Erik publishes and teaches on digital humanities, computational linguistic approaches to literary and historical texts, as well as legal and ethical issues in research data and research infrastructures.

Erik’s first book, Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities: Computational Approaches to Style (Bloomsbury 2022), is a computational study of style across Pynchon’s oeuvre. ‘A landmark contribution to Pynchon Studies.’ — Prof. Luc Herman, University of Antwerp, Co-Editor of The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon. The book is available open access.

Other recent work includes: an evaluation of computational methods for detecting code switching in texts (Ketzan et al. 2026); a computational analysis of 2,500+ Thomas Pynchon studies (Ketzan 2025); stylometric investigations of literary language in Stephen King’s novels (Ketzan and Eve 2024); a Python suite for the quick and easy comparison of digital textual variants (Ketzan and Schoech 2021); and a computational analysis of gender bias in a 19th-century 'women's encyclopedia' written for female audiences (Ketzan et al. 2022).

Erik completed a PhD in English/Digital Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, then worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at University of Cologne, Institut für Digital Humanities on the project EncycNet: A Historical Encyclopedia Knowledge Graph, then Postdoctoral Research and Teaching Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. Prior to his PhD, Erik worked as an academic researcher in the Computational Linguistics and Research Infrastructure departments of the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, and CLARIN, focusing on legal and ethical issues in research data.

Erik has published and lectured extensively on copyright and personal data protection in digital research. 'Digital Humanities Research Under United States and European Copyright Laws: Evolving Frameworks', provides a general overview (Ketzan and Kamocki 2021). Erik has worked as a Consulting Researcher on licensing issues for the successor project to The Oxford Text Archive at the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford, represented digital humanities organisations in government consultations, and speaks at industry events for legal professionals.

Research interests and PhD supervision

• Computational literary studies
• Legal and ethical issues in research data
• Corpus stylistics

Teaching

Erik teaches a range of digital humanities areas, including computational humanities, computational literary studies, Python for the humanities, and has given numerous guest lectures on legal issues in DH.

Erik is currently supervising two PhD students in digital humanities, and is open to inquiries related to his areas of research.

Selected publications

• Erik Ketzan, Avyav Kumar Singh, Tianyu Wang, and Shenwei Xu, “Advancing Methods in Automatic Code Switching Detection for Digital Humanities”, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (2026). https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqag060
• Erik Ketzan, “A Bibliometric Overview of Pynchon Studies: Introducing the Thomas Pynchon Online Bibliography (TPOB)”, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 12:1 (2025). https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.23348
• Erik Ketzan and Martin Eve, “The Anxiety of Prestige in Stephen King’s Stylistics”, Journal of Computational Literary Studies 3:1 (2024). https://doi.org/10.48694/jcls.3915
• Erik Ketzan, Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities: Computational Approaches to Style (Bloomsbury, 2022). Open access.
• Erik Ketzan and Pawel Kamocki, ‘Digital Humanities Research Under United States and European Copyright Laws: Evolving Frameworks’, in Access and Control in Digital Humanities (Routledge, 2021). Post-print.