Literature

Where are we now?

The answer to this question is in one sense that we are where we have always been, i.e. the computer-assisted analysis of literary texts is a marginal area of literary scholarship. New developments have, however, helped to make us more visible; this is especially true of multimedia and hypertext. With the growing importance of information technology in our society, the students we now have are more interested in the techniques we can offer for the analysis of texts.

Literature is an art which uses language as a medium. More specifically we look at the particular use of language in individual texts. As Roseanne Potter has pointed out in her Literary Computing and Literary Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989), the fundamental difference between linguists and those scholars who study literary texts is that while linguists are interested in the language use of a group of individuals, i.e. what is the common use among a particular group, literary scholars, on the other hand, are interested in the outliers, precisely because literary texts consists of some "unusual" form of language use. Literary scholarship must thus also look at the background against which individual texts are outliers. Michel Butor, both an accomplished novelist as well as perceptive critic of literature has neatly summarized what literary studies are all about: Just as the true writer is the person qui can't stand that people speak so little or so badly about a certain aspect of reality, qui feels obliged to draw attention to it, hopefully definitively [...]; so, the most useful critic the most useful critic is the person who can't stand that people speak so little or so badly about a certain book, about a certain painting, about certain music, and the necessity is as keenly felt in this domain as in any other. Essais sur le Roman (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), p.171 (tr. P. Fortier)

The essential aspect of literary studies is the interpretation of the individual text. In addition to linguistic features of texts, we could also be interested in prosodic features, narrative structure or thematic structure, but these have received less attention so far among those scholars who use computer-assisted methods to analyse texts. With respect to many of these features the central problem is one of mark-up: what you put in determines what you get out. Ten years ago we didn't have the mark-up tools that we have today and many things that were unthinkable then are now possible; in fact, the possibilities are enormous today. The statistical analytic capacity that exists today is also enormous and we have gone a long way in our use of these methods.

Key development areas

A lot still needs to be done in the field of mark-up in that deep mark-up is very laborious work and much could be done to give us large literary text corpora for statistical analysis. This does raise the problem, however, that with literary texts, many of the features that one might want to study are, at least to some extent, a matter of individual interpretation and one scholar might not want to use texts marked-up by another scholar, or at least he/she would want to check that he/she agrees with the mark-up in the text. Computer-assisted literary scholarship also raises the question of what it is that literary scholars do that is computable. Within manuscript studies we now have the ability to link the manuscript image with its transcription and this of course renders the manuscript more widely available to scholars (who may not have been able to travel to where the actual manuscript was); it also has the potential to change the interpretation of that literary text. We have also returned to the question of what the text is. For example, with a film version of a text one might ask how do film studies relate to literary studies? We may also have multilingual forms or different versions of a text and we can now build parallel concordances to help us look at these texts. The technology provides the material for analysis, but of course it cannot do the analysis itself.

With hypertext novels and multi-authored texts the question is whether these are a dead end or whether they are in fact an exciting new development. We might ask ourselves such questions as what happens to our thinking of related documents when we think about texts created as hypertexts rather than texts that have just been changed into that format. This brings forth the cognitive aspects of using such tools as we now have. Generally speaking, we can already see that students are using texts in different ways than before; it seems to have affect the way people chunk information and this, of course, has much wider social implications. Turning to classical studies, the issue there is perhaps more of how to keep the area alive. In other words one might ask how one can take a piece of scholarship and dilute it in different ways in order to make it appealing to the public.

Where are we going?

The tools we have today have had a destabilising effect on literary scholarship. Because we have such vast quantities of electronic texts and varying corpora it has enabled us to say definite things about specific topics (such as 17th century poetry or the novel in the early 20th century) , which we simply couldn't do before. It is now possible to say things which are independent of a particular author or text. All of the above would lead us to the conclusion that technology is forcing us to redefine what we mean by literary studies. The computer also reinforces the canon. The role of the computer seems to be crucial to the paradigm shift in the thought process. When people work with the text electronically they are more engaged with the text. These things all seem to be the result of various things that have arisen in our society at more or less the same time, i.e. new theoretical trends, new tools and the new kinds of demands made on people.

Summary

The advent of our new tools and technology has affected several aspect of the work we do within literary scholarship:

technology has changed the ways in which we work
technology may change what we do and the kind of work that we do
the kind of work we do will also be determined by what people conceive of as literature
the digital culture will affect our students and the writers of the future, i.e. not only will it affect how people write on the whole, but also how they write literature and what we perceive as being "literature"
statistical analyses of texts have given us new insights; we are now able to do many things that we couldn't have conceived of before