From text analysis to reception analysis: A change of paradigms in Literary Computing ?

From text analysis to reception analysis: A change of
paradigms in Literary Computing ?

Jan
Christoph
Meister
Literaturwissenschaftliches Seminar University
of Hamburg
jan-c-meister@rrz.uni-hamburg.de

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

I. Computing the text, computing the mind
Most computational studies of Literary texts make use of either of two
methodologies: quantitative or qualitative analysis. Though in both cases
the Literary text is our point of departure, quantitative and qualitative
analysis effectively deal with two distinct types of preprocessed textual
database. The quantitative analysis of "raw" textual data relies on a descriptive mark-up of elements (words) and base
structures (sentences) in terms of grammatical categories and functions.
Qualitative analysis, on the other hand, necessitates a degree of
higher-level hermeneutic mark-up. Theoretical
models of the human interpretive faculty developed in cognitive science
offer some fascinating insight into the complexity of this activity, but
they also make quite clear that for the time being, practical models or
algorithms attempting to simulate the human understanding of texts
presuppose the strict delimitation of pragmatic context. For technological
and methodological reasons computer based research into qualitative textual
aspects cannot shy away from being reductionist: If you want to compute, you
first have to translate the analogous into the digital. But it is naïve to
believe that digitization would eradicate or neutralize meaning -- a raised
finger will always point at something: a potential object as well as a
logical subject of signification. The fact therefore remains that any
mark-up -- and particularly the one designed to capture higher-level
semantic structures - will eventually transgress deductive categorical
classification. At some stage in Literary Computing, we are no longer
computing texts -- we are computing our own mind. A dilemma? A chance!
Rather than enforcing ever stricter, less ambiguous mark-up conventions we
should perhaps consider advocating flexibility, shifting our focus from text
to reception analysis.

II. "Parsing for the theme" -- an experiment
I would like to illustrate the above thesis by way of a recently conducted
experiment. It was motivated by an attempt to sketch out a functionalist
definition of the concept of "theme". Three alternatives for this definition
have been discussed in recent contributions toward a new theory of "theme":
The generative ("theme" as a pre-script and frame of reference for the
production of a text); the cognitive ("theme" as a cognitive construct
enabling readers to integrate various aspects of informational content in a
text); finally the intertextual ("theme" as a universal shared among various
texts).
Can these aspects be integrated? I tried to look at how a "theme" construct
is taking shape in the course of reception, and whether any correlative to
the thematic hypothesis produced by a reader can be identified in the
textual material by way of computational text analysis. This involved a two
stage experiment based on an excerpt from Caroll's "Alice in Wonderland".
Comparing the findings gathered from a sample of reading protocols on the
one hand (stage 1), and from the basic statistical analysis of the textual
word material on the other (stage 2) the data did indeed suggest that there
is a significant correlation between peak readings of thematic categories in
reader protocols, and high frequency words and word clusters (collocates and
maximal phrases) in the textual database.

III. In search of the improbable
The example shows that comparative studies of text and reception data may
indeed offer an interesting methodological alternative to purely
quantitative or qualitative analyses. But the suggestion to re-focus our
attention from text to reception analysis would have far reaching
consequences for Literary Computing. To quote Karl R.Popper (1984:29; my
translation): "The provability of a theory goes hand in hand with its
information content, that is, with its improbability. ... Therefore, the
better or more preferable hypothesis is often the more improbable one."
Surely if there is any point in advocating a change of paradigms in Literary
Computing it must be for the sake of the more meaningful, the more
enlightening results one hopes to achieve. Yet paradoxically enough it might
well be the logically -- and numerically - more "improbable" that we need to
consider more carefully. Our pretense to objectivity would have to
emancipate itself from the empirical and re-incorporate the speculative
dynamics of reading and interpretation once again. Can Literary Computing --
or Humanities Computing for that matter -- accept this risk?

References

Claude
Bremond

Joshua
Landy

Thomas
Pavel

Thematics. New Approaches

Albany
SUNY Press
1995

Karl
R.
Popper

Objektive Erkenntnis. Ein evolutionärer Entwurf

Gütersloh
Bertelsmann
1984

The original English version was published under the title Objective Knowledge, Oxford (Clarendon Press) 1972