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What Can Computers Do for Philology? A Case Study in Pseudo-Seneca

By Pramit Chaudhuri and Joseph P. Dexter

This paper outlines a sample of recent computational approaches aimed at aiding traditional interpretive work in literary criticism. Taking the corpus of Senecan tragedies as a case study, the paper demonstrates the power of computation both to identify standard stylistic features far more rapidly than manual methods and to highlight features too small and numerous for human readers to register with any comprehensiveness.