Chapter 3 - The Canon

Summary

In its early days, the methods and theories of the digital humanities promised to reform our understanding of the canon, or, given a comprehensive archive of literature and the tools for analyzing all of it, even abolish it all together. Although these earlier utopian hopes for digital archives and computational text analysis have proven to be ill founded, the points of contact between the canon and the digital humanities have had a profound effect on both. From studies that test the formal properties of canonical literature to those that seek to explore the depths of newly available archives, the canon has remained an object of significant interest for scholars working in these burgeoning fields. This chapter explores the fraught relationship between the canon and computational analysis, arguing that, in the hands of cultural analytics, the canon has transformed from a prescriptive to a descriptive technology of literary study.