Computational Literary Studies UK - CLSUK

This project will establish a community of researchers working at the forefront of Computational Literary Studies (CLS), placing the UK at the heart of an expanding discipline and ensuring the next generation of scholars and students are equipped to take advantage of emerging technologies.
CLS uses innovative computational methods to examine statistical patterns of language. Novel approaches can compare hundreds of documents simultaneously or identify trends in a text of many tens of thousands of words. New techniques can highlight the linguistic habits of individual writers, enable authorship attribution, plot language changes in genres and uncover patterns that reveal much about the cognitive processes and social norms of authors which are hard to detect by human readers.
While such tools offer huge potential, they also present challenges. New research paradigms are needed to combine computational techniques with traditional stylistic analysis and/or archival research, combining ‘close’ and ‘distant’ reading. Furthermore, while CLS is distinct from Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI is raising profound questions about authorship, copyright, bias and the nature of scholarship. As technology transforms the research landscape, there is an urgent need for new ethical, legal and methodological frameworks that this project aims to establish.
Our project will ensure UK researchers are at the forefront of the CLS revolution. The European Horizon funded CLS INFRA project (2022-25) established a continent-wide network but did not involve the UK. European CLS scholars have offered transformative insights into literature, for example by revealing that Italian writer ‘Elena Ferrante’ is not a person but a virtual figurehead behind which hides a highly successful international author whose name is kept hidden by ‘her’ publishers. Dutch Professor van Dalen-Oskam has led a pioneering study showing how gender biases shape our perception of literary quality. In the UK, individual...