English Events
[PAST EVENT] How Literary Canons Evolve: A Data-Driven Approach
Access & Features
- Open to the public
This talk will focus on Erik Fredner and J.D. Porter’s creation of a relational database that captures every author and work ever selected for The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Their database reveals in detail the changes in the literary canon over the past half-century of this influential anthology’s ten editions.
Fredner and Porter’s work shows that the common story of improved diversification in the canon of American literature is true—though more so with respect to race than gender. However, the biggest structural change they reveal has been massive growth in the number of anthologized authors. They argue that, while NAAL’s expansionist strategy has produced real gains, it also creates a canon that less effectively manages reader attention, affords women and people of color a less valuable position than many white male authors enjoyed when the canon was smaller, and tacitly accepts the notion that the new additions do not have the literary merit of the original roster, members of which Fredner and Porter argue editors too rarely replace. They support their position by revealing and critiquing the “Norton 103,” the authors who have been selected for every NAAL edition.
Building on the results of this pilot study, this talk will also discuss future directions for this project, including a collaboration with English and Data Science students at William & Mary working alongside Profs. Arthur Knight and Alexander Nwala.
Erik Fredner is Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at the University of Virginia, where he teaches in the College’s new liberal arts curriculum. His work has been published or is forthcoming in PMLA, Nineteenth-Century Literature, The Nathaniel Hawthorne Review, The Cambridge Companion to the Novel, and elsewhere. His first book project is about literature and statistical thinking in nineteenth and twentieth century US literature and culture.
J.D. Porter is a Digital Humanities Specialist in the Price Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. He specializes in text mining, American literature from modernism to today, and literature and philosophy. Places to find his work include Synthese, Cultural Analytics, Episteme, The Atlantic, Ralph Ellison in Context, and (soon) PMLA.
Contact
For more information, please contact Arthur Knight at [[iaknig]]