Franco Moretti

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“I Totally Understand Why A 20-Year Old Would Choose To Do Astrophysics Rather Than Literature”

March 8, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Faulting literature for not being astrophysics is like disparaging Louis Armstrong for not being a great hockey player. It’s really missing the point.

The humanities do what they do, and science does what it does. They’re both valid and useful. It’s not that the Digital Humanities has nothing to teach, but trying to understand the novel mainly through quantification will yield minimal returns. Literature isn’t a science and the academics who’ve tried to turn it into one have birthed a Frankenstein, but not an interesting one like Frankenstein.

The Stanford scholar Franco Moretti may not care for the DH term (“digital humanities means nothing”) but as much as anyone he’s the face of it. An exchange from Melissa Dinsman’s LARB interview with him:

Question:

People often speak of digital work (and more frequently the digital humanities) as a means of making the humanities relevant for the 21st-century university. Do you think this statement is a fair assessment of digital work and its purpose? Do you think it is fair to the humanities to say that DH will come in on a white horse and save the humanities from itself?

Franco Moretti:

Neither one. The humanities will need to save themselves, and not only for the crass reason that going to university can cost an insane amount of money, so students choose to go into business, medicine, economics, etc., to remake the money as soon as possible. It’s not just that, although that cannot be simply dismissed. In the 20th century the natural sciences have produced some amazingly stunning and beautiful theories in physics, and genetics, and in biology. The humanities have produced nothing of this sort. Literature, art, in a sense even political history (mostly in a horrendous way), have produced enormously interesting objects, but the study of these objects, that is to say the disciplines of the humanities — the study of literature, the study of history — have lagged behind. The humanities have lagged behind in conceptual imagination and in boldness. I totally understand why a 20-year old would choose to do astrophysics rather than literature. It’s so much more interesting in many ways, just for the pleasure of the intelligence. That is what the humanities have to work on.•

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“This New Approach To Literature Depends On Computers To Crunch ‘Big Data'”

June 14, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m sure that feeding books into computers instead of reading them can tell us something about literature–and ourselves–but there are limits to quantitative methods when it comes to poetry. The opening of “Big Data Meets the Bard,” an article about “distant reading” by John Sunyer in the Financial Times:

“Here’s some advice for bibliophiles with teetering piles of books and not enough hours in the day: don’t read them. Instead, feed the books into a computer program and make graphs, maps and charts: it is the best way to get to grips with the vastness of literature. That, at least, is the recommendation of Franco Moretti, a 63-year-old professor of English at Stanford University and unofficial leader of a band of academics bringing a science-fiction thrill to the science of fiction.

For centuries, the basic task of literary scholarship has been close reading of texts. But for digitally savvy academics such as Moretti, literary study doesn’t always require scholars actually to read books. This new approach to literature depends on computers to crunch ‘big data,’ or stores of massive amounts of information, to produce new insights.

Who, for example, would have guessed that, according to a 2011 Harvard study of four per cent (that is, five million) of all the books printed in English, less than half the number of words used are included in dictionaries, the rest being ‘lexical dark matter’? Or that, as a recent study using the same database carried out by the universities of Bristol, Sheffield and Durham reveals, ‘American English has become decidedly more ‘emotional’ than British English in the last half-century’?

Not everyone is convinced by this approach.”

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