Enumerations : data and literary study For well over a century academic disciplines have studied human behavior using quantitative information. Until recently however the humanities have remained largely immune to the use of data—or vigorously resisted it. Thanks to new developments in computer science and natural language processing literary scholars have embraced the quantitative study of literary works and have helped make Digital Humanities a rapidly growing field. But these developments raise a fundamental and as yet unanswered question: what is the meaning of literary quantity In Enumerations Andrew Piper answers that question across a variety of domains fundamental to the study of literature. He focuses on the elementary particles of literature from the role of punctuation in poetry the matter of plot in novels the study of topoi and the behavior of characters to the nature of fictional language and the shape of a poet’s career. How does quantity affect our understanding of these categories What happens when we look at 3 388 230 punctuation marks 1.4 billion words or 650 000 fictional characters Does this change how we think about poetry the novel fictionality character the commonplace or the writer’s career In the course of answering such questions Piper introduces readers to the analytical building blocks of computational text analysis and brings them to bear on fundamental concerns of literary scholarship. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Digital Humanities and the future of literary study Frontmatter Contents Preface Introduction (Reading’s Refrain) 1. Punctuation (Opposition) 2. Plot (Lack) 3. Topoi (Dispersion) 4. Fictionality (Sense) 5. Characterization (Constraint) 6. Corpus (Vulnerability) Conclusion (Implications) Acknowledgments Appendix A Appendix B: Model Description for Deriving Poetic Similarity Data Sets Notes Index