Digital textanalysis.

Understanding the literary preferences of the past, and explaining historical shifts therein, is one of the core tasks of cultural studies and a prerequisite for producing valid literary histories. This activity is moreover closely related to the formation of canons (i.e. the "hitlist" of the most influential literary works in a given culture). This project is concerned with the medieval period (ca. 600-1450), in which the hand-copied codex was the primary vehicle of texts. In this project I will draw methodological inspiration from the emerging paradigm of cultural evolution, where agent-based models are developed that allow us to study the processes of selection that drive cultural change (such as canon formation). Additionally, the persistence of cultural information over long stretches of time is a key research topic of this project. In a new framework that we call Cultural Ecology, we import empirical methods from ecology and biostatistics to provide innovative quantitative models of cultural change and survival, in particular in the domain of literature.

Keywords:DIGITAL HUMANITIES

Disciplines:Modelling and simulation, Medieval literature