New book mines gender, place across 200 years of British Lit

Literature offers a lens to the past, and with new computational tools, scholars can mine entire libraries of digitized books - representing thousands of titles and billions of words - expanding the view to spot insights about culture and society across time and space.

A new book co-authored by a pair of digital humanities scholars explores the relationship between gender and geography in British literature and offers an example of how computational analysis can be used to extract discoveries from entire digital libraries.

Matthew Wilkens, associate professor of information science in the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, and Elizabeth Evans, associate professor of English at Wayne State University, wrote Gender and Literary Geography, which was published in April by Cambridge University as part of its Elements in Digital Literary Studies series. The pair computationally analyzed more than 20,000 British books published between 1800 and 2009 to investigate the relationship between gender - of both the authors and their characters - and geographic spaces in literature.

"We think of our contribution as bringing the equivalent of macroeconomics - large-scale data and scientific methods - to the humanities, which hasn't generally had the capacity, and in some cases, not the inclination, to use those methods," Wilkens said.

The pair found that female characters across those 20,000 books were far more likely than male characters to inhabit public urban spaces, upending the notion that women occupied more domestic spaces while men inhabited the public sphere of work, government, and power. Male characters, researchers found, were more often situated in nature than female characters.

Read the full story on the Cornell Bowers website.