The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age (04/21)
New Books in East Asian Literature Lecture Series
The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age
Professor Hoyt Long (University of Chicago)
Time: Thursday April 21, 2022, from 6 pm to 7:30 pm
Room: CAS 222 (In-person only)
The recent proliferation of digital archives and data-mining tools has renewed longstanding tensions between numbers and literary study. Where some call for a rapprochement, others insist on their fundamental incompatibility. What can the study of literature, Japanese or otherwise, gain from a more deliberate engagement with numbers and computation? This talk takes up the question from past, present, and future perspectives. I historicize the enduring tension of numbers and literary study within shifting conditions of knowledge production, hinting at what we might learn from earlier attempts by Japanese critics to read literature quantitatively. Next, a case study on the representation of race and ethnicity under Japanese empire helps demonstrate the possibilities for reading offered by today’s newest computational methods, like machine learning. Finally, I speculate on the possible futures of computation within Japanese literary studies, both as a catalyst for new disciplinary formations and as a means to develop critical literacy of the technologies set to define our coming information age.
Short Bio: Hoyt Long is Associate Professor of Japanese Literature at the University of Chicago. He teaches in the East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department and also co-directs the Textual Optics Lab. He has published extensively in the fields of modern Japanese literature, media history, and digital humanities. His current research interests include machine translation, computational approaches to world literature, and cultural production in the age of social media platforms.
**the 2021-22 theme of the lecture series is New Directions in East Asian Literary Studies.
The event is co-sponsored by the BU Center for the Humanities, BU Center for the Study of Asia, and BU Department of World Languages & Literatures.
