A Companion to Digital Literary Studies

Algorithmic criticism is criticism prompted by the algorithmic manipulation of literary texts – either does not exist, or exists only in nascent form. Algorithmic criticism would have to retain the commitment to methodological rigor demanded by its tools, but the emphasis would be less on maintaining a correspondence or a fitness between method and goal, and more on the need to present methods in a fully transparent manner. Algorithmic criticism undoubtedly requires a revolution of sorts, but that revolution is not one of new procedures and methods in contradistinction to the old ones. Algorithmic criticism seeks a new kind of audience for text analysis – one that is less concerned with fitness of method and the determination of interpretive boundaries, and one more concerned with evaluating the robustness of the discussion that a particular procedure annunciates.