Sadly this post isn't really about teaching students (from university) anything on literature. If it were so, they would have to look at very different theories

Sadly this post isn't really about teaching students (from university) anything on literature. If it were so, they would have to look at very different theories/schools of study of literature. There are quite a lot of schools/theories that could greatly benefit from a technical supported empirical method. For example inter-textuality[1], the school that practically says every text has links to other texts, quotes, parts that are plagiarism, different stances on the shared topics or are just in the same genre. So yeah, Detecting hidden "links" between texts could give you interesting insights, or might tell you, that there could be "hidden" texts, still unknown to us, as they were lost. Reading (and writing my final thesis on on of his books) a lot from Umberto Eco showed me, what it means, that literary works are nodes in a network. Reading "The Name of the Rose" (and not just watching the movie) really drove home this point. Especially, if you know a little bit about history or the basic structure of the genre "detective stories" ;-) [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsests:_Literature_in_the_Second_Degree https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsests:_Literature_in_the... (the German version is much more elaborate)