Hoyt Long and Richard So on Close Reading, Machine Learning, and Patterns in Literature

Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So stopped by the CI office recently to discuss their essay, "Literary Pattern Recognition: Modernism Between Close Reading and Machine Learning," which is forthcoming in Critical Inquiry (Winter 2016).

An effort to bridge hermeneutic and computational methods for textual analysis, Long and So's piece employs three interpretive methods to the English-language haiku. In this video, the auhors discuss some of the methodological and literary historical insights that emerge from their study of the modernist haiku through close reading, through a socio-historical object, and through a machine learning-framework.

Hoyt Long is an associate professor of Japanese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago.
Richard Jean So is an assistant professor of English at the University of Chicago.