What are the key papers in our field? The papers you would give to someone to say, "This is why what we do matters." The papers that use the tools we build to make contributions that are simply too significant to be ignored?

Why this matters: because MONK is a big place, and we've pulled in lots of people from beyond the circumferences of our usual communities. It would be good to be able to point them to the stuff we think represents our work when it's done best.

This query began as a thread on the listserv. Not everything offered below is a response to the question formulated under exactly those terms.

Martin:

To my mind John Burrows' Computation into criticism: a study of Jane
Austen's novels and an experiment in method is a little masterpiece,
and there are worse descriptions of MONK than saying that twenty
years after its publication MONk aims at creating an environment in
which the technical barriers to doing this kind of work have been
lowered to a level at which this kind of inquiry can be done by
critics who are neither mathematicians nor programmers.

I also think very highly of his essay on text analysis in the
Unsworth/Schreibman Companion. The subject matter is not as
immediately gripping, but the essay shows the same skill in the
nuanced evaluation of statistical data for the particular purposes of
a literary historian or critics.

John:

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january98/01crane.html

http://texttechnology.mcmaster.ca/pdf/vol14_2/flanders14-2.pdf

http://computerphilologie.uni-muenchen.de/jg03/huitfeldt.html

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/public/jjm2f/radiant.html

http://texttechnology.mcmaster.ca/pdf/vol14_2/ramsay14-2.pdf

http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/Kings.5-00/primitives.html

http://tinyurl.com/yrgecr

Stan:

I've often enjoyed the witty presentations of Jan Rybicki, involving his
use of principal component analysis: http://llc.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/21/1/91

There's the project Melissa Terras was involved in, providing visual
tools for paleographers working on discarded tablets from Hadrian's
Wall. She has a book out through OUP, called *Image to Interpretation:
An intelligent system to aid historians in reading the Vindolanda texts*.

See also: http://www.hb.se/bhs/ith/23-00/mt.htm

I think of other people whose presentations I've enjoyed, but I don't
have articles at hand. I believe articles of the kind you ask for will
emerge, or have already but I haven't spotted them. The presentations I
saw dealt with specific applications and not just the technology. Some
at least have web pages, and no doubt the others do too but I didn't see
them quickly:

• Marc Plamondon on phonetics in poetry. Browning and Tennyson, I think. http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~mplamond/MarcCV.html
• Aaron Coburn on social networks in prose fiction
• Tanya Clement on repetitions in Stein
• David Hoover on metrical stresses in Old English meter http://homepages.nyu.edu/~dh3/dlhcv.html
• Steve Ramsay and Sara Steger on term frequencies in Woolf's The Waves

Stefan:

And though a simple list of publications is not what you want,
there's also the readily available articles listed in the ADHO Essays
page: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/Essays/