About

Mark Algee Hewitt is an Associate Professor of English at Stanford University and serves as the Director of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA), the Stanford Literary Lab, and the Director of Graduate Studies for the Program in Modern Thought and Literature. His research focuses on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England and Germany, aiming to combine literary criticism with digital and quantitative analyses of literary texts. He is particularly interested in the history of aesthetic theory, the development and transmission of aesthetic and philosophic concepts during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, and the relationship between aesthetic theory and poetry of the long eighteenth century. With a background in English literature and computer science, Dr. Hewitt has worked on projects that integrate literary interpretation with quantitative analysis. His current book project, The Afterlife of the Sublime, explores the history of the sublime by analyzing over 11,000 texts from the long eighteenth century to trace its discursive patterns and the reasons for the term's disappearance at the end of the Romantic period. He has also been involved in collaborative projects such as the Book History BiblioGraph, a dynamic online resource visualizing connections in Book History, and the Werther Topologies, which aims to identify lexical patterns influenced by Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther. Dr. Hewitt has taught courses in literary history and theory at McGill University, Rutgers University, and New York University, where he earned his PhD in 2008.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Biology
• Demography
• Statistics
• Geography
• Computer Science
• Mathematics
• Archaeology
• Data science
• Genetics
• Anthropology
• Chemistry
• Chromatography
• Criminology
• Bioinformatics

Selected publications

• The Canon

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-11-14

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• Computational Humanities

  Debates in the digital humanities · 2024-06-20 · 2 citations

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  Bringing together leading experts from across North America and Europe, _Computational Humanities_ redirects debates around computation and humanities digital scholarship from dualistic arguments to nuanced discourse centered around theories of knowledge and power. This volume is organized around four questions: Why or why not pursue computational humanities? How do we engage in computational humanities? What can we study using these methods? Who are the stakeholders? <br><br> Recent advances in technologies for image and sound processing have expanded computational approaches to cultural forms beyond text, and new forms of data, from listservs and code repositories to tweets and other social media content, have enlivened debates about what counts as digital humanities scholarship. Providing case studies of collaborations between humanities-centered and computation-centered researchers, this volume highlights both opportunities and frictions, showing that data and computation are as much about power, prestige, and precarity as they are about _p_\-values.

  PublisherDOI

• Embedded Ideas: Revolutionary Theory and Political Science in the Eighteenth Century

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-11-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Using a new visualisation technique for word embedding data, this chapter explores the formation of complex, compound concepts in the late eighteenth century, focusing specifically on ‘political revolution’. Word embedding models offer an alternative method of understanding relationships between terms, both as a function of proximity (as in collocation) and of shared contexts (as in synonyms). By measuring the direct distance within the embedding space between two words over time in a series of aligned models, we can witness two parts of a compound idea bind together and observe which terms provide the binding force between them. Using this method, I explore the way that ‘revolution’ travels across the eighteenth century in relation to the ‘political’. Although loosely linked in the wake of the Glorious Revolution at the outset of the century, revolution becomes heavily tied to Newtonian mechanics, before being pulled back into political usage during the French Revolution. The method I introduce here reveals the hidden connections to ‘science’ in both political and revolution that undergirds their eventual merger into the idea of ‘political revolution’ that we have inherited today.

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• Enlightenment Entanglements of Improvement and Growth

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-11-09

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  This chapter models the idea of economic growth in the period of the Enlightenment in Britain. Using methods developed in the Cambridge Concept Lab, it demonstrates that the ideas of improvement and progress supported the slow evolution of the notion of economic growth as a necessary good. It tracks the thinking of the philosopher and political economist Adam Smith as he formulated his ideas with respect to size and operation of modern capitalist economies.

  PublisherDOI

• The Affordances of Mere Length

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Do short stories cohere into a genre, different from other prose fiction, merely by virtue of their length, or, as some critics have argued, are there narrative and thematic differences that go beyond the question of how long they are? In this chapter, we turn to Digital Humanities methods to explore these questions in a corpus of around 10,000 short stories published in twentieth-century women’s magazines. As we analyze the deployment of characters, the narrative patterns, and the linguistic variety of the short stories in our corpus, we reveal the ways that these popular short stories trace a new history of short story writing. The constraints of “mere” length, our analysis shows, allow short fiction to develop a new kind of narrative, one different from that of the novel. Rather than simply a side-effect of the genre, the shortness of the short story is fundamental to understanding its narrative possibilities.

