Motivated by Gregory Crane's question, "What do we do with a million books?", this tutorial is designed to raise questions from the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences that have emerged in an era of a rapid increase in digital resources for the study of literature and, more broadly, culture.
The tutorial begins with the concepts of close and distant reading, and the tension between traditional research questions and methodologies, and the emerging methodologies rooted in computational approaches, including applications from NLP, machine learning, geographic information systems, and network analysis. Illustrated by projects from Old Icelandic, folklore, classical Chinese, and 19th century literature, the tutorial aims to illustrate how Humanities scholars think about culture(s), how research questions are generated, and opportunities where novel computational approaches can potentially dramatically impact research in these disciplines.