceived conundrum in the existing studies of German cinema that filmhistorical and political history usually do not match. The aim is to open up another perspective on the problem of periodization by looking at the data of film production, more specifically of collaboration. By using a comprehensive data set which is made availavable by the Filmportal, the central internet platform on German film, the approach in this paper is to look at the key creatives involved in the production of a film in the period from 1919 to 1939 and to conceptualize collaboration and connectivity in a (national) film culture through the use of network research methods.

After her retirement as a bookseller, Sylvia Beach continued to promote new books. This article tells the story of one of these books—the last to be recorded on the Shakespeare and Company lending library cards. In 1962, Beach gave a copy of Bryher’s memoir, The Heart to Artemis (1962), to Jean-Dominique Rey, a young French intellectual. The article argues that the gift demonstrates Beach’s efforts to ensure that the accomplishments of her circle of queer women would not be lost to history.

This study investigates the analysis of evaluative linguistic patterns within the context of the German-language Islamophobic online blog PI-News. The corpus consists of texts that refer to the Quran. The innovation of this research lies in two primary dimensions: Firstly, it adopts John Dewey’s pragmatism to establish an explicit valuation theory. Secondly, it extends the boundaries of topic modeling in the digital humanities by integrating van Dijk’s differentiation between aboutness and pragmatic macrostructures of texts. Notably, within these pragmatic macrostructures, the study highlights the practice of quoting Quran suras as a significant linguistic pattern. Together with the analysis of topic distribution and topic pathways in texts, the paper illustrates how evaluative practices reinforce the ideal of an Islam-free Europe.

Claims and evaluations of authenticity are a powerful resource in food discourse: reviewers use evaluations of authenticity to demonstrate their expertise, and restaurants viewed as authentic receive higher star ratings. But the multivalent nature of authenticity presents challenges for researchers. This contribution seeks to understand authenticity by combining computational and corpus driven discourse analysis methods. O’Connor et al. (2017) sought to quantify the impact of authenticity on consumer perception via four theoretical authenticity types (type, craft, moral, and idiosyncratic). This method is tested using a sample of US restaurant reviews and compared to sentiment analysis metrics computed from the same dataset. All types except for moral authenticity showed a positive effect on sentiment. Authenticity in restaurant reviews is further investigated by examining collocates of terms referring to authenticity and compiling keywords of subcorpora created from high and low scoring reviews. Reviewers most often topicalize authenticity in terms of place, taste, and descriptors of ethnicity. These findings illustrate how combining corpus driven discourse analytical and computational methods can illuminate evaluation from multiple perspectives and provide insights which may help to improve computational approaches in the future.

Many of our conventional mapping practices are ill-suited to the complexities and nuances of pre-modern politics, especially in the non-Western world. Choropleth maps suggest that political borders are clear and uniform, but early modern politics was characterized by ill-defined and overlapping political spheres. This study uses interactive maps to explore the case of composite state borders in early modern Japan. Using points, rather than polygons, to represent villages, we reproduce how Tokugawa-era officials understood political space primarily as population nodes, not as clearly defined polygons. In lieu of conventional borders, we calculate Voronoi polygons to show where political authority was spatially fragmented. Using logit analysis we show that increased spatial contiguity allowed lords (daimyo) to establish monopolies and tax their holdings more intensively. Other factors, such as the lord’s rank, figure prominently in the historiography, but can not be substantiated in our analysis.