Can Literary Genius Be Graphed?

I read an interesting article in the New York Times, titled “The Word Choices That Explain Why Jane Austen Endures,” that explains the results of research done by Stanford Literary Lab. This lab applies data analysis to the study of fiction. The founder of the lab argues that certain books survive through the choices of ordinary readers, a process somehow like evolution.

The article asks, what traits make Austen special, and can they be measured with data?

The above-mentioned research has produced a graph that shows the main characteristics of Jane Austen's five famous novels. These investigations are based on a statistical method called principal component analysis, a technique that tries to extract the main dimensions of a dataset.

This analysis showed that Jane Austen's novels have a vocabulary that focuses on the abstract more than the physical, and on the quotidian more than the melodramatic.

Read the full article here.