Intro
One thing that Digital Humanists—and especially Digital Humanists who focus on literature—like to do is look at the way that authors use certain vocabulary. Authors have a tendency to use certain key words again and again, and if we can figure out what those words are, then we can have an easier time identifying the author's style, that je ne sais quoi that makes their style their own.
Let's look at an excerpt from Archibald MacLeish's poem "'Dover Beach'—a Note to that Poem." (It was written as a response to Matthew Arnold's famous poem "Dover Beach.")
Quote
… It's a fine and a
Wild smother to vanish in: pulling down—
Tripping with outward ebb the urgent inward.
Speaking alone for myself it's the steep hill and the
Toppling lift of the young men I am toward now…
Analysis
David L. Hoover, a Digital Humanist, did a computational analysis of the recurrence of certain words in MacLeish's poetry. He found that certain words like "vanish," "steep," "lift" (among others like "hope," "rope," "stung," "fog," "ragged," "strung") recurred again and again in MacLeish's writing. These words, in other words, were "markers" of his style and voice.
We can see these words in the passage above. Just in this tiny excerpt, there are three of MacLeish's markers: "vanish," "steep," and "lift." (And more of these marker words, as Hoover shows, are in the poem as a whole).
So, thanks to digital methods, we can figure out what those words are that authors gravitate towards again and again. And that can be a great place to begin a literary analysis.