The Scientization of Literary Study

Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Andrew Piper

Abstract
Scholarly practices within the humanities have historically been perceived as distinct from the natural sciences. We look at literary studies, a discipline strongly anchored in the humanities, and hypothesize that over the past half-century literary studies has instead undergone a process of “scientization”, adopting linguistic behavior similar to the sciences. We test this using methods based on information theory, comparing a corpus of literary studies articles (around 63,400) with a corpus of standard English and scientific English respectively. We show evidence for “scientization” effects in literary studies, though at a more muted level than scientific English, suggesting that literary studies occupies a middle ground with respect to standard English in the larger space of academic disciplines. More generally, our methodology can be applied to investigate the social positioning and development of language use across different domains (e.g. scientific disciplines, language varieties, registers).
Anthology ID:
W19-2503
Volume:
Proceedings of the 3rd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, USA
Editors:
Beatrice Alex, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Anna Kazantseva, Nils Reiter, Stan Szpakowicz
Venue:
LaTeCH
SIG:
SIGHUM
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
18–28
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-2503
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-2503
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb and Andrew Piper. 2019. The Scientization of Literary Study. In Proceedings of the 3rd Joint SIGHUM Workshop on Computational Linguistics for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities and Literature, pages 18–28, Minneapolis, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
The Scientization of Literary Study (Degaetano-Ortlieb & Piper, LaTeCH 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-2/W19-2503.pdf
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