Problems of digital research

Digitizing historical material in databases is only the most significant and widespread effect of a larger process—taking place over the last half-century—that aims to transform even the most rudimentary aspects of research in the humanities into a technical process. And if we are seeing that research technology in the humanities is nothing like the oxymoron previous generations of scholars thought it would be (as if such a rendering-technical would force the humanities to turn into sciences), it is clear we are having problems registering the effects of this process in terms of changes in the objects of our study.

The study of literature in particular has been susceptible to saying that “the text” changes when different material is researched. The text expands, as it were, to incorporate the form and content of not only the new uncovered material, but also the characteristics of the particular juxtapositions between materials now possible with increasing ease--in short, the functionality of the mode of research as it discovers or unveils the primary documents (attributed, by a reversal, to the juxtaposed material itself). But digitization’s increase of access capabilities to otherwise unreachable material has produced an interesting phenomenon: expanding a notion of textuality looks ridiculous when so much actual text becomes available. Suddenly, we need less text, not more, and we have to somehow confront the mode of research itself as it bears on the textual object.

There are three ways out of this problem, as I see it. 1) We theoretically provide a principle of selection, limiting the theoretical notion of textuality. 2) We provide a principle of textual distribution, which accounts for the area in which this expanded text circulates. These first two modes work together: one can see their results in the new (now somewhat aging) historicism, and, via a negative process, in the sociology of literature. Or 3) we look at how literary critical method is forced to change: the local axioms, or protocols, of reading and constructing a reading that may construe the text. This third way was often subsumed into something like "rhetorical reading," which was seen to be theoretically grounded (despite, or rather precisely because of what Paul de Man argued), and so regressed into the first option. But it need not work that way. (I suggest Derrida wanted to register this change in terms of method. For him, method must incorporate a corresponding process of technicalization, of archiving the process of incorporating the archive.)

I'd suggest that what we need is moving 2 into 3, resisting reducing 3 to 1, and continually relating more intimately (via cultural analysis which has gone on for some time now) 1 and 2.