Using Digital Humanities Methodologies to Expand a Corpus and Challenge the Canon: Looking for Nineteenth-Century Cross-Dressing Narratives

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaper

Abstract

Digital humanities methods – particularly ones that focus on numerical data – have not traditionally been used in literary studies because of the way quantitative analysis is viewed as being diametrically opposed to the hermeneutic methods typically associated with English literature. This presentation challenges this presumption and uses nineteenth-century cross-dressing narratives as a lens to demonstrate how useful digital humanities methods are in both finding and analysing literature. Motivated by a review of existing scholarship which concludes that a new - but equally narrow - literary canon has emerged, the aim of this paper is to challenge the canon by exploring new mechanisms for finding primary source material. Using the expanded corpus of cross-dressing narratives, I will illustrate how quantitative analysis can be used to reveal insights that would not be possible through traditional methods alone.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2024
EventTeesside University's 2023/4 English and Creative Writing Research Seminar Series -
Duration: 2 Oct 20231 Jun 2024

Seminar

SeminarTeesside University's 2023/4 English and Creative Writing Research Seminar Series
Period2/10/231/06/24

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