Introducing the Corpus of the Canon of Western Literature: A corpus for culturomics and stylistics

This paper introduces the Corpus of the Canon of Western Literature (Version 1.0), accompanied by a demonstration of its potential uses. The canon of western literature has been an important construct in the study of literature, long standing and long contested. It has been argued to represent many of the greatest works produced in the history of western literature. This corpus operationalizes the western canon based on Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994). The paper describes the development of the corpus, its organization and source material. Corpus procedures are applied to the corpus, such as word frequency analysis, lemmatization and keyness, to demonstrate its potential uses in culturomics and corpus stylistics, two interdisciplinary fields between the traditional and digital humanities, and the linguistic and literary approaches to literature. Culturomics is the study of culture and social psychology via the investigation of corpora of literature as cultural artefacts, while corpus stylistics is the application of corpus linguistics to traditional literary scholarship. The corpus introduced in this paper is open source and freely available.