Computation and Form, Reconsidered

Throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, critics have continually reconsidered the compatibility of computation and the humanities. Often, questions of “form” have played key roles in these conversations. In the 1940s, for example, critics asked whether word-counting might capture “formal units” of poetry like style. By the 2010s, scholars debated with new fervor whether computational methods could—or should—be used to track aesthetic structures like narrative, character, or genre, and especially without eliding rich socio-historical contexts. Today, these debates are by no means over. But they look different after a half decade of new work, and a cascade of theoretical and technical developments—perhaps most prominently, increasing attention to audiovisual materials and the explosion of transformer-based generative AI. In this special issue, we bring together scholars from across multiple disciplines to reconsider the intersections between computation and form for this emerging technological and critical moment. Together, their work represents a digital humanities in multiple types of transition. The essays collected in this issue refine existing computational critical methods to enable more nuanced and contextualized formal analysis; they apply these methods beyond literary or aesthetic canons to broader ranges of audiovisual, pop-cultural, and technical artifacts, from comics and conspiracy theories to viral TikToks; and they consider prompt-based LLMs, not only as new tools of aesthetic analysis, but also as cultural and technical “forms” in their own right. The articles in this special issue will be published in groups on a rolling basis over the coming weeks.