Matthew L. Jockers - Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History

The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing.

Douglas Carl Engelbart

An article in the June 23, 2008, issue of Wired declared in its headline Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete (Anderson 2008). By 2008 computers, with their capacity for number crunching and processing large-scale data sets, had revolutionized the way that scientific research gets done, so much so that the same article declared an end to theorizing in science. With so much data, we could just run the numbers and reach a conclusion. Now slowly and surely, the same elements that have had such an impact on the sciences are revolutionizing the way that research in the humanities gets done. This emerging field we have come to call digital humanitieswhich was for a good many decades not emerging at all but known as humanities computinghas a rich history dating back at least to Father Roberto Busa's concordance work in the 1940s, if not before. Technology has certainly changed some things about the way literary scholars go about their work, but until recently change has been mostly at the level of simple, even anecdotal, search. The humanities computing/digital humanities revolution has now begun, and big data have been a major catalyst. The questions we may now ask were previously inconceivable, and to answer these questions requires a new methodology, a new way of thinking about our object of study.

For whatever reasons, be they practical or theoretical, humanists have tended to resist or avoid computational approaches to the study of literature. And who could blame them? Until recently, the amount of knowledge that might be gained from a computer-based analysis of a text was generally overwhelmed by the dizzying amount of work involved in preparing (digitizing) and then processing that digital text. Even as digital texts became more readily available, the computational methods for analyzing them remained quite primitive. Word-frequency lists, concordances, and keyword-in-context (KWIC) lists are useful for certain types of analysis, but these staples of the digital humanist's diet hardly satiate the appetite for more. These tools only scratch the surface in terms of the infinite ways we might read, access, and make meaning of text. Revolutions take time; this one is only just beginning, and it is the existence of digital libraries, of large electronic text collections, that is fomenting the revolution. This was a moment that Rosanne Potter predicted back in the digital dark ages of 1988. In an article titled Literary Criticism and Literary Computing, Potter wrote that until everything has been encoded, or until encoding is a trivial part of the work, the everyday critic will probably not consider computer treatments of texts (93). Though not everything has been digitized, we have reached a tipping point, an event horizon where enough text and literature have been encoded to both allow and, indeed, force us to ask an entirely new set of questions about literature and the literary record.

Roberto Busa, a Jesuit priest and scholar, is considered by many to be the founding father of humanities computing. He is the author of the Index Thomisticus, a lemmatized index of the works of Thomas Aquinas.

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I suspect that at least a few humanists have been turned off by one or more of the very public failures of computing in the humanities: for example, the Donald Foster Shakespeare kerfuffle.