Abstract

I’ll try to make the case for humanities research that is experimental in the scientific sense, involving the systematic manipulation of variables under controlled conditions to support causal inference. To that end, I’ll present the results of our lab’s recent research using AI to create simulated in-distribution proxies for both high- and low-status contemporary novels. I will also describe in some detail ongoing work to build full-scale AI-based simulations of literary evolution in the twenty-first century (and, more challengingly, in earlier periods).

Bio

Matthew Wilkens is Associate Professor of Information Science at Cornell University, where he leads the Culture and Computation Lab and directs the multi-institutional AI for Cultural and Historical Reasoning project. His work is devoted to developing, validating, and using computational systems to study large-scale problems in literary and cultural history. He is the author of two books and of articles in venues ranging from American Literary History to Experimental Methods in Natural Language Processing to the Journal of Minimally Invasive Gynecology.

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