"I Had To Hire Henry": The New Yorker Documents A Brown CS Student's "Hacking The Humanities"
- Posted by Jesse Polhemus
- on July 13, 2015
Writing in The New Yorker, Brown University's Elias I. Muhanna, Manning Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature, describes the experience of working with "Henry", a Brown CS student who helped him develop an algorithm that could detect different types of rhetorical figures in a large corpus of poetry.
"Our collaboration," he explains, "didn’t need to offer a panacea for the humanities to be worthwhile; it just needed to solve a problem. I could hear the silence hanging in the classroom again, aware that the undergraduate with his skittering laptop keyboard was now doing the talking, while I was the one grasping for answers."
The original article is available here.
Image provided by The Walters Art Museum under Creative Commons license.
