Who we are...

Principal Investigators:

  • Hoyt Long is an Associate Professor of Japanese Literature in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. He conducts research in the field of cultural analytics and has written extensively on the use of computational methods for the study of literary history. This includes work on global modernism, modern Japanese literature, and the US novel. He is director of the Chicago Text Lab and a member of the NovelTM group at McGill University.
  • Robert Morrissey is the Benjamin Franklin Professor of French in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. Founder and Director of the ARTFL Project (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language), one of the oldest and most well-established digital humanities project, he is general editor of the ARTFL on-line edition of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Situated at the confluence of literature and poetics on the one hand and ideology and politics on the other, his work concentrates on themes, topoi, and cultural currents over the longue durée.
  • Haun Saussy is University Professor in Comparative Literature, East Asian Languages & Civilizations, and the Committee on Social Thought. His work bears mostly on classical Chinese literature and the problems of interpretation it raises. Some of these problems are amenable to corpus-based solutions, such as text reuse and the properties of genre and style. Other issues that he has worked on include media theory, translation, and the history of linguistic thought.
  • James Sparrow is an Associate Professor in History and the College.

Project Director & Technical Director:

  • Clovis Gladstone is the Project Director and Technical Director of the Textual Optics Lab. He is a long-time member of the ARTFL Project where he has been leading the development of PhiloLogic for several years, as well as developing a range of data-mining and machine learning techniques for text analysis. He specializes in French Early-Modern intellectual history, and more particularly 18th century materialism, and holds a doctorate in French Literature from the University of Chicago.

Postdoctoral Fellows:

  • Wei Zhao  is a postdoctoral fellow at Capital Normal University, Beijing, specializing in modern Chinese literature and digital humanities. The first scholar who used the digital humanities method to explore the narration patterns in large-scale modern Chinese novels. She is now serving as a researcher for Textual Optics's major Chinese-language project and also  working on a project of  Moyan’s Full Texts Corpus and Modern Chinese Literature Text Mining.
  • Marine Riguet (Sorbonne Université, Paris, France)

Team members:

  • Charles Cooney is a Project Manager and long-time member of the ARTFL Project who has developed a range of digitized text resources for ARTFL as well as for Electronic Text Services and the Digital South Asia Library Project based in the Regenstein Library. With a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Chicago, Charles also has extensive experience conducting algorithmic-based text research.
  • Spencer Stewart is a PhD student in the History Department at the University of Chicago. He is an Assistant Developer at the Textual Optics Lab working primarily on the Republican China corpus.
  • Peyton Wolf is a student programmer working on modernizing the PhiloLogic code base, and adding some additional features to it. He's a current second-year undergraduate computer science major at the University of Chicago who has a high level of interest in low-level C code and the tradeoffs between performance and portability."