Mark Algee-Hewitt

Mark Algee-Hewitt will spend the year at CASBS developing a new set of computational methods for exploring the evolution of abstract concepts from the eighteenth-century to the present day. Bringing current computational linguistic tools to bear on the history of ideas, this project uses a series of linked language models to trace semantic distance over time, such that we can witness the mutual interaction of ideas as they merge to form complex compound concepts. This work will result not only in a book project on failed concepts, but a set of publicly available tools that can measure and help explain the success or failure of ideas in history.

Algee-Hewitt is an associate professor of digital humanities in the English department at Stanford University where he directs the Literary Lab (https://litlab.stanford.edu/). His work combines traditional humanities methods of literary study with quantitative and computational analysis. At the Lab, he directs projects on such varied topics as science communication in climate fiction, representations of nineteenth-century domesticity, and, in his forthcoming book The Afterlife of Aesthetics, the dissolution of aesthetic theory and the rise of literary criticism.