a project developed by Martin Gliserman, a professor in the Department of English at Rutgers and a practicing psychoanalyst, uses the quantitative and graphic capacities of information technology to disclose the complex linguistic dimensions of literary texts. Its current focus is the verbal and semantic graphing of one hundred Anglophone novels written between 1719 and 1997--the individual texts as well as the collective chronology they compose. The project shows that the macro-chronology reflects regular patterns in micro-textual linguistic distributions. This suggests that a cultural template may guide the composition of novels across time and place, enabling innovation within a broad framework of verbal and semantic possibility. The project's focus is in the process of being enlarged.
