The Values in Numbers - by Hoyt Long

About the Book

"Ideas about how to study and understand cultural history-particularly literature-are rapidly changing as new digital archives and tools for searching them become available. This is not the first information age, however, to challenge ideas about how and why we value literature and the role numbers might play in this process. The Values in Numbers tells the longer history of this evolving global conversation from the perspective of Japan and maps its potential futures for the study of Japanese literature and world literature more broadly. Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application to literature together with critical reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Chapters guide readers through increasingly complex techniques while making novel arguments about topics of fundamental concern, including the role of quantitative thinking in Japanese literary criticism; the canonization of modern literature in print and digital media; the rise of psychological fiction as a genre; the transnational circulation of modernist forms; and discourses of race under empire. Long models how computational methods can be applied outside English-language contexts and to languages written in non-Latin scripts. Drawing from fields as diverse as the history of science, book history, world literature, and critical race theory, this book demonstrates the value of numbers in literary study and the values literary critics can bring to the reading of difference in numbers"--

Book Synopsis

Ideas about how to study and understand cultural history--particularly literature--are rapidly changing as new digital archives and tools for searching them become available. This is not the first information age, however, to challenge ideas about how and why we value literature and the role numbers might play in this process. The Values in Numbers tells the longer history of this evolving global conversation from the perspective of Japan and maps its potential futures for the study of Japanese literature and world literature more broadly.

Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application to literature together with critical reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Chapters guide readers through increasingly complex techniques while making novel arguments about topics of fundamental concern, including the role of quantitative thinking in Japanese literary criticism; the canonization of modern literature in print and digital media; the rise of psychological fiction as a genre; the transnational circulation of modernist forms; and discourses of race under empire. Long models how computational methods can be applied outside English-language contexts and to languages written in non-Latin scripts. Drawing from fields as diverse as the history of science, book history, world literature, and critical race theory, this book demonstrates the value of numbers in literary study and the values literary critics can bring to the reading of difference in numbers.

Review Quotes

Long's pioneering book argues that the value in numbers is also the value of numbers. His superb analysis of post-Meiji Japanese narratives recovers century-old practices when quantitative methods helped to understand emerging literary forms. The result is an urgent call to review the many disciplinary worlds that constitute world literature.

--Priya Joshi, author of In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India

The Values in Numbers is a major intervention in transnational literary studies and in methodological reflection and innovation in digital humanities. Long convincingly shows that the values associated with literary traditions and disciplines do not have to be in tension with numbers and can be embodied by them. --Katherine Bode, author of A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History

Uncovering a history of Japanese writers and critics since Sōseki who turned to quantitative methods to get past Eurocentric hierarchies of literary value, Hoyt Long shows the value in numbers for literary study. Both a toolkit of statistical techniques for analyzing literary texts and a critical genealogy of those same techniques, this is digital humanities at its best.--J. Keith Vincent, author of Two-Timing Modernity: Homosocial Narrative in Modern Japanese Fiction

A deft reflection on disciplinary practice, history, and identity, The Values in Numbers is a thought-provoking application of computation to study concepts like genre, voice, and race set in a fascinating non-Western transnational context. This book sets a new standard for the field--a must read.--Andrew Piper, author of Enumerations: Data and Literary Study

Lucid, eloquent, and scrupulously measured in its claims, The Values in Numbers offers a fascinating tour of the history and present state of computational approaches to literary research, and does so through case studies that are themselves rich, persuasive, and often surprising. I know I won't be alone in saying that I've been waiting for this book for years.--Michael Emmerich, author of The Tale of Genji: Translation, Canonization, and World Literature

About the Author

Hoyt Long is associate professor of Japanese literature at the University of Chicago, where he codirects the Textual Optics Lab. He is the author of On Uneven Ground: Miyazawa Kenji and the Making of Place in Modern Japan (2012).