"Literature is a form of expression whose temporal structure, both in content and style, provides a historical record of the evolution of culture. In this work we take on a quantitative analysis of literary style and conduct the first large-scale temporal stylometric study of literature by using the vast holdings in the Project Gutenberg Digital Library corpus. We find temporal stylistic localization among authors through the analysis of the similarity structure in feature vectors derived from content-free word usage, nonhomogeneous decay rates of stylistic influence, and an accelerating rate of decay of influence among modern authors. Within a given time period we also find evidence for stylistic coherence with a given literary topic, such that writers in different fields adopt different literary styles. This study gives quantitative support to the notion of a literary “style of a time” with a strong trend toward increasingly contemporaneous stylistic influence."

It'll be interesting to see how they handle the bias induced by selective retention.

15th century Chaucer fanfic.

"A distinctive feature of this project's methodology will be its use of large-scale full-text digital archives and tools for analyzing and classifying large amounts of "dirty" data (from over 100,000 books) alongside more traditional modes of close reading. I refer to this data as dirty because the scans of the pages have not been checked for accuracy. Researchers working with this sort of data need to use statistical methods to allow for the inevitable machine-generated error in such a process. Using such databases alongside more traditional modes of reading will give the project a broader range of texts to analyze and from which to draw conclusions. ... " Moretti's student?

Hmmmm.

"How should we understand the fear and fascination elicited by the accounts of communicable disease outbreaks that proliferated, following the emergence of HIV, in scientific publications and the mainstream media? The repetition of particular characters, images, and story lines--of Patients Zero and superspreaders, hot zones and tenacious microbes--produced a formulaic narrative as they circulated through the media and were amplified in popular fiction and film. The outbreak narrative begins with the identification of an emerging infection, follows it through the global networks of contact and contagion, and ends with the epidemiological work that contains it. Priscilla Wald argues that we need to understand the appeal and persistence of the outbreak narrative because the stories we tell about disease emergence have consequences."