“Victorian Eyes” is a traveling art exhibition that examines nineteenth-century British literature from literary, statistical, and artistic vantages. With the modern deluge of media and information, it is easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer amounts of data available. With “Victorian Eyes,” we aim to inspire both specialists within our fields and nonspecialists to think about how the intersections of literature, statistics, and art can help us “see,” analyze, and explain large amounts of data. While our fields may seem like an eclectic grouping, all deal in varying modes with perspective, which is the unifying theme this exhibition is designed to explore. One intriguing literary and statistical finding (based on word frequencies, words lengths, unique words, etc.) functions as the muse for each art piece in our exhibition. Each art piece also features a QR code that links to a page on the exhibit’s website where more detailed information about the literary, statistical, and artistic perspectives about the results can be found.

This project won the New Arts Venture Challenge 1st place prize in 2013. For the write-up, please visit the award announcement. The project team included Carrie Roy (Library) and Fred Boehm (Statistics).

In addition to the exhibition, we held an afternoon seminar and reception in partnership with the Humanities Research Bridge. The seminar, Data in the Humanities Plus Art (later renamed Digital Humanities Plus Art or DH+A) , questioned how art can contribute to the analysis of humanities data. The controversy surrounding the digital humanities involves fear of taking the “human” out of humanities. Can the combination of literature, statistics, and art alleviate these concerns and make the approaches to and value in computational methods more accessible? Or, is this line of inquiry the equivalent of parlor tricks and little more? Can computational approaches give texts an opportunity to speak to us with a clearer voice than we have ever heard, which art can then (re-)translate or make accessible to a wider audience? The event generated a lively discussion among a diverse audience of science and humanities scholars and the public at large. For the event recording, visit the Victorian Eyes DH+A webpage.