Daniel Shore
Georgetown University, English, Faculty Member
- Philosophy, English Literature, Critical Theory, Digital Humanities, Aesthetics, Literary Criticism, and 18 moreRenaissance Studies, British Literature, Renaissance Humanism, Renaissance Literature (Literature), Intellectual History, Early Modern Literature, John Milton, History of Philosophy, Frankfurt School, English, Cultural Studies, Research Methodology, Linguistics, Discourse Analysis, Corpus Linguistics, Construction Grammar, Cognitive Linguistics, and Usage-based Grammaredit
- Daniel Shore, Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, is currently completin... moreDaniel Shore, Provost's Distinguished Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University, is currently completing his second book project, Cyberformalism (under contract with Johns Hopkins University Press). His first book, Milton and the Art of Rhetoric, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2012, and he has articles published or forthcoming in journals such as PMLA, Critical Inquiry, Modern Philology, Shakespeare Quarterly, Milton Studies, and Milton Quarterly.____I teach at Georgetown University as Associate Professor of English. My training is in the literature of the Renaissance and the humanist rhetorical tradition, with a focus on Milton and the 17th-century. My second book project, Cyberformalism (under contract with Johns Hopkins UP), argues that full-text searchable archives make possible new objects of philological inquiry. It uses archives like Google Books and Early English Books Online, as well as corpus analysis tools like CQPweb and the BYU corpora, to trace the histories not of words or concepts but of linguistic forms. Such histories, I suggest, reinvigorate formalist criticism by making it thoroughly historical and comparative, allowing us to attend to the form of an utterance not simply in its self-evident presence and singularity but in the difference between its historical instantiations. Because of its focus on the quantitative analysis of big data, digital humanities research has overlooked the transformative potential of increasingly sophisticated search engines to enlarge the domain of literary and historical inquiry in ways that revise and enrich the most basic concepts of literary study: influence, fiction, imitation, and style. Even as it retells the histories of linguistic forms, this project explores the new media that make them possible. One part of Cyberformalism appeared as an article, "WWJD? The Genealogy of a Syntactic Form," in the Fall 2010 issue of Critical Inquiryedit
Linguistic forms are essential to meaning: like words, they make a semantic contribution to the things we say. We inherit them from past writers and speakers and fill them with different words to produce novel utterances. They shape us... more
Linguistic forms are essential to meaning: like words, they make a semantic contribution to the things we say. We inherit them from past writers and speakers and fill them with different words to produce novel utterances. They shape us and the ways we interpret the world. Yet prevalent assumptions about language and the constraints of print-finding tools have kept linguistic forms and their histories hidden from view.
Drawing on recent work in cognitive and construction grammar along with tools and methods developed by corpus and computational linguists, Daniel Shore’s Cyberformalism represents a new way forward for digital humanities scholars seeking to understand the textual past. Championing a qualitative approach to digital archives, Shore uses the abstract pattern-matching capacities of search engines to explore precisely those combinatory aspects of language—word order, syntax, categorization—discarded by the "bag of words" quantitative methods that are dominant in the digital humanities.
While scholars across the humanities have long explored the histories of words and phrases, Shore argues that increasingly sophisticated search tools coupled with growing full-text digital archives make it newly possible to study the histories of linguistic forms. In so doing, Shore challenges a range of received metanarratives and complicates some of the most basic concepts of literary study. Touching on canonical works by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Kant, even as it takes the full diversity of digitized texts as its purview, Cyberformalism asks scholars of literature, history, and culture to revise nothing less than their understanding of the linguistic sign.
Drawing on recent work in cognitive and construction grammar along with tools and methods developed by corpus and computational linguists, Daniel Shore’s Cyberformalism represents a new way forward for digital humanities scholars seeking to understand the textual past. Championing a qualitative approach to digital archives, Shore uses the abstract pattern-matching capacities of search engines to explore precisely those combinatory aspects of language—word order, syntax, categorization—discarded by the "bag of words" quantitative methods that are dominant in the digital humanities.
While scholars across the humanities have long explored the histories of words and phrases, Shore argues that increasingly sophisticated search tools coupled with growing full-text digital archives make it newly possible to study the histories of linguistic forms. In so doing, Shore challenges a range of received metanarratives and complicates some of the most basic concepts of literary study. Touching on canonical works by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Kant, even as it takes the full diversity of digitized texts as its purview, Cyberformalism asks scholars of literature, history, and culture to revise nothing less than their understanding of the linguistic sign.