The digital medium has opened a range of innovative possibilities for capturing, analysing and sharing information, and, as is the case in virtually all academic disciplines, a growing number of scholars in the field of literary studies are currently trying to harness the countless affordances of computational methods. As has been shown in numerous studies, digital technologies can radically transform the ways in which we can examine works of literature. Based on their capacity to store large amounts of data, and on the concomitant ability to perform extensive and complicated calculations within milliseconds, computers can help scholars to discover remarkable trends or correlations within massive collections of texts. Such analyses often reveal patterns which we could never see before, taking place on a scale that far exceeds the human bandwidth. Many of these technical possibilities have already been seized productively by scholars in the field of literary history. Digital methods can be used, for instance, to study the stylistic differences between texts from different historical eras, or to trace the rise and fall of literary genres in their entirety. Despite the many technological advances, it can be observed that, within the field of literary studies at large, the use of computers is still limited. The experiments with computer-assisted forms of reading have largely remained confined to a small group of pioneers. This slim uptake can partly be explained through the fact that it is still unclear whether computational and quantitative methods can genuinely expand or transform the ways in which we can interpret literary works. Such a capacity to provoke and to enhance hermeneutic interactions with texts is of crucial importance, since literary scholarship typically focuses on the quality and the meaning of literary texts, and on the various and intricate ways in which this meaning is produced. The main objective of this thesis is to understand the possibilities and the limitations of a computer-based literary criticism. Additionally, this study aims to illuminate the various ways in which the literary criticism that can be enabled by computational methods differs from the more traditional forms of criticism, which are generally based on detailed analyses of paper-based texts.

Because of this focus on the differences between computer-assisted scholarship on the one hand and scholarship based on printed resources on the other, this study fits within a longer tradition of research into the social and cultural implications of new media. This study is centrally based on the assumption that scholarship does not function autonomously, and that the methodologies and the