One of the difficult things about teaching literature is undoubtedly 'unteaching' people all the dumb things they've probably learned about literature. Arguably, before you can have a really productive analytical discussion about literature (which, I promise, can be a lot of fun), you have to understand literature as a kind of data.
No, I'm not saying you have to understand literature in a positivistic light. You have to understand that, even if meaning isn't always upfront and readily apparent (anymore than it would be for an actual data set), a work of literature is something concrete and coherent from which we can all learn something. And the process by which we can learn something from literature--literary criticism--is aimed ultimately at learning something about the human experience, and not necessarily about telling us what counts as art and what doesn't, what styles are similar and what aren't, or whether something is historically 'true' or not. Answering these kinds of questions have always been part of literary criticism, to be sure; but they are means toward the end of learning something about how humans experience the world. We would be foolish to get caught up in such questions as though they were the only ends in themselves.
Nevertheless, we often do get too caught up in these types of questions. For the right people, they're interesting; they're fun; and they're almost always endlessly debatable. The problem is, they're only the surface of what we can learn from literature. So when trying to teach literature as a kind of data--as a record of the human mind in action that can tell us something valuable about the human experience, beyond the literary page--it can be difficult to steer people away from common and understandable fixations on the so-called 'literary' questions of style, artistic merit, etc., as though answering these (fascinating) questions is all literary study has to offer.
When it comes to laypeople who are primarily interested in quantitative study, like these Dartmouth mathematicians, conveying an understanding of how best to approach the study of literature and how to draw logical and supported conclusions about literature is sometimes especially difficult. This is the case because it's especially difficult to look at literature as a kind of data when your job involves looking at actual data in a very specific way. Noting that 'literature is a form of expression that...provides a historical record of the evolution of culture,' the authors of the Dartmouth study seem poised to analyze literature in interesting and productive ways, but then go on to fixate on style.
Accordingly, the Dartmouth study uses quantitative methods to draw some really absurd and illogical conclusions about literature, doing sophisticated and skillful work that's underpinned by a number of amateurish and unfounded assumptions about literature. In this respect it's a little bit sad, really. The study is an example of the way that this entire genre of quantitative literary study, while valuable, also regularly sidesteps or misses altogether the most important and interesting questions about literature. Why would one assume, for example, that because writing style tends to be similar among authors who are contemporaries, such authors aren't influenced as much, or more, by previous authors? Is style the only way in which authorial influence can be manifested? How does authorial influence manifest in non-stylistic ways? Consider, for example, the contemporary South African writer J.M. Coetzee's award-winning novel, Foe. I doubt any human or computer would find Foe a strong stylistic match with Daniel Defoe's classic eighteenth-century novel Robinson Crusoe, though Foe is based entirely on Robinson Crusoe. A reading of style in these two novels (by human or computer) would undoubtedly find that Foe is more like other twentieth-century novels than it is like Robinson Crusoe; so such a reading could find, implausibly, that writers like Coetzee aren't influenced by 'classic' novels like Robinson Crusoe.
True, this study also tells us some incredibly interesting things about patterns in literature; and people like me are undoubtedly glad that the study was conducted. In fact, I think there's a very welcome place in the wider field of literary study for quantitative analyses of literature (see Franco Moretti's Stanford Literary Lab). The problem, however, is that quantitative determinations have a funny way of insinuating themselves as the most important and the most reliable. In the case of literature, however, knowing the basics of literary history and criticism may still lead us to the most interesting and fruitful questions, and their answers. This might come as a surprise for readers in our 'technological age,' but it shouldn't. After all, given how long people have been studying literature, and how long people have been applying quantitative analyses to their objects of study, if the latter were a breakthrough way of doing the former, wouldn't it be old news by now?
