Digital revolution in the humanities brought about not only the increased storage capacity and  accessibility of literary resources but more importantly the possibility to reuse them for the large-scale  quantitative research. In doing so take the advantage of humanities research data, i.e. resources that have been diligently collected and annotated in various institutions throughout the years with the intention to  facilitate the research process: bibliographies, catalogues, chronicles, calendars, fact sheets, reports, editions, annotations etc.

Digital humanities (DH) has become a field in which interdisciplinary arts & humanities scholarship engages in transdisciplinary dialogue with ICT and STEM disciplines, employing quantitative tools and approaches to cultural sources. Computational methods and approaches to the study of literature have marked the distinction between traditional, close-reading and detail-oriented  approaches, on the one hand, and new, synthetic studies applying statistical methods to larger  corpora, on the other. In this presentation I will provide an overview of digital literary studies on the example of quantitative research into transitions in literary history on the example of Polish literary life 1989-2000.

I will begin with problematising the concept of research data in the humanities, followed by a brief outline of the main methods. Then, drawing on the data collected in Polish Literary Bibliography (PBL), a comprehensive database of Polish literary and cultural life, which indexes not only literary books but all instances of literary life and reception, I aim at describing and plotting key processes in literary history, namely dispersion and subsequent recentralisation of literary life after 1989.

Maciej Maryl, Ph.D., assistant professor and founding Director of the Digital Humanities Centre at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences. Literary scholar, sociologist, translator. He is a member of Teksty Drugie and OpenMethods Editorial Boards. He is a representative of IBL PAN at DARIAH-PL Steering Board and OPERAS Executive Assembly. He chairs ALLEA E-humanities Working Group and DARIAH Digital Methods and Practices Observatory.