For An Encore, She'll Count the Umlauts

Princeton senior Katherine Milkman dumped a bunch of New Yorker fiction in a computer "to discern, among other things, whether certain fiction editors at the magazine had a specific impact on the type of fiction that was published, the sex of authors and the race of characters." David Carr (NYT) calls the results a "confirmation of the obvious," but something about her wowed the Times enough to give her story space. Me, I'm more curious about the CD-ROM she made with her survey's data--in other words, a big ol' database of New Yorker short stories.

There's also a passing reference to the statistics-based literary studies approach of Franco Moretti, who attracted Beatrice's attention a while back.