Introduction to a special section on ‘Computational Methods for Literary–Historical Textual Scholarship’
Gabriel Egan · Digital Scholarship in the Humanities · 2019
All sorts of surprising discoveries about literary and historical texts have been made in the past 30 years or so by investigators employing new computational methods unavailable to previous generations. One landmark publication was John Burrows’s book Computation into Criticism (1987), which showed that literary scholars had been simply ignoring most of the available evidence, as expressed in the celebrated opening sentence ‘It is a truth not generally acknowledged that, in most discussions of works of English fiction, we proceed as if a third, two-fifths, a half of our material were not really there’. Burrows showed that the function words—the 100 or so words that comprise articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and other linguistic ‘glue’ holding our sentences together—are just as amenable to literary criticism as the more visible, rarer lexical words. Burrows could undertake his innovative research because digital transcriptions of literary works made it possible to count the function words, and he developed a series of algorithms for processing the resulting counts that are now widely used in the field. Since 1987, many more texts have been digitized and many more algorithms have been invented to process them in various ways. A conference at De Montfort University, Leicester, on July 2018, generously funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council and by the host university, was an opportunity to take stock of where these three decades of work had brought those interested in analysing texts using computers. This special section of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities presents a selection of the best articles from the conference; other fine articles had already been committed to other outlets.