Studying Literature by the Numbers

[Bandwraith at aol.com]

From: "A Short Biography of A.N. Kolmogorov"

"...Apart from his penetrating work in Mathematics and the Sciences he
devoted much of his time to improving the teaching of mathematics 
in secondary schools in the Soviet Union, and in providing special schools 
for the mathematically gifted - which were very successful. Famous are 
also his efforts to capture in quantitative form some aspects of Russian 
poetry, especially that of Pushkin. It is told that ``it was fascinating to 
hear him lecture on this, whether one understood Russian or not.''

http://homepages.cwi.nl/~paulv/KOLMOGOROV.BIOGRAPHY.html

respectfully

In a message dated 1/10/04 5:02:09 AM, monrobotics at yahoo.com writes:

<< The New York Times
Saturday, January 10, 2004
Studying Literature by the Numbers
By EMILY EAKIN
 
If Franco Moretti had his way, literature scholars
would stop reading books and start counting, graphing
and mapping them instead. For an English professor,
this is an ambition verging on apostasy. But Mr.
Moretti, a professor of English and comparative
literature at Stanford and director of the
university's center for the study of the novel,
insists that such a move could bring new luster to a
tired field, one that in some respects, he says, is
among "the most backwards disciplines in the academy."


Mr. Moretti, 53, has been honing his vision of a
text-free literary scholarship in books and articles
over the last two decades. And now he is issuing a
manifesto. "Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for
Literary History," which just appeared in the
November/December issue of New Left Review, a British
journal of politics and culture.... >>