I wrote about computational modeling for the humanities in the Washington Post:
"I earned a PhD in literature the traditional way, reading a lot and reading carefully. By the end, though, I began to wonder at the provenance of the books I studied. What led them to me? What forces guided me to read one book and not another? Hoping to find out, I followed the money. In 1960, basically every U.S. publisher was independent, not owned by a greater entity. By 2000, 80 percent of trade books were published by six global conglomerates. What had that shift done to literature?
Making sense of a problem at that scale was beyond the scope of my training. It would require tracing trends and patterns across thousands of books, a feat beyond the capacities of a single human mind. To do it, I turned to computation and the burgeoning field of cultural analytics. As I learned these new methods, I came to realize how little we know about books and reading"
