Digital Britain @Harvard University

Digital Britain:New Approaches to the Early Middle Ages
Harvard University March 2016
http://digitalbritain.weebly.com/

Session 3: Lexomics
Panel Chair: Hannah Weaver (Harvard University)
Mark LeBlanc (Wheaton College) – “Using Lexos to Mine Medieval Texts: The Lexomic Workflow”
Michael Drout (Wheaton College) – “Two Kinds of Lexomic Evidence and the Composition and Transmission of Beowulf”
Mary Dockray-Miller (Lesley University) – “Lexomic Goscelin”
Scott Kleinman (California State University, Northridge) – “Lexomic Evidence and the Composition of the Early Middle English South English Legendary”

[from conference website]: Medievalists already have an impressive track record in using the Digital Humanities in their teaching and research. It is now a common practice for an undergraduate to scrutinize high-resolution images of a thousand-year-old manuscript while she transcribes the texts it preserves. A searcher can pinpoint when and where certain words were used, or identify the scribe who copied a particular manuscript, or map out the paths of literary borrowings thanks to online reference tools. Now that we are well into the digital turn, this symposium seeks to take stock not only of methodology but also of avenues for future work. How should we keep rethinking traditional fields like paleography or source study? What can new media say to the old (and vice-versa)? And, in attending to a multimodal Middle Ages, how—and what—should we read? Traditional methods in literary analysis have already been challenged by Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” and Matthew L. Jockers’s “macroanalysis.” What is the appropriate scale for medieval literature? Is the sentence a viable unit for the Middle Ages? And how big is big data?