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The Open University Digital Humanities and History of Books andReaders Research Groups are pleased to announce that the next seminarin our joint seminar series on Digital Books, Digital Readers willtake place on 1 April, 5.30–7.30 pm, in Room 234, Institute of EnglishStudies, Senate House, London.All are welcome to attend.Date: 1 April 2019, 5.30pm - 7.30pmVenue: Room 234, Second Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HUSpeaker: Prof Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Huygens Institute for theHistory of the Netherlands and University of AmsterdamTitle: The Riddle of Literary Quality: can we measure literariness?What is literature, and can we measure it using new methods developedin the Digital Humanities? That is the key question of the project TheRiddle of Literary Quality. “The Riddle” is a research project of theHuygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands (Amsterdam) incollaboration with the Fryske Akademy (Leeuwarden) and the Institutefor Logic, Language and Computation (University of Amsterdam). TheRiddle combines computational analysis of writing style with theresults of a large online survey of readers, completed by almost14,000 participants. Correlating readers’ opinions and stylometricanalyses makes visible which linguistic features play a role, but alsowhich biases are in place. Some authors and some works clearly havemore prestige than others. Why? And what does this tell us aboutcontemporary society?Short bio:Karina van Dalen-Oskam is head of the department of literary studiesof Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands and professorin computational literary studies at the University of Amsterdam. Herresearch deals with the analysis of literary writing style and buildson her expertise in literary studies, medieval studies, onomastics andlexicography. She is an active member of the international digitalhumanities community, where she currently serves as chair of thesteering committee of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations(ADHO,&#160;https://adho.org/).