Digital Humanities

Computer count of many instances shows that descriptions of physical action occur more than 10 times more often in fiction than in other types of writing

The New York Times has a new column called "Mechanical Muse;" I heard linguist Ben Zimmer describe his recent contribution on the book review's podcast:

Creative writers are clearly drawn to descriptive idioms that allow their characters to register emotional responses through telling bits of physical action — “business,” as they say in theater. The conventions of modern storytelling dictate that fictional characters react to their worlds in certain stock ways and that the storytellers use stock expressions to describe those reactions. 

Ok, that much was obvious to me in the last few years just because I was thinking about that as I read -- no computer needed. But, there's more: 

For David Bamman, a senior researcher in computational linguistics with Tufts University’s Perseus Project, analyzing collocations can help unwrap the way a writer “indexes” a literary style by lifting phrases from the past. Often this can consist of conscious allusions — Bamman and his colleagues used computational methods to zero in on the places in “Paradise Lost” where John Milton is alluding to the Latin of Virgil’s “Aeneid.” Though traditional literary scholarship has long sought to track these echoes, the work can now be done automatically, transcending any single analyst’s selective attention. The same methods can also ferret out how intertextuality can work on a more unconscious level, silently directing a writer to select particular word combinations to match the expectations of the appropriate genre.

Now THAT is worth following up on -- and extending to Chinese literature.