The Order of Criticism Revisited: A mixed-methods study of a century and a half of literary criticism in Sweden

In Lina Samuelsson’s 2013 study »The Order of Critique: Swedish Book Reviews 1906, 1956, 2006», a key feature was the study of the critical text s normative discourses: What constitutes a review? Which key concepts permeate the critical text? Despite several chosen limitations, the work gathered a significant quantity of transcribed material.

In the project The Order of Criticism Revisited: A mixed-methods study of a century and a half of literary criticism in Sweden we now intend to conduct a methodological and epistemological study of corresponding materials using digital tools. Samuelsson’s discourse analysis will be compared to a language technological analysis. By »corresponding material» we mean partly Samuelsson own transcriptions, but above all (the privilege of the big data) the ambition is to make as exhaustive analysis as possible of the critical material that is available for the chosen years. A new study, of the year 2016, will be implemented, and the project will also launch an interactive interface for visualizing – and operate – the symbiosis of text mining and discourse analysis.

The project will be able to compare, in detail, analog and digital analyzes of the same historical moments. The study will thus encourage several creative challenges for the technical language analysis, and highlight several methodological meta-perspectives at the intersection of traditional humanities, language technology analysis and epistemological aspects of digitization.