Anatomy of tools: A closer look at “textual DH” methodologies

Abstract

Tool criticism has made us aware that the digital tools widely distributed in Digital Humanities have the power to reify. Therefore, the community needs a handle for gauging their validity, and a capacity for producing plausibility. But tools are not ‘just tools.’ The current panorama in Digital Literary Studies (DLS) presents a plethora of instruments, protocols and practices for processing, analyzing and visualizing data. On a general level, all of these are used to examine aspects of ‘literature’ by ways of digital representation and transformation, but a closer look reveals that the methodological ‘heirdom’ of DLS is a precarious patchwork.With this paper, it is our aim to instigate an explicit and detailed discussion about particular limitations – as well as potentials – of tools and methods in concrete scenarios of application. Taking up the current discussion around tools and research questions, our paper presents the gist from the ADHO SIG-DLS workshop “Anatomy of tools: A closer look at textual DH methodologies” that took place in Utrecht in July 2019.Having identified Textométrie, Stylometry, and Semantic Text Mining as three central types of ‘doing DLS’, we ask: What are our tools and methods-in-use? What are the implications of using a tool-oriented perspective as opposed to a methodology-oriented one? How do either relate to research questions and theory? With an eye to the imminent issue of replicability in DH, we enquire about the range of its potential incarnations in DLS. Addressing tool-adaption to specific research domains, we discuss one of these: poetry. And finally, we present one attempt at a practical solution for handling and gauging tools/methods in DLS, the SIG-DLS Tool Inventory, which may provide both a perspective of orientation and constructive criticism. The article reflects thus a rich array of perspectives on ‘tool criticism,’ including the complementary perspective of ‘tool defense’ – arguing that we need tools and methods as a basic common ground on how to carry out fundamental operations of analysis and interpretation within a community.