About the Book

Literary Mathematics

Quantitative Theory for Textual Study

Stanford University Press, 2023

From the back cover:

Across the humanities and social sciences, scholars increasingly use quantitative methods to study textual data. Considered together, this research represents an extraordinary event in the long history of textuality. More or less all at once, the corpus has emerged as a major genre of cultural and scientific knowledge. In Literary Mathematics, Michael Gavin grapples with this development, describing how quantitative methods for the study of textual data offer powerful tools for historical inquiry and sometimes unexpected perspectives on theoretical issues of concern to literary studies.

I’m an Associate Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. I’ve been working in the field of computational humanities since joining UofSC in 2012, and in my earlier academic life I was author of The Invention of English Criticism, 1650-1760 (Cambridge University Press, 2015).

You can purchase a copy of Literary Mathematics directly from Stanford University Press here.