Proposal – Atilio Barreda II

Proposal:

In light of Nan Z. Da’s “The Computational Case against Computational Literary Studies,” which exposes the limitations of traditional computational methods in literary studies, my research project will focus on understanding the humanistic and philosophical concepts embedded in techniques like cosine similarity, Euclidean distance, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). I aim to deconstruct the foundations of these methods and examine the potential for developing text analysis approaches that are sensitive to humanistic and philosophical dimensions.

To achieve this, I will begin by examining the underlying assumptions and principles of these methods, assessing their ability to capture the intricacies of literary works. I will draw on examples from Da’s critique and other instances within computational literary studies to identify common pitfalls and limitations of these techniques.

Next, I will explore interdisciplinary methodologies that can complement and improve upon traditional computational methods. By incorporating insights from fields such as linguistics, philosophy, and literary theory, I hope to begin develop a more robust and nuanced analytical framework.