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Faculty Fellow

Hoyt Long

Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Japanese Literature and Digital Studies University of Chicago

Biography

Photo by Erielle Bakkum

Hoyt Long is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Japanese Literature and Digital Studies at the University of Chicago (Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations). His research and teaching interests range from literature, media, and book history to platform studies, cultural analytics, and generative AI. His most recent book, The Values in Numbers: Reading Japanese Literature in a Global Information Age (2021), offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. Since then, he has written articles that rethink literary translation in the wake of neural machine translation; that explore how platforms are reshaping global televisual attention and response; and that consider the possibilities of generative AI for cultural co-intelligence. He is currently collaborating on projects that include Niche Worlds: How Streaming Platforms Changed Attention and Reception and a set of studies that investigate the limits and affordances of large-language models as readers, writers, and instructors of literature. You can learn more about Professor Long’s research on his faculty profile page.

Featured Project

An AI-generated image includes a synthesis amalgamating a large set of illustrated texts

Humanistic AI: Reimagining Humanistic Pursuits in the Age of Generated Media

Project Team:

2025 – 2027

Projects

Global Literary Networks

Global Literary Networks

Combining large datasets, social scientific methods, and close reading approaches, this project investigated the social dimensions of modernist literary history and aesthetics.
Global Literary Networks was a two-year digital humanities research project that examined the production, diffusion, and reception of literature on a macro-interpretative scale using tools of network analysis and network visualization. Combining large datasets, social scientific methods, and ...

Project Team:

Re-Staging the Lakeview Japanese American Neighborhood

Two women bowling

Re-Staging the Lakeview Japanese American Neighborhood

A Visiting Fellowship will enable Japanese novelist Yu Miri to develop an archive of oral histories and a theatrical performance based on interviews with local Japanese Americans on their memories of the community that sprung up in Chicago’s Lakeview neighborhood after World War II.
This project will bring Yu Miri, one of Japan’s most distinguished novelists and playwrights, to campus as a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow. During this stay she will work with local faculty to develop an archive of oral history interviews she will conduct with members of the local Japanese ...

Textual Optics

Textual Optics

An interdisciplinary group of scholars collaborated in a lab-like environment to formulate a unique, data-driven approach to the reading and interpretation of textual archives, from single words up to millions of volumes.
With the rise of the digital humanities has come the promise of new methods of exploring literary texts on an unprecedented scale. How does our approach to literature and literary history change when the canon expands to include millions of texts—all of them immediately analyzable by cutting-edge ...