Reading Between The Numbers

The Values in Numbers

Ideas about how to study and understand cultural history—particularly literature—are rapidly changing as new digital archives and tools for searching them become available. This is not the first information age, however, to challenge ideas about how and why we value literature and the role numbers might play in this process. The Values in Numbers tells the longer history of this evolving global conversation from the perspective of Japan and maps its potential futures for the study of Japanese literature and world literature more broadly. Hoyt Long offers both a reinterpretation of modern Japanese literature through computational methods and an introduction to the history, theory, and practice of looking at literature through numbers. He weaves explanations of these methods and their application to literature together with critical reflection on the kinds of reasoning such methodologies facilitate. Chapters guide readers through increasingly complex techniques while making novel arguments about topics of fundamental concern, including the role of quantitative thinking in Japanese literary criticism; the canonization of modern literature in print and digital media; the rise of psychological fiction as a genre; the transnational circulation of modernist forms; and discourses of race under empire. Long models how computational methods can be applied outside English-language contexts and to languages written in non-Latin scripts. Drawing from fields as diverse as the history of science, book history, world literature, and critical race theory, this book demonstrates the value of numbers in literary study and the values literary critics can bring to the reading of difference in numbers.

Gunner's Mate G 3 & 2

Numbers

The book of Numbers has had something of a renaissance in scholarly engagement in recent years - and this careful and contemporary commentary by Altmann and Peres distils that conversation with sensitivity and rigour. The joint nature of this commentary by two authors from different contexts helps to illuminate Numbers for the contemporary reader, as it seeks to make God's word a source of blessing, nourishment and hope for all. The Tyndale Old Testament Commentary is designed to help the reader of the Bible understand what the text of the book of Numbers says and what it means. The Introduction to this commentary gives a concise but thorough treatment of its authorship, date, original setting and purpose. Following a structural Analysis, the Commentary takes the book of Numbers section by section, drawing out its main themes and also commenting on individual verses and problems of interpretation. Additional Notes provide fuller discussion of particular difficulties. In the new Old Testament volumes, the commentary on each section of the text is structured under three headings: Context, Comment and Theology. The goal is to explain the true meaning of the Bible and make its message plain.