Dear All
you are warmly invited to the first annual UCL Rabindranath Tagore Lecture in Comparative Literature, which will take place on Wednesday, 10th May 2017. Please see full details below.
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The 2017 UCL Rabindranath Tagore Lecture in Comparative Literature
Novel Analytics from James Joyce to the Bestseller Code
Matthew
L. Jockers (University of Nebraska)
Wednesday, 10th May 2017 at 6:00pm
Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre
South Junction, Wilkins Building
UCL, Gower Street, WC1E 6BT
Abstract: To better understand bestselling fiction, Matthew Jockers and research partner Jodie Archer took the advice of researchers who argue that we should "embrace complexity and make use of the best ally we have: the unreasonable effectiveness of data.” Instead of seeking a formula or telling authors how to write a successful novel, Jockers and Archer went to the books, thousands of them, and leveraged computation to ask a simple question: "what are these texts made of?" The claim of their research, documented in The Bestseller Code, is that novels that hit the New York Times bestseller list are not random lottery winners but books that share an uncanny number of textual features. In this lecture, Jockers will describe how he went from being a close reader of language in Joyce's Ulysses to mining thousands of novels in search of the linguistic patterns most typical to books that best sell.
Speaker: Matthew L. Jockers is the Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of English and Associate Dean for Research and Partnerships in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Nebraska. He is a Faculty Fellow in the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and Director of the Nebraska Literary Lab. Jockers’s research is focused on computational approaches to the study of literature, especially large collections of literature. His books include Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History (UIUC Press 2013), Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature (Springer 2014) and, with Jodie Archer, The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of the Blockbuster Novel (St. Martins 2016). His research has been profiled in the academic and main stream press including features in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Nature, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Wired, New Scientist, Smithsonian, NBC News and many others.
All are welcome and the event will be followed by a drinks reception. Please note registration is required.
With thanks to funding by the London Arts & Humanities Partnership, and the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities.
Best wishes,
Florian Mussgnug
Reader in Italian and Comparative Literature
Director, UCL Comparative Literature Programme
School of European Languages, Culture and Society
University College London