Preliminary Business

Today's readings: (red links are to professor's annotated versions)

• Rockwell, Geoffrey, "What is Text Analysis, Really?" (pre-print version) (2003) 
• Ted Underwood, "Where to Start with Text Mining?" (2012)
• Ryan Heuser and and Long Le-Khac, "A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method" (2012) 
• Tutorial on Using the Antconc text-analysis ("concordancer") program used for the practicum for this class:  The Grammar Lab, "Antconc Walk-Through"
• Download onto your computer the Antconc text-analysis program
• For help on creating "plain-text" files and additional help with Antconc, see Heather Froehlich, "Getting Started with AntConc" 
•  Practicum: Text Analysis  Instructions for this practicum | Folder of exercises on Student Work page

Text analysis tools have their roots in the print concordance. The concordance, is a standard research tool in the humanities that goes back to the 13th century.... The first computer-based text-analysis tools were designed to assist in the production of print concordances. Father Roberto Busa in the late 1940s was one of the first to use information technology in the production of a concordance, his Index Thomisticus, (a remarkable concordance and more to the works of Thomas Acquinas).

Let us pause now to consider the hermeneutical principles behind the concordance and tools that extend it. As Willard McCarty puts it, "The early history of the concordance suggests that it was invented essentially for the same job to which we apply it today, 750 years later: to discover patterns of coherence in a text or textual corpus.... the concordance very likely grew out of a habit of mind conditioned by a typological or figural view of the Bible, i.e. the intratextual notion that the meaning of the biblical text is derived by putting together normally disjunct passages into a concordatia, a concord of senses."

... there is no a-priori privilege to certain processes of decomposition and recomposition like traditional concording. The assumptions behind concording are as suspect as any, despite the long tradition of using concordances. Familiarity with concordances should not breed contempt for other monsters. The challenge before us is to question our procedural habits and presuppositions as to what are legitimate recombinations--to forget the concordance and ask anew how we can analyze a text with a computer and whether such computer-assisted interpretations are interesting in and of themselves.

As we experimented with new questions we realized that one of the things that was important was this intellectual process of iteratively trying questions and adapting tools to help us ask new questions. We can do so much more now than find words in a string. We can ask about surrounding words, search for complex patterns, count things, compare vocabulary between characters, visualize texts and so on.