Dr Alexandra Huang-Kokina

Hello and welcome,

My name is Alexandra Huang-Kokina, a recent PhD graduate in Comparative Literature at the University of Edinburgh, and a former researcher in residence at our university’s digital research services team. With this blog post, I’d like to introduce you to a thrilling journey—a journey that dances on the fine line between the Humanities and quantitative sciences, a dance that weaves a rhythm so unique that it gives birth to an entirely new field of exploration and understanding.

Why this journey, you may ask? Throughout my academic and professional career, I have been drawn towards the confluence of arts and sciences. I’ve been fascinated by the potential of applying digital & quantitative methods, including AI-driven techniques, to humanities research, especially in literature and music. The potential of this transdisciplinary approach is stunning—it allows us to uncover patterns and connections that might otherwise remain hidden, illuminating our understanding of human culture and languages in unprecedented ways.

Currently, I am engaged in two Digital Humanities projects. One uses AI topic modelling to analyse opera librettos drived from the works by well-known composers, while the other applys machine learning for statistical natural language processing, mapping the literary concept of musical performativity in a global corpus of twentieth-century piano novels. These projects showcase the potential of merging AI-augmented approaches with literary textual analysis, offering unexpected insights and fresh perspectives to well-studied texts.

And this is where this blog comes in. Through this platform, I aim to share my experiences and offer guidance on how to apply digital & quantitative methods to humanities research. We’ll cover a range of topics, from the role of statistics and data visualisation in humanities research to digital asset management, DH ethical considerations, and future trends. Along the way, we’ll discuss the applied learning of various digital tools, delve into commonly used digital methodologies, and even explore the creative realm of generative models in literature and music.

My hope is that this blog will be a valuable resource for researchers and students who are interested in merging the quantitative and the qualitative, the scientific and the artistic. Together, we will learn, experiment, and push the boundaries of our understanding.

So, let’s embark on this journey to explore the new rhythm of humanities research. Let’s dance with numbers and create a symphony of literature and music, composed on the stave of quantitative analysis.