Milan Terlunen conceived and realized a pilot project to study the practice of quotation in scholarly writing while earning his PhD at Columbia University. He led a team at Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research that built a text-matcher tool to detect quotations from a source text in a large collection of academic journal articles.
At MIT, he will use the text-matcher tool and conceptual framework developed through this pilot project to ask a new set of questions about a different set of texts, with the end goal of offering a new account of how “theory” functions, and how it developed historically, within the writings of scholars across the humanities and social sciences.