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• Modeling Therapy as Discourse in Twentieth-Century American Literature

  American Literary History · 2023-06-28

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article uses quantitative methods of cultural analytics in order to trace points of contact between the discourse of therapy as it emerges in the encounter between patient and clinician and in the language of twentieth-century US novels. Our computational analysis moves away from considering therapy as a diagnostic tool, either for characters or authors, and towards thinking about therapy as a discourse: a set of words (semantics) in a pattern of proportions (parts of speech, grammar). Our computational models identify excerpts of novels that contain therapy discourse and, in so doing, reveal the ways that the discourse of therapy exists in the novel beyond its expected pathways of entry (through setting, plot, and characterization). In close reading these excerpts, we observe the consistent use of a representational aesthetics of psychological interiority, one that endeavors to approximate a realistic experience of living in and through our interactions with one another. We propose that therapy as a discourse is not strictly a clinical endeavor but is more broadly an intersubjective enterprise—a process-oriented linguistic phenomenon that arises in a more heterogeneous canon of novels than those in which critics have traditionally thought to look. Using cultural analytical methods to explore therapy as a discourse helps us . . . to consider therapy and the novel as interdependent terms of analysis and at heretofore impossible scales.

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• THE ENDS OF DIGITAL HUMANITIES

  Bloomsbury Academic eBooks · 2023-01-01

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• “Looking as from a Distance on the World”: Poetic Epistemologies of the Long Eighteenth Century

  The Wordsworth Circle · 2022-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
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• The reality of the dead in Brazil: perspectives on identification in forensic anthropology.

  PubMed · 2022-01-01 · 2 citations

  editorialOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Understanding the Relationship between Genetic Markers and Skeletal Remains: Implications for Forensic Anthropology and Phenotype-Genotype Studies

  Human Biology · 2022-01-01

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  Human identification techniques have been a leading tool to hold perpetrators accountable, give families closure, and approximate faces on skulls. This project is a pilot study to critically examine three disciplines that fall under the human identification umbrella: forensic anthropology, forensic genetics, and forensic art. Current facial research in genetics focuses on data from living individuals, identifying specific single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) that influence specific regions of the face. This study assesses the translation of these regions to craniometric dimensions (interlandmark distances) of the underlying skull itself. The goal of this project is to provide information regarding the correlation of craniometric measurements and SNPs, as well as to encourage interdisciplinary work within the forensic sciences. We examined a selection of candidate SNPs currently identified in the literature to examine correlations between interlandmark distances and these SNPs within the same individual. A series of 99 craniometric landmarks were collected from 17 documented skulls from the Texas State Donated Skeletal Collection using a three-dimensional Microscribe digitizer. Criteria for inclusion in this study included European American ancestry, presence of intact skulls, and presence of associated donor blood cards collected at the time of body donation. Using these blood cards, DNA from each individual was extracted, amplified, and sequenced through next-generation sequencing for the chosen SNPs. Bioinformatics tests were then applied to observe the presence or absence of the major or minor alleles in specific locations on the genome. After determining the presence or absence of an SNP (minor allele), a set of statistical tests were performed, including Spearman’s correlation between the craniometric measurements and the individual’s genetic data variables; two-way hierarchical clustering and bootstrap forest modeling between variables that demonstrated significant correlation; a principal components analysis on the craniometric data (interlandmark measurements) and genetic data (SNP presence/absence) to check homogeneity of each data set; and a pairwise Procrustes analysis on the correlation of the two data sets as different groups. The results indicate correlations of varying degrees between the targeted craniofacial regions and the targeted SNPs. Eleven SNPs showed significant correlation (p < 0.05), but the correlations were not as expected and showed some interesting results. By group level there was no significant correlation, but there was correlation at the individual level. While some SNPs affected the soft tissues only, others showed correlations with the skull (hard tissue), a finding not previously reported. Combining craniometric and DNA analyses to leverage genotype-phenotype associations has great potential to expand the discourse of current facial approximation and thereby to provide new investigative tools for human identification in forensic anthropology.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Graciela S. Cabana

  Hudson Institute

  344 shared

• Anne L. Grauer

  Loyola University Chicago

  343 shared

• Leslie C. Aiello

  The University of Tokyo

  343 shared

• Trudy R. Turner

  John Wiley & Sons (United States)

  343 shared

• Kristi Lewton

  University of Southern California

  343 shared

• Joe Tomaszewski

  University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

  343 shared

• Dennis E. Slice

  Florida State University

  26 shared

• Jieun Kim

  20 shared