You are warmly invited to join us for the second Annual Digital Humanities Lecture, on 29 April 2015, to be given by Professor Jonathan Hope. The lecture will be held in ArtsTwo Lecture theatre, Queen Mary University of London, at 5.30pm, and will be followed by a wine reception. Please register here to attend.

Books in space: hyper-dimensional reading

Digital tools allow us to ‘read’ vastly more text than any human could manage in a lifetime. They also allow us to make comparisons between texts, genres, and periods based on projections of those books into multi-dimensional spaces. Some have hailed the advent of ‘culturomics’ – but what kind of ‘reading’ is this, and how can we ‘read’ spaces which are beyond the imaginative capacity of human minds? I’ll consider the promise, and the opportunities, of digital methods applied to large collections of texts – and I’ll also consider how these tools and methods might change the nature of our object of study. Most of my examples will be drawn from Shakespeare and the Early Modern period.