Computing, memory and writing: some reflections on an early experiment in digital literary studies
Authors: Giorgio Guzzetta, Federico Nanni (University College Cork, Università di Bologna, 2015)
Topic: Textual Genres & Literature Linguistics

Abstract
In this paper we present the first steps of a research that aims at investigating the possible relationship between the emergence of a discontinuity in the study of poetic influence and some early experiments of humanities computing. The background idea is that the evolution of computing in the 1960s and 1970s might have triggered a transformation of the notion of influence and that today's interactions between the field of natural language processing and digital humanities are still sustaining it. In order to do so, we studied a specific interdisciplinary project dedicated to the topic and we reproduced those experiments. Then we compared the results with different text mining techniques in order to understand how contemporary methods can deal with the rethinking of the notion of influence.

Introduction
In recent years, when the institutional presence of digital humanities grew stronger, the need for a closer look at the history of humanities computing (the name under which this community of researchers was originally gathered) became more urgent, and some answers have been attempted AUTHOR. Rehearsing the history of humanities computing proved to be a challenging task, because of the hybrid and interdisciplinary nature of it and because of its entanglement up with a field like computing, which is epistemologically unstable and interdisciplinary as well AUTHOR.\newline This paper is a contribution to this attempt to develop an history of humanities computing, trying to combine together the histories of computing, of computational linguistics, and of literary studies. We present here the first steps of a research that aims at investigating the possibility that the emergence of a ``discontinuity'' in the notion of literary influence (and, consequently, of literary source), or at least the critical awareness of it, might be related to some early experiments of humanities computing. The background idea is that the evolution of computing in the 1960s and 1970s might have contributed to this transformation of the notion of influence, and that today's interactions between the field of natural language processing and digital humanities might have further developed it, possibly in new directions.\newline In order to do so, the paper is organised as follows. First of all, we define the problem of influence from the point of view of literary studies and literary theory. With that background in mind, we study a specific interdisciplinary project dedicated to the topic AUTHOR and we analysed Raben key-role on AUTHOR computational analysis. Moreover, to get a complete understanding of the methods applied in this work, we recreated the same approach with a script in Python.\newline Then, we decided to update Goodman and Villani's approach by adopting contemporary text mining methods. While conducting this specific task our purpose was not only to compare the different techniques and to highlight possible mistakes in Goodman and Villani's approach, but we aimed especially at understanding whether contemporary methods commonly adopted in natural language processing and digital humanities are able to answer questions and solve problematic issues emerged during the rethinking of the notion of influence in recent years.

Conclusion
To conclude, for what concerns more specifically the possible boundary between humanities computing and the study of influence in literary studies, we believe that computational techniques helped to develop a keen sense of the issues involved, foregrounding the role of mechanical reading in de-idealising the problem. The use of machines in turn triggered Bloom’s creation of his own “machine for criticism” (Bloom, 1976) built in order to understand how the anxiety of influence was dealt with by writers. If it’s true that Bloom’s theory “anxiously responds to [...] the subliminally perceived threat of textual anonymity promoted by the ’mechanical reproduction’ of available texts” (Renza, 1990), that is to say something that with the digital will soon reach an entirely new, we can consider Raben’s work as moved by a similar tension. Compared to Bloom, however, the advantage of the latter was that he was working from within, so to speak, the machine language. For this reason, he was able to begin transforming the traditional approach, that emphasised continuity within literary traditions, with a different one more focused on the way in which creative writing works, and on what the role of linguistic memory and of “creative” reading (or, as Prose (2006) said, reading as a writer).