Abstract:The concepts offered by quantitative analyses operate across scales in ways that are often foreign to literary study. They demand new kinds of abstraction: ones that can take into account minute effects in single texts replicated across a corpus that numbers in the hundreds, or thousands. Establishing metrics, finding patterns and linking these metrics and patterns with meaningful concepts of literary criticism: these are tasks that digital humanities now faces. In doing so, it must ask new questions about the nature of what it studies and how computational results can be made compatible with the established practices of literary criticism. This essay poses these questions through a quantitative analysis of English dramatic history. How can the transformation and abstraction of a play into a network, and then into a metric, reveal new facets of the evolution of drama since the early modern period? How does the process of abstraction, necessary to create a network out of a play, compare to the abstractions of literary history? What kinds of new concepts that describe character, plot, or structure, are made possible by quantitative metrics? And, how can the patterns of similarity and difference revealed by the quantitative measurement of these abstractions be reconciled to our already extensive critical understanding of English drama?

中文翻译：

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分布式字符：1550-1900年的英语阶段量化模型

摘要：定量分析所提供的概念在各个尺度上都以文学研究通常不熟悉的方式运作。他们需要新的抽象形式：可以考虑到在成百上千的语料库中复制的单个文本中的微小影响。建立指标，寻找模式并将这些指标和模式与有意义的文学批评概念联系起来：这些是数字人文科学现在面临的任务。在这样做的过程中，它必须提出有关其研究内容的性质以及如何使计算结果与既定的文学批评实践兼容的新问题。本文通过对英国戏剧史的定量分析提出了这些问题。如何将游戏的转换和抽象转换为网络，然后转换为指标，揭示了近代以来戏剧发展的新方面？与戏剧史的抽象相比，为建立戏剧网络所必需的抽象过程如何？定量指标使描述字符，情节或结构的哪些新概念成为可能？而且，通过对这些抽象的定量测量所揭示的相似性和差异性模式，如何与我们对英语戏剧的广泛批判性理解相一致？