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.
Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web, by Jerome McGann
The archive was built under the auspices of the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in Humanities (IATGH), which was founded the same year as The Rosseti Archive was begun..
The use of IT in humanities disciplines began in the late 1940s with Father Roberto Busa SJ, whose work on the copus of St. Thomas Aquinas set the terms in which humanities computing would operate successfully for more than 40 years. Two lines of work dominate the period: first the creation of databases of humanities materials — almost exclusively textual materials — for various types of automated retrieval, search, and analysis; second, the design and construction of statistical models for studying language formalities of many kinds, ranging from social and historical linguistics to the study of literary forms.
pg 3