Form and computation

A Case Study

Anupam Basu

pp. 111-128

in: David Currell, Islam Issa (eds), Digital Milton, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

The Early English Books Online-Text Creation Partnership makes a vast corpus of early modern literature available for computational processing, while raising new theoretical and practical challenges. Although computational approaches to this corpus have usually treated it as a strictly linguistic resource or "bag of words," this chapter considers how to utilize the information available in the markup of the documents' non-linguistic features. Can encoded information about the format of early modern texts give critics purchase on generic form? In order to investigate this question—using texts by Milton and Middleton as examples—Basu constructs an algorithmic engine that associates early modern texts on the basis of format markup alone.