Digital Humanities, Big Data, and Literary Studies: Mapping European Literatures in the 21st Century

The purpose of this research is, firstly, to map the 48 national literatures of Europe, through the exploration and the analysis of the bibliographic references contained in the main literary database, the Modern Language Association International Bibliography. Secondly, the series obtained are correlated to economic and development indicators in order to determine whether and how the cultural, economic, and social fields interact with each other. From the theoretical viewpoint, this project stands at the crossroad of several concepts: the literary field defined by Pierre Bourdieu (1972, 1980, 1992), knowledge domain analysis (Hjorland& Albrechtsen 1995; Hjorland 2001; Nascimento & Marteleto 2008), scientometrics (Price 1963; Garfield 198o, 2005; Leydesdorff 1998), and the recently emerged concept of big data (Berman 2013; Boyd & Crawford 2012; Mayer-Schonberger& Cukier 2013). Methodologically, aiming at quantitatively identifying the European national literatures, we base our research on scientometrics. Initially developed by Price (1963), the purpose of scientometrics is to measure and to analyze the scientific and technological activity. In this study, we adapt scientometric indicators to the architecture and features of the Modern Language Association International Bibliography. Thus, the elaboration of bibliometric indicators (Garfield 1980, 2005; Hjorland & Albrechtsen 1995) allowed us to obtain the number of bibliographic references dedicated to the study of each of the 48 European national literatures, making it possible for us tovisualize the importance of each of these literatures and to compare them to economic and social indicators.