Intro
The Digital Humanities scholars Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs decided to do an experiment. In "Searching for the Victorians," Cohen talks about how they wanted to find out what kinds of books got published—and when—during the Victorian period.
So he and Gibbs went ahead and got a huge batch of data from GoogleBooks, which included 1,681,161 books that were published in Britain between 1789-1914. Cohen and Gibbs then started doing searches for specific words in the titles of books. One of those words they searched for was "revolution."
Let's look at this excerpt from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, which is totally one of the books that popped up in Cohen and Gibbs's search for "revolution."
Quote
All circumstances taken together, the French revolution is the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world. The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and apparently, by the most contemptible instruments. Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies.
Analysis
Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is a famous treatise on the French Revolution. In it, he basically disses the French revolutionaries, saying that they were a bunch of idiots. Pretty controversial stuff, right?
Burke wasn't the only one writing about the French Revolution at the time. Loads and loads of people were. And how do we know this? Well, we know this thanks to analyzing that huge digital archive of Victorian books. As Cohen and Gibbs show, the publication of books with the word "revolution" in the title—books like Burke's—spiked around the time of the French Revolution (1789), and the revolutions of 1848.
In other words, with statistical text analysis, we can find all kinds of quantitative data about what people were thinking and writing about at specific points in history. And as a result, we can see all kinds of interesting links between history and literature.