Students will become familiar with computer manipulation of 
texts through a survey of electronic texts in the humanities.  
Readings and discussion will be supplemented with hands-on 
computer work with texts and corpora.  Students are expected to 
learn terms, concepts, and techniques used for work with 
computer manipulation of texts.  Students are also expected to 
learn and use a text processing program called WordSmith 
Tools.  In addition, students are expected to learn to 
evaluate the professional literature of text and corpus 
analysis with respect to their own particular literary or 
linguistic fields, which in most cases will include evaluation 
of quantitative approaches.  Students must also learn 
to select and apply appropriate text and corpus analysis 
methods to problems in their own particular literary or 
linguistic areas, at a level of sophistication matching the 
current literature in their fields.

This course is an exploration of text and corpus analysis.  As 
the field is new and developing quickly, topical material is 
subject to change.  A typical course may begin with a survey of 
electronic texts in the humanities, including elementary 
notions of text encoding, file manipulation, stylometry, and 
textual criticism.  It may then consider the position of corpus 
linguistics with respect to other methods of empirical 
linguistics and to modern theoretical linguistics, and then  
investigate the current motivations for and state of both 
English corpora and analyses of those corpora. The readings for 
the course can address questions of literary text analysis like 
author attribution, and the computer methods discussed will be 
directly applicable to computer analysis of literary texts.