What is qh?

“Quantitative Humanities” is a set of scholarly disciplines which can be characterized by the following keywords:

• Experimentation: probing literary and visual texts with digital tools and statistical methods
• Text-centrism: considering literary artifacts as more than mere anecdotes reflecting extra-textual forces and ideologies
• Quantification: reinterpreting narrative phenomena as vectors, frequencies, distances, and networks
• Big Data & Small Data: reading large corpora, single novels, and tiny paragraphs
• Multidisciplinarity: combining natural language processing with cognitive neuroscience and traditional humanistic methodologies: close reading, genealogy, structuralism, aesthetic theory, etc.
• Limits of computation: identifying what stories can tell us about the world and ourselves that matrix multiplications cannot