Cultural accumulation and improvement in online fan fiction

We analyse stories in Harry Potter fan fiction published on Archive of Our Own (AO3), using concepts from cultural evolution. In particular, we focus on cumulative cultural evolution, that is, the idea that cultural systems improve with time, drawing on previous innovations. In this study we examine two features of cumulative culture: accumulation and improvement. First, we show that stories in Harry Potter’s fan fiction accumulate cultural traits—unique tags, in our analysis—through time, both globally and at the level of single stories. Second, more recent stories are also liked more by readers than earlier stories. Our research illustrates the potential of the combination of cultural evolution theory and digital literary studies, and it paves the way for the study of the effects of online digital media on cultural cumulation.

Chinua Achebe’s There was a Country and the digital publics of African literature

A growing body of critical works on the digital expressions of African literature confirms the importance of digital literary studies in Africa. Examples of this growing scholarship include those of Shola Adenekan (2012) and Stephanie Santana (2018). Adenekan’s work focuses on ‘the Internetting of African literature’, while Santana's essay uses digital fiction from South Africa to offer a brilliant treatment of the connections between national spaces and digital networks. Several questions emerge, though, in considering how digital technologies reformulate the form, function, and audience of African literature. How are we, for instance, to understand the role of digital publics? What kind of ideological terrains emerge in online literary representations? What mediations do digital technologies bring to the changing forms and publics of contemporary writing in Africa? How does the ontology of the digital reconfigure the behaviour of the audience in the interpretation of literary meaning and how might previous scholarship such as those of Karin Barber’s on publics and audiences be read in the context of digitality? This article aims to answer these questions by examining some articulations of reader agency to Chinua Achebe’s There was a Country on digital avenues such as Facebook. Aside from an exploration of the intersection of digital culture and African literary forms, I hope to use online responses to Achebe’s memoir to track the trajectories of the new publics of African literature, showing how the ethnopolitics that greeted the publication of Achebe’s wartime narrative explicates the nature of digital publics

The Use of Authorial Corpora Beyond Linguistics

The study concentrates on the issue of quantitative and qualitative methods within the context of literary theory. It intends namely to present the concept of the literary corpus of Czech prose and define main parameters of the corpus. Besides the project of a specialized corpus, primarily intended for the use in the field of literary theory, the study deals with current stochastic and corpus methods applied by foreign scholars in analysis of literary prosaic texts. The study tries to incorporate the original project of Czech prose literary corpus in this contemporary context that represents one form of a recently flourishing discipline called Digital Humanities (Digital Literary Studies).

Tradition

This chapter discusses traditions that inform the book's macroanalytic approach to digital literary studies as well as the strength of macroanalysis as a tool in the study of literature. It begins with an overview of some early concerns and contemporary criticisms regarding literary computing and the digital revolution. It then considers the emergence of the so-called “digital humanities” or humanities computing and shows that its foundation, computational text analysis, has come a long way. It also examines the contributions of computing humanists to humanities scholarship, such as the creation of digital archives, along with a number of useful tools that have been developed by computer scientists working in natural language processing, corpus linguistics, and computational linguistics. Finally, the chapter cites examples of projects working to apply the tools and techniques of text mining and corpus linguistics to literature. It suggests that, despite all of the achievements and the overwhelming sense of enthusiasm and collegiality that permeates the DH community, there is much more work to be done.