南京大学人文社会科学高级研究院

学术前沿系列讲座  第222期


演讲人：加拿大阿尔伯塔大学哲学与数字人文教授、
            阿尔伯塔大学Kule高等研究院院长

            Geoffrey Rockwell

演讲题目： How Can We Read Thousands Books ?

主持人： 从 丛 教授

时间：2014年6月4日（周三）下午16:00—17:30
地点：仙林校区国际学院C308高研院报告厅
备注：英语演讲

提要：

In a well known article Greg Crane of the Perseus project asked "What Do You Do with a Million Books?” We now have big humanities data including millions
of digitized books which is why it is useful to ask how this treasure can be used in literary, historical and philosophical studies. One thing you can do
is to use computers for text analysis of large collections. In my talk I am going to look at how we can use big data techniques to do what Franco Moretti
calls “distant reading.” Specifically I will:

- Give a brief history of how we have used tools to help reading literature over the centuries starting with the concordance
- Demonstrate Voyant Tools (http://voyant-tools.org) - a computer-assisted text analysis  environment
- Talk about the implications of big data to the humanities and how it could change how we make arguments
- Conclude with some of the limitations of using computers