Literary Mathematics

"Literary Mathematics is a new kind of book. A project of this scope is guaranteed to be controversial, but everyone interested in literary history will find it worth their time."—Ted Underwood, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

"This book is a timely, well-reasoned, and readable contribution to digital humanities and literary studies. Literary Mathematics will help guide the next generation of researchers in quantitative approaches to historical and literary texts."—Mel Evans, University of Leeds

"Theoretically, historically, and critically informed, this is the most ambitious, and practical, book I know on the computational revolution in literary studies."—Jonathan Hope, Arizona State University

"With Literary Mathematics, Gavin achieves what he sets forth to do: demonstrate quantitative models that can be used to describe the relationships between a corpus and its source texts, facilitating insights into the culture from which these historical documents emerged. Gavin's call for 'a curious spirit' that brings 'creative, rather than merely critical, thinking' is a welcome approach. Gavin takes risks in his corpus-level analyses and asks scholars to join him by looking at thousands of texts with an openness to the possibilities of what they may find."—Mary Learner, H-Sci-Med-Tech

"Gavin's approach will be of great value to those who have been witnessing the debate about digital humanities as a set of methods.... Literary mathematics, not just in the sense of a title, is very likely to be seen as a concept that anchors contemporary debates and trends in digital humanities in replacing computers and digital technology with math as a site of meaning making."—Soni Wadhwa, South Atlantic Review