The June 23rd issue of Nature magazine featured a profile of Erez Lieberman Aiden, described in the article as “molecular biologist, applied mathematician and, at 31 years old, the precocious doyen of the emerging field known as the digital humanities.” Among a pretty staggering laundry list of other achievements, Lieberman Aiden, along with his collaborator Jean-Baptiste Michel, is behind “culturomics,” a quantitative approach to analyzing culture.
Lieberman Aiden and Michel were granted access to the millions of books digitized by Google, and are using all of that data to “very, very not-carefully” read through a corpus said to represent 10% of all books ever published. They intend this method of analysis as a revolutionary complement to the traditional “close reading” approach of the humanities. The basis is frequency analysis: Lieberman Aiden and Michel argue that you can learn a great deal by tracking how frequently certain words or phrases have appeared at various points in history. Google’s popular and addictive n-gram viewer, a simple tool that allows anyone to graph the frequency of appearance of words or short phrases across Google’s digital corpus, was built to demonstrate the possibilities for culturomics.
As the Nature story indicates, many people in the humanities have some deep reservations about this new approach. Dan Cohen, director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, and someone on the leading edge of innovation in the digital humanities, is quoted as calling the n-gram viewer a “gateway drug” for the digital humanities, which is surely meant as praise. But Cohen expresses anxiety over the attempt to do broad cultural analysis across a database that includes only published books. “I think saying all books equal the DNA of human experience — I think that’s a very dangerous parallel,” says Cohen. The article’s author draws out Cohen’s concerns: “How do you factor in the cultural contributions of furniture, or dance, or ticket stubs at a movie hall? What about all the books that were never published? Or the culture as experienced by the world's vast illiterate populations?”
Lieberman Aiden and Michel are careful to make clear that they value traditional approaches to the humanities, and that they’re not the bum-rushing reformers that much of the coverage of culturomics makes them out to be. In response to one historian/blogger’s take on the Nature article, Lieberman Aiden and Michel dismissed as a “straw-man” the repeated claim that the duo think their work should make any extant method of historical analysis redundant. In the Nature article, Lieberman Aiden is quoted expressing a great deal of respect for traditional approaches to the humanities. “I think you should use the best methods available—and all of them,” he says. “And I think that includes carefully reading texts and trying to get behind what authors think.” The article’s author recounts an anecdote told by Lieberman Aiden one Friday night over Shabbat dinner:
He tells the story of Isaac Casaubon, a sixteenth-century Protestant scholar, who undermined the presumed Egyptian provenance of a set of religious texts by identifying a reference to a Greek play on words—something that could only have been written hundreds of years later. “That point is as objective an interpretive remark as any remark a scientist might make,” says Lieberman Aiden. “So the methods of humanists are very, very formidable. And I think the degree of insecurity they have over whether these methods are here to stay is not really befitting.”
In January we published a book on Casaubon, by Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg. The book, titled “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, The Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship, is as great a demonstration of the “formidability” of the methods of humanists as anything we’ve published in recent years. Grafton and Weinberg engaged in some incredible scholarly detective work to uncover how the legendary Renaissance scholar Casaubon gained his knowledge of Hebrew. They searched for manuscripts across continents and pored over Casaubon’s handwritten marginalia to explain how Casaubon enriched the Renaissance revival of Latin and Greek through his hard-won acquaintance with Hebrew texts. Writing in the New Republic, Eric Nelson praised Grafton and Weinberg for “amply demonstrat(ing) that Casaubon’s Hebrew studies should be given pride of place in his intellectual biography—and that this fact reveals something important not only about Casaubon himself, but also about the phenomenon of Christian Hebraism more broadly.”
“I have always loved the Holy Tongue” is an amazing piece of “traditional” scholarship, all the more fascinating because Grafton and Weinberg’s dogged close reading of Casaubon mirrors that done by their subject 400 years earlier. For those of us deeply committed to this type of work, it was heartening to read of Lieberman Aidan’s appreciation for Casaubon. It’s also worth pointing out, though, that the Nature feature on Lieberman Aiden quotes Grafton himself expressing what the reporter characterizes as “deep reservations about the digital humanities movement as a whole—especially if it will come at the expense of traditional approaches”:
“You can't help but worry that this is going to sweep the deck of all money for humanities everywhere else,” says Anthony Grafton, a historian at Princeton and president of the American Historical Association, who uses a giant, geared wooden reading wheel to help him manage his oversized, Renaissance texts. He wants researchers to hold onto the power that comes with intimately knowing their primary sources, right down to the scribbled notes in the margin that would elude the book scanners. “You don't want to give up what is your own core activity,” he says.
Elsewhere, Grafton has expressed great admiration for the promise of culturomics and the breakthroughs being made by Aiden Lieberman and Michel. He’s not out to discredit their advances, and in the Nature article his reservations aren’t about the level of respect that digital humanities pioneers may or may not have for more traditional methods. His concern is about what happens when the institutional and financial structures supporting academic research become enthralled by this or any other fascinating new thing. So while culturomics may be an incredible new tool waiting to be put to remarkable use, one can only hope that the people with the purse strings never lose sight of the fact that a close-reading Anthony Grafton is a truly formidable thing.
