This talk will introduce some of the efforts currently under way at Washington University in Saint Louis to make a corpus of early printed English tractable for computational analysis. As an example of what a large-scale corpus makes possible, Anupam Basu will present a case study on the orthographic practice of Edmund Spenser’s texts, which a long editorial and critical tradition have marked as distinctive. Basu will ask how we might understand such distinctiveness within a regime of early modern spelling that already tolerated a wide degree of variation.

While the EEBO-TCP corpus provides unprecedented access to the early English print record, its orthographic irregularity has often been seen as little more than an annoyance – a hindrance for computational analysis. However, Basu will argue that the ability to perform stylometric analysis based on orthographic variation within this vast corpus not only allows us to trace the broad patterns of orthographic evolution over the first two centuries of English print, but also enables meticulously historicized literary profiling. Spenser’s general orthographic practice, Basu will contend, conforms to the broad expectations of Spenser’s period.

All Yale students, faculty, and staff are invited to attend. This talk is co-sponsored by the Yale English Department’s Renaissance Colloquium and Yale Digital Humanities Laboratory.

Speaker Bio

Anupam Basu, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Washington in Saint Louis, works at the intersection of literature and big data, drawing on emerging computational techniques like natural language processing and machine-learning to make vast digital archives of early modern print more tractable for computational analysis.