Sir Walter Scott contrasted his style of writing with that of Jane Austen: "The big Bow-Wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me. "While he characterized his work as large, Jane Austen called her own small, a "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush."
Systematic
textual analysis has a history that goes much further back than computers. The first
concordance, according to The Word Crunchers dates back about 800 years. It was a most labor-intensive
project, taking up the work of 500 friars.
A Chaucer concordance took 50 years
until it was ready for publication in 1927. Computers entered the picture as early
as 1951 with punch card programming and IBM computers. At the time, “indexing all of Aquinas took a million man-hours.” It was only complete in 1974. Ten years later, though, computers could
analyze texts effortlessly, as depicted in the reports of a novelist’s favorite
word in David Lodge’s novel Small World.
The
proliferation of digitalized books, courtesy of Google books is what makes it
possible for computers to now process huge volumes of text from thousands of
works. Matthew Jockers, along with
Franco Moretti, founded the Stanford Literary Lab in 2010. The research is
done in groups along the lines of scientific investigations with the help of
computer.
Data-diggers are
gunning to debunk old claims based on "anecdotal" evidence and answer
once-impossible questions about the evolution of ideas, language, and culture.
Critics, meanwhile, worry that these stat-happy quants take the human out of
the humanities. Novels aren't commodities like bags of flour, they warn.
Cranking words from deeply specific texts like grist through a mill is a recipe
for lousy research, they say—and a potential disaster for the profession.
It’s not just a matter of traditionalists feeling
threatened by computer power. Algorithms that depend on Google books for
meta-data tags may reach wrong conclusions. Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist,
is quoted as declaring Google’s tags "a
mess," not to be relied
on. Aside from questions of accuracy,
there is that of relevance. Researcher have to ask themselves: "What does
this tell me that what we can't already do?"
I had the same question when I read the article on Jockers. Aside from identifying the novel’s
trail set by Austen, it points out the supposed revelation that the novels of George
Eliot "more closely resemble the patterns of male writers." Is it altogether surprising that the author of
Silly Novels by Lady Novelists who deliberately adopted
a masculine pseudonym broke the mold conceived for female writers? That’s something that any student of
Victorian literature should already know.
What
this form of research could do that traditional studies do not is unearth the
roads not taken by the literary canon. In a New Scientist article on Jockers’ work, Nicholas Dames, chair of the department
of English and comparative literature at Columbia University as seeing the
value of this type of research to bring to light the full body of fiction "rather
than the small percentage of canonical texts that are usually taken as
exemplary." That opens up the consideration of the canon in a larger
context, which can lead to questioning the marked trail of influence. But that will only work if the Google Books
data proves comprehensive and reliable enough to accurately represent the
literature of the time.
Related
Jane Austen at the MorganThree Janes, Two Governesses, and the Abolitionist MovementSome observations on Jane Austen's EmmaJ
ane Austen and AutismPride, Prejudice and Persuasion: Obstacles to Happiness in Jane Austen's Novels
