Medium’s technology blog OneZero provides a great example of the new field of “digital humanities”:
Actors and critics have long remarked that when you read Macbeth out loud, it feels like your voice and mouth and brain are doing something ever so slightly wrong. There’s something subconsciously off about the sound of the play, and it spooks people. It’s as if Shakespeare somehow wove a tiny bit of creepiness into every single line. The literary scholar George Walton Williams described the “continuous sense of menace” and “horror” that pervades even seemingly innocuous scenes. For centuries, Shakespeare fans and theater folk have wondered about this, but could never quite explain it.
Then a clever bit of data analysis in 2014 uncovered the reason… It turns out that Macbeth uncanny flavor springs from the unusual way that Shakespeare deploys one particular word, over and over again. That word?
“The….”
As Hope and Witmore note, you’d expect Macbeth to refer to “my hand” and “my eye”. By writing it as “the hand” and “the eye”, Shakespeare neatly evokes the way Macbeth is beginning to be tormented by his own decisions; he disassociates from his own body. In a few acts he’ll be a totally unravelled mess…
[T]his is one of my favorite examples of using data analysis to ponder literature. The field of the “digital humanities” — which often involves using data analysis to study books — can get a bad rap sometimes… But what’s so delightful about Hope and Witmore’s work is how it’s genuinely a cyborg, centaur piece of literary analysis… They started by pondering a phenomenon that has puzzled Shakespeare fans for centuries. They did some data analysis that pointed to the word “the”. But to figure out why “the” was so key, they had to go back and reread the play closely, engaging in a very rich line-by-line literary analysis. The computation existed as a set of fresh alien eyes, telling the humans where to direct their attention. But it was up to the humans to find the meaning.
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot