Text comparison and digital creativity

Description:

Summary: The spread of digital technology across philology, linguistics and literary studies suggests that text scholarship is taking on a more laboratory-like image. The ability to sort, quantify, reproduce and report text through computation would seem to facilitate the exploration of text as another type of quantitative scientific data. However, developing this potential also highlights text analysis and text interpretation as two increasingly separated sub-tasks in the study of texts. The implied dual nature of interpretation as the traditional, valued mode of scholarly text comparison, combined with an increasingly widespread reliance on digital text analysis as scientific mode of inquiry raises the question as to whether the reflexive concepts that are central to interpretation - individualism, subjectivity - are affected by the anonymised, normative assumptions implied by formal categorisations of text as digital data.

subjects: Electronic publications,  Technological innovations,  Effect of technological innovations on,  Philology,  Early printed books,  Research,  Methodology,  Bible,  Textual Criticism,  Data processing,  Communication in learning and scholarship,  Manuscripts,  Scholars,  Digitization,  Bible, criticism, textual,  Criticism, textual,  Electronic publishing,  Research, methodology,  Learning and scholarship