No Representation Without Taxonomies: Specifying Senses of Key Terms in Digital Humanities

Digital humanities practitioners typically deal
with polysemous terms by specifying the
intended sense of a term in accompanying
documentation (when it is one of the set of terms
in a schema) or by giving a localized qualification
(when the term is being used in a scholarly
article). Granted, practitioners do interrogate
their use of ubiquitous terms: 'theory,' 'model,'
and 'text,' for example, have all been critically
examined.
1
These discussions, however, have
not visibly affected the prevailing ad hoc,
localized approach to sense disambiguation.
In ordinary language use multiple senses are the
norm: we might hope for greater precision in an
academic field, but cannot assume it. "After all,"
writes Allen Renear apropos of conflicting views
on the essential characteristics of textuality,
"there is not even a univocal sense of 'text' within
literary studies: Barthes's 'text' can hardly be
Tanselle's 'text'" ("Out" Note 1 124). The more
finely senses are distinguished, though, the
greater the need for documentation to point to,
the greater the amount of documentation there
must be, and the greater the requirement that
digital resources make all the necessary pointers
available.
There is a case, then, for relieving the
polysemous burden carried by terms like 'text'.
This could be done either by shifting some
senses onto different terms or by adding an
agreed upon set of clearly defined qualifiers
to the original term. One example of different
terms being available is the FRBR Group One
entity types (IFLA Study Group 3.2). It may
not have been the
intention
of the IFLA Study
Group to provide alternatives for 'text', but
unquestionably each Group 1 entity type -
work, expression, manifestation, and item -
corresponds to an existing sense of 'text' and can
therefore be used in place of it. However, while
these types do capture some broad distinctions,
the set is very small.
More ambitious is the taxonomy of texts
proposed by Shillingsburg as part of his
overall concept of a 'script act.'
2
Here the
semantic burden is shifted to a qualifying
phrase and 'text' has the constant sense of
a sign sequence (in material or immaterial
state), whose existence is established by at
least one material instantiation, and which is
intended as a unitary communication (whether
actually finished or not). Extrapolating from
this, we can say that--in relation to this
taxonomy--'textuality' is the exhibiting of such
properties, and 'text' as a general phenomenon
(that is, as a mass noun rather than a count
noun) is some quantity of that which exhibits
'textuality'.
These definitions are ours and not
Shillingsburg's, but derive from his definitions
and are consistent with the principles upon
which his taxonomy is based. Furthermore,
they accord with common senses of those
terms. We emphasize this both because it
has methodological implications and because it
helps us rethink a notion of 'text' that is well-
known in the digital humanities community and
to see its proper relation to the senses just
described.
The quote from Renear given earlier
comes from his discussion of "theory about
the nature of text" coming out of the
electronic text processing and text encoding
localities ("Out" 107). The view Renear
himself espouses--"Pluralism"--developed as a
refinement of the earlier view--"Platonism"--
associated with the assertions made by de Rose
et al in the paper "What is Text, Really?"
This line of thinking has presented itself as
definitional
, offering a sense to associate with
'text.' Also, by emphasizing its origins in work
on automated document processing, it presents
this sense of 'text' as
fundamental
: that is,
a more universal sense of 'text' than any
sense coming from the traditional humanities
localities, because it is as applicable to tax forms,
memos, and technical manuals as to novels,
plays, and poems. The third thing to note is that

2
this approach has used 'text' in both mass noun
and count noun senses interchangeably, and so
whatever is said about one applies equally to
the other. In the Pluralist view, what defines
text is the presence of one or more structures
of content objects. We believe this view actually
has the opposite effect of what it originally
intended because, despite its avowedly universal
scope, it actually imposes a greater restriction
on what qualifies as a text than Shillingsburg's
taxonomy does. Shillingsburg's categories have
the form QualifyingLabel+'text', where 'text'
has the sense of a sign sequence as described
earlier. The sentence "Call me Ishmael." clearly
counts as 'text' in Shillingsburg's sense, and
equally clearly does not count as 'text' in the
Pluralist sense - unless we dilute the sense of the
phrase 'content object' until it includes standard
linguistic structural units such as the clause, in
which case the Pluralist sense simply becomes
the same as Shillingsburg's sense.
What that line of thinking about text, texts, and
textuality that runs from "What is Text, Really?"
through "Out of Praxis" actually describes is a
property that many--indeed most--texts exhibit,
but that is not an
essential
property of a text.
In a footnote to the discussion in "Out of
Praxis" Renear acknowledges that the various
meanings 'text' has in the various disciplinary
localities do share a common ground, namely
that "they all are efforts to understand textual
communication." But he continues "I think that
taxonomies of sense are best deferred until after
we have a better understanding of actual theory
and practice" (124). We think the conceptual
help afforded by the clarity of Shillingsburg's
distinctions shows the opposite is true: having
taxonomies in place first betters our theoretical
understanding.
That last statement brings out the 'chicken and
egg' nature of this problem with terminology,
as many scholars would doubtless argue that
specifying a taxonomy like Shillingsburg's
presupposes
one's holding to a particular theory
of text/textuality. Debating that, however,
would in turn be helped by having a taxonomy of
'theory' available, because what that term means
in digital humanities is itself hotly contested.
As helpful as we believe Shillingsburg's
taxonomy to be, it only clarifies a few items
of the "essential vocabulary," and while we
think his overall 'script act' framework a good
place to start, it needs adding to--for example,
in the area that Shillingsburg calls "reception
performance" (
Resisting
77-80). Though he
emphasizes his debt to McGann he doesn't
attempt a taxonomy of the bibliographic codes
that McGann considers such an important
feature of production texts (
Textual
passim).
Nor does he really say what happens to the
notion of illocutionary point when we move from
speech act to script act.
3
This is work still to be
done.
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