A volume in the University of Illinois Press series Topics in the Digital Humanities, Macroanalysis introduces a particular approach to the digital humanities. Jockers first places his subject matter in the larger history of the rapidly growing area of the digital humanities-a history that begin in the 1940s with a lemmatized index of the corpus of the works of Thomas Aquinas. In its broadest definition, the digital humanities refers to connecting literary or textual studies to computer studies, using various kinds of digital tools in order to analyze texts in one way or another. After sketching the broad sense of that tradition, Jockers suggests one particular approach that he calls macroanalysis. He explains it by an analogy to economics. "The approach to the study of literature that I am calling 'macroanalysis' is in some general ways akin to economics or, more specifically, to macroeconomics." He continues his comparison to "microeconomics, which studies the economic behavior of individual consumers and individual businesses. As such, microeconomics can be seen as analogous to our study of individual texts via 'close readings.' Macroeconomics, however, is about the study of the entire economy" (p. 24). Jockers' interest then has to with a large corpus and asking questions about, for example, the "historical place of individual texts, authors, and genres in relation to a larger literary context" or "literary production in terms of the growth and decline over time or within regions or within demographic groups" or "literary-patterns and lexicons employed over time, across periods, within regions, or within demographic groups" or "the culture and societal forces that impact literary style and the evolution of style" (p. 27). In each of these the interest in literary study has to do with larger overarching topics rather than the study of individual texts.
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