Combatting Disability Erasure in Literary Studies: How a Literary Archive and Distant Reading Can Give Disabled Characters the Attention They Have Been Denied

I have created a digital archive documenting literary works that feature disabled characters. Using distant reading within this digital archive provides insight into the representation of disability in literature, aids in creating a disability literary canon, and prioritizes disability within the realm of critical literary studies. Despite the widening of canon and the increasing visibility of disability studies in the academy, there needs to be an archive that features works with disabled characters. Literary visualizations created through distant reading provide a new way to read texts. My thesis, “Combatting Disability Erasure in Literary Studies: How a Literary Archive and Distant Reading Can Give Disabled Characters the Attention They Have Been Denied,” will explore how distant reading would add an unprecedented dimension to a disability literary archive. Disabled characters have been present in prominent and now out-of-print literature for generations, but their presence has been cast to the periphery of storylines