Sierra Eckert is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Center for Digital Humanities and a Perkins Fellow at the Humanities Council. As a practitioner and historian of digital humanities, her work examines the literary significance of systems of information and labor, from the nineteenth century to the present.
Thank you for your time today! I found your focus on technology and literature really cool, because I am also interested in these fields in relation to one another. Can you start off by describing what Digital Humanities is?
There is a kind of a cliche saying in Digital Humanities that no one really likes to define what it is, in part because it encompasses a lot of different kinds of work. I like to describe it as an interdisciplinary field that is at the intersection of, on the one hand, quantitative approaches to traditional humanities fields, and, on the other hand, humanistic approaches to quantitative artifacts. Work in Digital Humanities takes many different forms: some focus primarily on dataset curation while others use these datasets to ask questions of humanistic research.
You described how there are two ends of a spectrum in Digital Humanities. Where do you think your work belongs on this spectrum?
I think it depends on the project, as I am often straddling the two. My first book project is closer to the second approach to Digital Humanities since it is a literary history of statistics and quantitative methods. For this project, I looked at how writers in the 19th century used statistical methods of research as they were emerging. I came upon this topic while doing my dissertation research. When looking at novelists' notebooks and working papers, I expected to see notes for novels. What I found instead were surprising instances of novelists doing what we might call social science today—taking detailed notes and referring to existing works of history. I was fascinated by the ways in which they organized those notes, often using tabulation. I realized that novelists were conceptualizing the novel in a sophisticated way involving statistics and analysis. I ended up looking at this era when writers were also social theorists thinking across various fields that were not as distinct from one another as they are today.
My other projects are much closer to the first approach to Digital Humanities, computational approaches to humanities fields. I am currently working on a project called Shadow Canons on canons of art and literature that get constructed through acts of everyday scholarship and teaching. What are the canons produced by works that are included in syllabi, quoted in scholarly papers, and anthologized? What are the actual works that we refer to when talking about impressionism, for instance? To answer these questions, I had to figure out how to find all the quotations from a work like Middlemarch by George Eliot in works of scholarship, which is a computational task. Though a quotation is a bounded thing, it is a little fuzzier than simply looking for something in between quotation marks because there are several different conventions for denoting quotations. My interest in asking research questions at a scale that is difficult for an individual researcher to explore is what led me to quantitative methods.
These projects sound really cool! How did you first get into this field of study?
My path to Digital Humanities can be traced all the way back to my undergraduate years, during which I was torn between majoring in literature and majoring in astronomy. In astronomy, I had done some work that involved basic programming in C to visualize different observations from telescopic images; I looked at spectrographs to analyze the chemical composition of a star based on the kind of light it was emitting. As I was learning programming, statistics, and data science, I also became interested in how literature enabled imaginations of scientific concepts such as time in the 19th century. The way that we understand and imagine the world is not only constrained to the realm of science but also impacted by public perception of it. I was still very interested in the scientific work in astronomy, but did not think that questions were being asked and answered in the right way. I declared as an English major in my junior year but continued to engage in different fields by taking a variety of classes. I took a class in which the professor introduced a term called "Digital Humanities." I asked the professor if I could do a project in this field on works of Walter Benjamin and ended up using computational methods to analyze Benjamin's encyclopedic mode of organizing data. I loved the project and later incorporated it into my senior thesis, which was in conversation with History, English, and interpretive theory.
How do you use technology to aid your research in literature?
Technology is involved everywhere in my research process, from asking questions about the patterns of language over time across works of literature on Google books, project Gutenberg, and Internet archives to analyzing periodicals and published books made accessible by OCR technology. In particular, everyday materials like magazines are much harder to access compared to books like Middlemarch that have lots of printed copies. Periodicals provide a wealth of information about the everyday life and culture of common people, as they contain everything from the news to fiction and poetry. Technology is really instrumental for me in that it enables me to be able to access a lot of primary sources for my scholarly work. Having access to high resolution scans of books may also be useful for those who want to explore the social life of books. Things that are seemingly basic as the OCR or the library catalog can unlock a plethora of research questions.
In what ways do you think technology and literature are interrelated? What does technology contribute to literature and vice versa?
I like to think about the book itself as a kind of technology that relies on different stages of revolutions in the way we share works, everything from the invention of printing in the 15th century to the period that I study, the 19th century. Everyone was often in a panic about the novel whenever new printing technologies were introduced. The invention of the lithograph eliminated the need for people to laboriously print out every single letter since it was a sheet that could be mechanically engraved onto and repurposed to print multiple editions of the text. The cost of paper went down in the 19th century as the United States, Britain, and France decided to take off taxes added to paper. There were all these op-eds, much like the ones today about ChatGPT about whether the emergence of the penny press will mark the end of thinking. In many ways, for me, the story of literature is always the story of technology because we think about the ways in which literary works were enabled by changes in the underlying technology. I think the two are necessarily intertwined together.
What would you say is the most interesting or fulfilling part of your job? What inspires you every day?
For me, one of the most inspiring parts of my job is teaching, in part because I find that my own research on what it means to think about literature and data together is often informed by the questions that students ask. Such questions get me thinking about the underlying assumptions baked into the everyday tools and technologies that we use. Sometimes, it could be harder to convince humanists who are trained in more traditional forms of thinking about works of literature to think of their work as data. The whole field of poetry, at least in the English language, is centered around concepts of prosody, which is how you measure out the metrical form of poems, and meter is nothing but a certain number of stressed and unstressed syllables. So in fact, it is deeply quantitative yet not recognizable as data to some. There are more parallels between literature and data that we tend to recognize when we are more deep into the field. I find that students can be more willing to see the split between the two fields as a fairly recent invention.