Squinting at a Sea of Dots: Visualising Australian Readerships Using Statistical Machine Learning

The key question when approaching literary studies with empirical methods is how to move between the generalisations involved in empirical research and the attention to the particular that characterises literary analysis: in other words, how such data could be made useful to literary analysis? This chapter examines one such approach. Specifically, it uses a collaboration between Australian literary studies and statistical machine learning to suggest how, in practice, empirical modes of research can speak to, enhance, or even help to direct more traditional modes of literary analysis.