Andrew Piper – författare

Much ink has been spilled lamenting or championing the decline of printed books. In Book Was There, Andrew Piper shows that the rich history of reading itself offers unexpected clues to what lies in store for books - print or digital. From medieval manuscript books to today's interactive urban fictions, Piper explores the manifold ways that physical media have shaped how we read. In doing so, he uncovers the intimate connections we develop with our reading materials-how we hold them, play with them, and even where we read them - and shows how reading is interwoven with our experiences in life. Piper reveals that reading's many identities, past and present, on page and on screen, are the key to helping us understand the kind of reading we care about and how new technologies will - and will not-change old habits. Contending that our experience of reading belies naive generalizations about the future of books, Book Was There is an elegantly argued and thoroughly up-to-date tribute to the endurance of books in our ever-evolving digital world.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin produced books in ever greater numbers. But it was not just the advent of mass printing that created the era's "bookish" culture. According to Andrew Piper, romantic writing and writers played a crucial role in adjusting readers to this overflowing literary environment - learning how to use and to want books was importantly a product of the symbolic operations contained within books. Examining novels, critical editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated volumes, as well as the communities who made them, Dreaming in Books tells a wide-ranging story of the book's identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. In revisiting the book's rise through the prism of romantic literature, Piper aims to revise our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book in our so-called digital age.

For well over a century, academic disciplines have studied human behavior using quantitative information. Until recently, however, the humanities have remained largely immune to the use of data—or vigorously resisted it. Thanks to new developments in computer science and natural language processing, literary scholars have embraced the quantitative study of literary works and have helped make Digital Humanities a rapidly growing field. But these developments raise a fundamental, and as yet unanswered question: what is the meaning of literary quantity?In Enumerations, Andrew Piper answers that question across a variety of domains fundamental to the study of literature. He focuses on the elementary particles of literature, from the role of punctuation in poetry, the matter of plot in novels, the study of topoi, and the behavior of characters, to the nature of fictional language and the shape of a poet’s career. How does quantity affect our understanding of these categories? What happens when we look at 3,388,230 punctuation marks, 1.4 billion words, or 650,000 fictional characters? Does this change how we think about poetry, the novel, fictionality, character, the commonplace, or the writer’s career? In the course of answering such questions, Piper introduces readers to the analytical building blocks of computational text analysis and brings them to bear on fundamental concerns of literary scholarship. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Digital Humanities and the future of literary study.

For well over a century, academic disciplines have studied human behavior using quantitative information. Until recently, however, the humanities have remained largely immune to the use of data—or vigorously resisted it. Thanks to new developments in computer science and natural language processing, literary scholars have embraced the quantitative study of literary works and have helped make Digital Humanities a rapidly growing field. But these developments raise a fundamental, and as yet unanswered question: what is the meaning of literary quantity?In Enumerations, Andrew Piper answers that question across a variety of domains fundamental to the study of literature. He focuses on the elementary particles of literature, from the role of punctuation in poetry, the matter of plot in novels, the study of topoi, and the behavior of characters, to the nature of fictional language and the shape of a poet’s career. How does quantity affect our understanding of these categories? What happens when we look at 3,388,230 punctuation marks, 1.4 billion words, or 650,000 fictional characters? Does this change how we think about poetry, the novel, fictionality, character, the commonplace, or the writer’s career? In the course of answering such questions, Piper introduces readers to the analytical building blocks of computational text analysis and brings them to bear on fundamental concerns of literary scholarship. This book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Digital Humanities and the future of literary study.

At the opening of the nineteenth century, publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin produced books in ever greater numbers. But it was not just the advent of mass printing that created the era's 'bookish' culture. According to Andrew Piper, romantic writers played a crucial role in adjusting readers to this increasingly international and overflowing literary environment. Learning how to use and want books occurred through more than the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible; the making of such bibliographic fantasies was importantly a product of the symbolic operations contained within books as well. Examining novels, critical editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, "Dreaming in Books" tells a wide-ranging story of the book's identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era.In revisiting the book's rise through the prism of romantic literature, Piper aims to revise our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book in our so-called digital age.

High Lean Country captures the rich history and haunting character of the New England region of northern New South Wales.The authors explore how memory - of land, of family, of patterns of life on the other side of the world - has influenced the identity of New England. They also consider how the high country itself has shaped its people and their sense of regional uniqueness. In doing so, this book sets a new direction for understanding Australia as a whole.Weaving together the histories of human settlement, economic, social and cultural development, as well as interactions with the environment, High Lean Country shows how colonial settlers strived for decades to literally create a new England. It traces the story of the graduates of Oxford and Cambridge who turned their hands to sheep husbandry and developed a squattocracy, the establishment of schools and other institutions, and the cultivation of traditional arts. It also examines the early colonial bushranging period, and a history of not always friendly relations between white settlers and the local Aboriginal population.A project of the Heritage Futures Research Centre at the University of New England, High Lean Country is a fascinating study of this distinctive Australian high country.

This Element tackles the problem of generalization with respect to text-based evidence in the field of literary studies. When working with texts, how can we move, reliably and credibly, from individual observations to more general beliefs about the world? The onset of computational methods has highlighted major shortcomings of traditional approaches to texts when it comes to working with small samples of evidence. This Element combines a machine learning-based approach to detect the prevalence and nature of generalization across tens of thousands of sentences from different disciplines alongside a robust discussion of potential solutions to the problem of the generalizability of textual evidence. It exemplifies the way mixed methods can be used in complementary fashion to develop nuanced, evidence-based arguments about complex disciplinary issues in a data-driven research environment.

Why human storytelling matters: the science behind attention, memory, and connection.How do the stories we read shape the ways we think, perceive, and navigate the world? In this ambitious and timely book, Andrew Piper argues that fiction is far more than entertainment. Stories cultivate attention, perspective, and embodied understanding in ways increasingly vital to modern life.Piper is the director of McGill University's ".txtlab," a digital humanities laboratory that uses AI and computational modeling to study how storytelling works. Rather than using AI to generate fiction, Piper employs these tools to analyze patterns across thousands of novels, folk tales, fan-fiction archives, and works of contemporary global literature. By translating elements of narrative—characters, emotions, objects, behaviors, social relationships, and points of view—into measurable features, his lab can identify patterns that no individual reader could easily detect through ordinary reading alone. Across these diverse traditions of storytelling, Piper demonstrates that fiction consistently foregrounds lived experience: characters moving through richly textured environments, objects charged with emotional and cognitive significance, worlds rendered through accumulated sensory detail. These patterns reveal fiction's distinctive ability to model how minds and bodies engage with their surroundings. Piper connects these findings to the cognitive science concept of embodied cognition, or the idea that thought emerges through our physical and emotional engagement with the world.Fiction, he argues, does more than immerse us in imagined worlds. It trains us to examine experience with greater flexibility, attention, and interpretive distance. By coordinating our attention around the lives of others across cultures and centuries, stories help us inhabit perspectives that would otherwise remain inaccessible. At a moment when AI is reshaping how we think about language and creativity, Why You Should Read More Fiction offers a powerful defense of human storytelling and reading.