Electronic Texts and Their StudyGeoffrey M. Rockwell

x 24072

TSH 312

grockwel@mcmaster.ca

http://www.humanities.mcmaster.ca/~hc-courses/texta

nalysis/

Research with E-Texts

What can we learn from the texts created? How do we go about doing text analysis?

History of Text-Analysis Tools Text-analysis tools grew out of concordances:

1247, Concordance to the Vulgate Bible, Paris 1949, Father Busa Index Thomisticus 1970s, Batch Concordancers like OCP 1989, TACT - Interactive Concordancers 1990s, Textual Visualization

Text-analysis tools provide by comparison: Speed, Complex Searches, Reconfigured Views,

Statistics The researcher can generate personal concordances interactively

Concordance - Rearranged TextTypes of Concordances:

verbal - index without context

contextual - KWIC (Key Word In Context)

glossarial - word-forms

conceptual - organized by idea or sense

“An alphabetical arrangement of the principal words contained in a book, with citations of the passages in which they occur” (OED)

Concordances and Interpretation Concordances provide an alternative arrangement

of the text that brings disjunct passages together into a concordantia.

Interpretative strategy where answers are drawn from the text (Bible) by assembling passages on the subject in question and reading this rearranged text as a meaningful whole.

Concordance facilitates this rearrangement providing alternative views.

Types of Text-Analysis Stylistic

Describing author’s style and comparing it Authorship studies

Linguistic Create representative corpus Describe linguistic use

Thematic Analysis Finding patterns (words) in a text Following themes through a work Comparing themes Asking what a work is about - identifying themes

What is a theme?

“Theme, a salient abstract idea that emerges from a literary work’s treatment of its subject-matter, or a topic recurring in a number of literary works.” (Concise Oxford Dict. Lit. Terms)

Oedipus theme, theme of the hero’s return, image of swan, water theme, love theme

Following a Theme

Theme - Scepticism Identify Patterns to Search for (Thesaurus)

sceptic.* Look at Distribution

Distribution by part and character Collocates

What words are used in the neighborhood? Compare to other themes

Example from my work

Study of Humes “Dialogues” Problem of Scepticism

Search on “sceptic.*” Distribution graphs

Look at how characters use the term sceptic.*; when speaker=cleanthes sceptic.*; when speaker=philo

Tell a story based on evidence

http://tactweb.humanities.mcmaster.ca/dialogs/tactweb.htm

Looking at Text-AnalysisDistribution for Cleanthes0 | 0 |

1 | 18 |******************

2 | 0 |

3 | 4 |****

4 | 1 |*

5 | 0 |

6 | 0 |

7 | 0 |

8 | 0 |

9 | 0 |

10 | 0 |

11 | 0 |

12 | 0 |

Distribution for Philo0 | 0 |

1 | 11 |***********

2 | 2 |**

3 | 0 |

4 | 1 |*

5 | 0 |

6 | 2 |**

7 | 0 |

8 | 1 |*

9 | 0 |

10 | 2 |**

11 | 4 |****

12 | 8 |********

c:\hume\sceptic.lst

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Looking at Text-Analysis

Scepticism is a framing issue Cleanthes insults Philo who has positioned

himself as a sceptic Philo avoids answering Philo returns to it in later passages - he

demonstrates what it is to be a sceptic

ProblemsThat a theme is the passages where a set of words appear

Can themes be identified by key words?

What about ambiguous words?

That concording passages into a new text is an acceptable interpretative strategyWhere does the passage start and end around a word?

Is reading a rearranged text useful?

That the distribution of words indicates the progress of a themeDo the number of hits indicate intensity of theme?

Surface Measurement (Quantification)

Interesting Interpretation (Understanding)

Two Views of Text-AnalysisText-analysis is about proving things about texts

Stylistic analysis provides reproducible descriptions of authors style

Measurement of surface features allows us to prove more interesting points

Reaction to impressionistic reader oriented literary theory

Text-analysis is the rereading a text in ways that help one better understand itText-analysis is only one of many strategies

Text-analysis reveals anomalies to be researched

Text-analysis is useful precisely because the computer can’t do well what we do well, and can do other things well - Alternative Perspective

Arguments for text-analysis There is a transfer of meaning for words

across contexts Words can evoke themes

Need for theoretical work? Tradition of concording

Tradition of treating words as belonging to categories (Thesaurus)

Return to the text?

We make soft quantitative claims anyway It counters impressionistic readings Reproducable and disputable results

Text-Analysis Playpens Discipline of identifying what you mean for

a machine