Reading Tools, or Text Analysis Tools as Objects of Interpretation

Computer-assisted text analysis has over 50 years of history
in providing tools to help scholars interpret texts (see,
for instance, Potter, 1991, Burrows, 2004, Bradley, 2004). The
tools themselves are the products of a large range of
circumstances in computing and text criticism, from the
availability of certain hardware to the fluctuating fortunes of
structuralist approaches in literary criticism. In this paper we
will reverse the usual interpretive flow from tools to text by
attempting to interpret tools themselves as artifacts of human
creation. We will frame this interpretive exercise as a
Gedankenexperiment; in particular: if a scholar one hundred
years from now were to study the TAPoR Portal as cultural
artifact, what would it reveal about its theoretical
presuppositions, the methodological practices of its times, its
cultural value, and even its authors?
This thought experiment is predicated on the assumption that
tools can be studied as cultural artifacts in ways similar to, say,
literary texts. To examine this assumption more closely, we
will outline several ways in which tools may be studied and
interpreted, including:
• as functional systems fulfilling an identified need
• as code that corresponds to certain expectations in terms of
structure, brevity, creativity, etc.
• as interfaces that may have an aesthetic appeal
• as pedagogic tools that are intended to assist users in
developing skills
• as artifacts that express an author's perspective
• as artifacts that express characteristics about a community
Several differences are evident between literary texts and tools
as objects of study. For instance, tools manifest themselves at
two (at leaset) layers of visibility: the code layer, generally
reserved for developers, and the interface layer, generally
intended for users. Literary texts, in contrast, have only one
layer of exposure. It may also be that text analysis tools are fundamentally too different from texts to be considered using
approaches of literary criticism. A similar debate has raged in
game studies for the past several years (see, for instance Frasca,
1999): can games be studied as narratives (the literary camp)
or do they require an entirely different approach (the ludology
camp)? We will argue for a hybrid approach: while literary
criticism can be useful to interpret certain aspects of tools, other
aspects require their own framework of study. Moreover, this
hybrid approach leads to certain practical consequences when
considering how to peer-review tools and their development
(see Sinclair et al., 2003). As a case study for interpreting tools,
we will use the TAPoR Portal, an initiative to build a web-based
gateway to electronic texts and tools (see <http://tapor
.ca/> and Sinclair, 2002). The TAPoR Portal is reaching the
end of its development cycle, after approximately five years.
It serves as a convenient case study for several reasons,
including its duration (a five year project), its collaborative
nature (involving several dozen researchers at five Canadian
universities, its development model (a blend of academic and
private sector contributions), its interdisciplinarity (representing
several branches of the digital humanities and computer
science), and, of course, its size and complexity (over 165, 000
new lines of code). Indeed, given the size of this "corpus",
examples can be found for just about any interpretation that
might be proposed, but such is the open-ended nature of
interpretation.
Bibliography
Bradley, John. "Text Tools." A Companion to Digital
Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John
Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004. 505-522.
Burrows, John. "Textual Analysis." A Companion to Digital
Humanities. Ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John
Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2004. 323-347.
Frasca, Gonzalo. "Ludology Meets Narratology: Similitudes
and Differences Between (Video) Games and Narrative." 1999.
Accessed 2006-11-13. <http://www.ludology.org/a
rticles/ludology.htm>
Potter, Rosanne G. "Statistical Analysis of Literature: A
Retrospective on Computers and the Humanities, 1966-1990."
Computers and the Humanities 25.6 (1991): 401-429.
Sinclair, Stéfan, John Bradley, Stephan Ramsay, Geoffrey
Rockwell, and Ray Siemens. "Peer Review of Humanities
Computing Software." ACH/ALLC 2003 Conference Program.
2003. Accessed 2006-11-13. <http://www.english.ug
a.edu/webx/abstracts/final/sessions.pdf>
Sinclair, Stéfan, and Terry Butler. "TAPoR - A Canadian Text
Analysis Portal for Research." Digital Resources in the
Humanities. London: Office for Humanities Communications,
2002.
TAPoR Project. Accessed 2006-11-13. <http://www.tap
or.ca/>