Lecture Series: Corina Koolen

Dr. Corina Koolen is a postdoctoral fellow in digital humanities project The Riddle of Literary Quality, conducted at the Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (Amsterdam). She defended her thesis, Reading beyond the female, successfully last May and is now brooding on other ways of making this world a tiny bit of a better place.

Gender and the Riddle of Literary Quality

We as readers like to think that we don’t have bias, that we can judge books quite objectively. However, when The Riddle of Literary Quality project did a large survey in the world of people who read Dutch-language books, some subtle (and less subtle) gender biases came to light. In this talk, Koolen explains what the team found and the dozen ways she tried to tease out the cause of this bias. Some of which failed, and others which proved more successful. Part of this is a computer analysis of the texts of hundreds of novels: is gender really that important for writing style? Koolen will give the answer to this and other burning questions.