The purpose of our study is to map the literatures that belong to the Iberian worlds, in order to reveal the complex relations that the national literatures that constitute these worlds have developed through time. To this effect, this research is located at the convergence of two phenomena: the conceptual turn from comparative literature into world literature (Damrosch 2014; Gupta 2009; Saussy 2006), and the emergence of big data in the humanities (Boyd and Crawford 2012; Mayer-Schönberger and Cukier 2013; Schreibman, Siemens, and Unsworth 2004, 2016). Specifically, in this paper, we will illustrate how this availability of massive amounts of information for the humanities – unimaginable not long ago – will allow us to analyze the configuration of the literary system of the Iberian worlds. We would like to emphasize that, in this research, we modify the usual topdown viewpoint to introduce a bottom-up perspective. To achieve this, we use the methodological approach of criticometrics (Ferrer 2011), that we have developed based on the exploitation of digital databases and which makes it possible to articulate theoretical concepts with empirical research. Instead of imposing pre-established criteria, this approach stems from the observation of thousands of studies carried out by the international academic community and relies on the law of large numbers.

1. descriptive metadata
2. digital humanities
3. mapping
4. world literature

Ana Gallegos Cuiñas and Daniel Torres-Salinas (dir.), Humanities and Big Data in Ibero-America. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2023, 145-164.