"DH" | Digital Methods for Literary Study
In an entry on "text analysis" in Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities, Natalie M. Houston describes multiple actions that Humanities scholars undertake in their scholarship––before pointing out that these same scholars tend to describe these actions with a single verb.
She writes,
Regardless of the time period, language, or form of the text, or the questions that motivate our approach, humanists frequently:
- select or collect texts in order to explore an hypothesis;
- look for patterns (of words, ideas, symbols, rhetorical or formal structures, etc) within an individual text and/or within sets of texts;
- discover relationships (of development, dependence, seriality, association, intention, allusion, intertextuality, etc) between parts of texts, whole texts, or sets of texts;
- interpret the significance of these patterns, relationships, and texts;
- develop arguments for the larger significance of these interpretations.
In humanities research, these steps...are rarely labeled as hypothesis, data collection, experimentation, analysis, and argument. Instead, all of these things are called reading.
Here, Houston suggests that the practices in which scholars of literature or linguistics are engaged are very similar to the kinds of actions that scientists and social scientists perform in their research; the primary difference we see between them is perhaps rooted in the way literary scholars in particular describe what they are doing. Of course, the object of analysis is important as well, and the fact that literary scholars are primarily interested in literary texts is what makes them distinct from a Biologist or Sociologist and even from an expert in Linguistics.
But what they do with texts may still have something in common with scholars in other fields, even those whose methods are primarily quantitative. With computational tools, they can identify patterns at a scale that would be impossible or overly time-consuming to an individual reader. With electronic media, they can distribute performances to audiences beyond the physical spaces of theaters. And with social media platforms whose purpose is building and amplifying communities, they can create knowledge and share it rapidly with any and all interested parties.
Houston describes the impact of such tools on Humanities research as follows:
Each of these items has significant implications for the study of literature, and more specifically, for the study of Shakespeare. We will address them more substantively over the course of this book's many pages, but here we will give you a quick snapshot. With respect to the first item, we will note that you can access Shakespeare plays and poems in multiple forms online, and in some cases, forms that could only be seen in rare book libraries. Digital images of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century quartos and folios afford a glimpse into what early modern readers saw when they read Shakespeare's works and also allow us to collate editions--that is, to compare texts that were printed in more than one edition. Additionally, we now have multiple sites developed by libraries and universities that contain images as well as transcriptions of documents relating to Shakespeare life and times, documents associated with the early modern theatre, and of course, there are also many sites associated with his contemporaries as well. Databases such as Early English Books Online and Early Print not only give us access to texts and transcriptions of early modern books, but also allow us to mine them for specific phrases and content. As items two, four, and five suggest, the digitization of texts enables both close and distant reading; it also encourages the creation of new texts with tools that can help us visualize what we find within Shakespeare's "old" ones. Digital content has likewise transformed how we think about performance, from electronic access to manuscripts from the playhouses to the new media platforms on which plays can be staged. Virtual Reality programs such as Play the Knave and Second Life have made made going to the theatre compatible with staying at home. Twitter and YouTube have made it possible to talk about Shakespeare or watch his plays 24/7.
- large scale digitization changes our access both to specific texts and to new quantities of texts;
- relational databases and full text search expand the kinds of research queries that can be pursued;
- new media forms and new interfaces transform how we understand and perform acts of reading;
- the widespread availability of computational power and storage offer new ways of curating, displaying, and using collections of texts for human or machine analysis;
- tools for data visualization and multimodal composition offer new ways of exploring texts and building arguments.
We will address each of these developments in this book, but because this book is focused primarily on practices for reading Shakespeare in digital formats, we will root our foundational chapters in discussions of computer-based textual analysis. How did we get to this point in the history of literary studies, a moment in which scholars don't read books without their computers? Let's take a look...