Hacking the Humanities
One student, Henry, a double major in computer science and mathematics, approached the assignment differently. Rather than trying to imitate Pliny himself, he found a text version of “The Natural History” on the Internet, analyzed its thirty-seven books using a natural-language processing toolkit, and then wrote a computer algorithm that generated English sentences using the discovered features of Pliny’s style. Here’s a sample from the passage that he submitted:
.. As the stakes have grown, so has an expectation about the role that the “digital turn” might play in revivifying the humanities, effecting a synthesis with the sciences, and other weighty causes.