THE DIGITAL HUMANITIES AS A TOOLKIT FOR LITERARY THEORY: THREE CASE STUDIES OF THE OPERATIONALIZATION OF THE CONCEPTS OF “LATE STYLE,” “AUTHORSHIP ATTRIBUTION,” AND “LITERARY MOVEMENT”

Digital Humanities (DH) offers contemporary literary criticism, as well as other fields, a unique and constantly expandable set of “big data” (digital libraries and collections, for example) that can be investigated through statistical analysis. This paper presents three case studies of computational analysis of “Late Style,” “authorship attribution,” and “literary movement.” This analysis represents an attempt to demonstrate that the quantitative approaches of DH allow the “operationalization” of concepts in literary theory—that is, their translation from a theoretical level to an empirical one. Once these concepts are operationalized through quantitative analysis, data are produced that can inform qualitative research; in this way, a circular form of interdisciplinary research is created.