Computational Literary Studies and Mental Health

James Carney's current research investigates how mental illness interacts with textual structures – specifically, using machine learning to investigate the potential therapeutic qualities of literature with different levels of entropy (unpredictability) and abstraction, for anxiety disorders versus depression. We also touch on wider questions of motivation in the health humanities and literary studies, the appeal of belief in the transformative power of literature, and the expansion of textual/computational inquiry out into structural anthropology.