Matthew Jockers, http://www.matthewjockers.net/

Around the World in 3,500 Novels

5:30 pm Curtin 118
Supported by a grant from the UWM Digital Future initiative

How do literary expressions and attitudes toward slavery in the nineteenth century change according to fictional setting? Do novels set in Ireland present a perspective towards landlords and tenants that is similar or different from what we find in novels set in America or England? How do the answers to these and similar questions fluctuate over time or according to author gender or author nationality?

For this study, Matthew Jockers uses tools and techniques from text mining, natural language processing, machine learning, and statistics to address questions such as these and to identify and study how specific places, themes, and sentiments find synchronous or asynchronous expression within the nineteenth century literary imagination. Using data mined from a large corpus of ~3500 works of British, Irish, and American fiction, this macroanalysis seeks to expose persistent links between geographic settings, themes and sentiments and to then chart the ways in which places (such as Ireland) are constructed, or ‘invented,’ within the literary imagination of the century.

Digital Future Workshop with Matthew Jockers

Interrogating Big Data
Friday, April 19
Please register via c21@uwm.edu
9:00 am - 4:30 pm (lunch included), Curtin 108

Matthew Jockers’ research and teaching is focused on computational text analysis, specifically an approach he calls “macroanalysis.” He was the co-founder and the co-director of Stanford’s Literary Lab before moving to University of Nebraska’s English department. He is the author of a forthcoming book, "Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History." New York Times and Chronicle of Higher Education has covered his research. In this workshop, Jockers will teach topic modeling using a corpus of texts.

More on Macroanalysis

The workshop is free, but please register by emailing C21@uwm.edu and indicating 1) your departmental affiliation 2) why you are interested in attending the workshop. This information will help Professor Jockers better address the specific needs of the participants.


< Return to Calendar