Jim English - Workshop

In the first part of this informal event, Jim English, founding director of Penn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities, will do a show-and-tell with some of the diagrams he and his students have created to visualize data about readers and the books they read. One of the questions driving their work is how to distinguish between people who prefer to read a variety of different kinds of book (literary “omnivores”) and those who are more content to read the same sort of book over and over (literary “univores”). That’s a more complicated question than it seems, but Jim will show how it can be approached by fairly simple methods of data gathering and data visualization. He will then open a broader conversation about the special pleasures of working in faculty-student teams and doing data-driven research in literary studies.