Comments on: Using Text Analysis Tools for Comparison: Mole & Chocolate Cake

By: Columbia University Libraries FYI » Too cool

Columbia University Libraries FYI » Too cool — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 15:29:19 +0000

[...] a great post from the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities blog. I particularly like how the author here [...]

By: Comparator « Mercurius Politicus

Comparator « Mercurius Politicus — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 20:14:00 +0000

[...] July 2008 by Nick I posted previously about being inspired by Digital Scholarship in the Humanities to mess about with word clouds. The same post also gave me the idea to try some text comparison [...]

By: Lisa Spiro

Lisa Spiro — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:42:59 +0000

Hey, I like the distinction between shallow, computer assisted reading and deep reading.

By: Thomas Crombez

Thomas Crombez — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 12:40:54 +0000

I recently used similar (rudimentary) word counting methods to tackle the discourse used by a series of publications on Flemish political theatre from the 1970s.
In order to gauge the usage context of a particular keyword—in my case this was “vormingstheater”, meaning political or pedagogical theatre—I counted the content words that occurred most often in the vicinity of the keyword. This produced a list of words that are “attracted” by the keyword.
(I borrowed this method from LABBÉ, Dominique en Cyril, ‘How to Measure the Meanings of Words? Amour in Corneille’s Work’, in: Language Resources and Evaluation, 39.4 (2005), pp. 335-351.)
The bottom-line of my mini research project was that a word counting program allows you new ways to gather information about your texts. Indeed, it doesn’t cancel hermeneutics—there’s always an intelligent reader needed to process the newly formatted data. But still, it allows for wholly new ways of looking at a text you’ve read a hundred times before.
I would propose that “human readers” automatically do close reading. It’s very difficult to skim through a document quickly, and still pick up all relevant information. On the other hand, the computer is the perfect “shallow reader”. It allows to process a text swiftly and exhaustively, even if it only scratches the ‘word surface’ of the document.

By: Lisa Spiro

Lisa Spiro — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 21:48:44 +0000

Excellent commentary, Toma! I agree that the interpretive power that the scholar brings to the textual analysis is the point…

By: Text Analysis of Venture Smith’s Narrative « history-ing

Text Analysis of Venture Smith’s Narrative « history-ing — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:33:57 +0000

[...] Analysis of Venture Smith’s Narrative After reading Lisa Spiro’s latest blog post addressing text analysis for comparison based research, I decided to try out some of these tools [...]

By: Toma Tasovac

Toma Tasovac — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 11:50:44 +0000

Very interesting post, Lisa. I don’t think that anbody should submit articles full of word count tables to traditional literary journals. For me, that would amount to intellectual surrender. Running statistical analysis tools is — with a certain degree of necessary input adjustment — a rather trivial matter. What editors and readers are (or at least I hope should be) interested in is what the author does with the numbers. We should also keep in mind that statistical methods in literary studies existed long before the advent of the computer. In fact, the breakthrough of Russian formalism at the beginning of 20th century was based on the idea of establishing an “objecitve” literary science that would study the devices of literariness (of that which makes literature literary). This actually turned out to involve, in many instances, a great deal of counting. Surely, it’s a piece of cake to classify the distribution of stressed vowels in a poem, but try counting by hand the number of times Doestoevsky used the adverb “suddenly” in Crime and Punishment. Yet people have done it and come up along the way with very smart, exciting readings based on very detailed, textual analysis — all that before the proliferation of the digital text. Now, computers — which Ramsay nicely describes as incredibly powerful yet ultimately impotent — should keep doing what they’re good at, but we should also keep interpreting the data. That doesn’t mean that we should stop theorizing the machine or give up looking for novel, playful, irreverent, “deformative” ways of interacting with the text. I just hope that literary journals will never transform into glorified phone books.