Approaches that utilize computational analysis and/or digital (digitized) data are now gaining traction in the study of book history and print culture (and in the humanities field in general). Projects that employ those computer-assisted methods are often called digital humanities (DH), although the term is loosely defined, and the boundary of DH is always debated. (But then, what humanities terms are not open to multiple interpretations and debates?)

While there are many methods and technologies involved, the following two are often used to digitally explore print culture and book history: text analysis and spacial humanities.

• Text analysis: A popular approach in this area is the one that uses codes, programs and statistical models to analyze large (very large) corpora of texts. Common methods include text mining (for word frequency, etc.) and topic modeling. This approach is often called "distant reading" (a play on "close reading"). 
  • Robots Reading Vogue
  • Google Ngram

• Spacial Humanities uses Geographical Information System (GIS) to visually represent and analyze literary works, history, authors, etc.
  • The Atlas of Early Printing
  • Visualization platform for Buddhist Biographies 佛教傳記文學視覺化平台: One Dataset, Three Views

You may also want to check WU's own Humanities Digital Workshop and their projects for more examples and inspirations. 

Digital Humanities Asia @ Stanford University: Residency program and DH initiative at Stanford University.

Digital Humanities jp (DHjp), a Japanese series on DH issues (in Japanese) is available electronically through Maruzen eBook Library. (WUSTL ID required for remote access). 

While large corpora of digitized and OCRed (and sometimes already marked up) texts are readily available for Western languages (and to some extent for simplified, "modern" Chinese), converting original text to machine-readable full-text data has been a challenge for the study of East Asian books, particularly classical ones. The following are select examples of projects and software designed to aid the process. 

Transcription

• The Ten Thousand Rooms project (Yale University; Chinese): A transcription helper tool in development based on open source Mirador Viewer. 
• Smart-GS: A desktop transcription tool, being developed in Japan.
• An article about the challenge of fine tuning OCR for Japanese kuzushiji/hentaigana (in Japanese). 

Text mark up 

• MARKUS: An automatic text mark up tool for Chinese texts. Can automatically pick up personal names, place names, etc. from the text.

Teach yourself to read

• The Hentaigana App: iOS, Android
• KuLA: iOS (Japanese App Store only), Android