Dan Sinykin, who earned his PhD in English Language and Literature in 2015, has an article, "Data Is Not the Enemy of the Humanities," in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
"Literature and culture are increasingly defined by data itself. Think about the presence of authors in the digital literary sphere. Think about Instapoets — popular poets who reach gigantic audiences on Instagram. Or about the arguably perverse proliferation of genres produced through Kindle Direct Publishing. In 2021, to reject data is to risk alienating ourselves from the ontological and sociological grounding of the works we study. Humanists need to embrace data as one of many objects we study — while fighting against those who would turn data against us."
Read the full article here.
Sinykin is an assistant professor of English at Emory University.
