Abstract Demography of Literary Form: Probabilistic Models for Literary History

Digitization of library collections has made millions of books, newspapers, and aca-demic journal articles accessible. These resources present an opportunity for his-torians interested in identifying patterns in cultural production that emerge over the space of decades or even centuries. For example, considerable interest has been expressed in studying the emergence, decline, and transmission across national and linguistic boundaries of literary form in the tens of thousands of novels published in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Navigating such a large col-lection of texts, however, requires the use of quantitative methods rarely used in literary studies. Single, direct reading of even a thousand texts exceeds the time and resources available to most historians. This dissertation demonstrates the application of probabilistic model of texts in the study of literary history. The major finding of the dissertation is that regularities previously identified by literary historians can be captured by probabilistic models