Title: Contours of Contemporary Research: Perspectives Across Disciplines
Chief Editors: Dr. S. Durga, Dr. S. Sathyapriya, and Dr. V. A. Jane
ISBN: 978-81-17787-25-0
Chapter: 9
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59646/880/9
Authors: Dr. J. U. Gayathri, and Dr. C. K. Uma Devi
Abstract
Over the past two decades, the digital humanities have moved from the margins of literary studies toward its centre, bringing with them new methods such as distant reading, text mining and topic modelling, together with new forms of scholarly output such as digital archives, editions and visualisations. This expansion has produced both enthusiasm and suspicion. Supporters argue that computation allows critics to study literary history at a scale no individual reader could manage; sceptics argue that statistical methods often confirm what critics already knew, misuse quantitative reasoning, or reproduce the biases of the archives on which they depend. This paper surveys the main methods and debates in digital literary studies, from Franco Moretti’s call for distant reading and Matthew Jockers’s macroanalysis to Ted Underwood’s work on long-term literary change, Katherine Bode’s critique of digital collections, and Roopika Risam’s postcolonial digital humanities. It also examines the sharpest critiques of the field, including Nan Z. Da’s challenge to computational literary studies, and considers what large language models add to the picture. The paper argues that digital methods are most valuable when they expand the evidence available to interpretation and force critics to reflect on how archives are built, rather than when they promise to replace close reading with automated answers.
Keywords: digital humanities, distant reading, computational literary studies, digital archives, cultural analytics, large language models