Computational text analysis within the Humanities: How to combine working practices from the contributing fields?

Abstract

This position paper is based on a keynote presentation at the COLING 2016 Workshop on Language Technology for Digital Humanities in Osaka, Japan. It departs from observations about working practices in Humanities disciplines following a hermeneutic tradition of text interpretation versus the method-oriented research strategies in Computational Linguistics (CL). The respective praxeological traditions are quite different. Yet more and more researchers are willing to open up Keywords Digital humanities Á Adaptation of NLP tool chains Á Interdisciplinary working practice 2 For Computational History, see for instance the contributions in Bozic et al. (2016); for Computational Literary Studies, many researchers came together for the 2017 International DFG Symposion in Literary Studies at Villa Vigoni, Italy 9-13 October 2017, which was dedicated to Digital Literary Studies. A volume of the contributions is in preparation (Jannidis, in preparation). The development of the subfield of Computational Literary Studies in Germany is quite dynamic. In 2018, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), established a priority program Computational Literary Studies (SPP 2207) with a runtime of 6 years. 3 This is not to say that digital editions and computational support for corpus search and exploration have not been widely adopted. Indeed, fields like Literary Studies have changed with the omnipresence of computational tools and resources, hence the observation of a ''computational turn'' (Berry 2011). Most influential have arguably been the contributions by Moretti (2007) and Jockers (2013). The emphasis in this article is however on the integration of formal/algorithmic models in the core argumentation of scholarly research in the Humanities disciplines, which up until today are still in its early stages. 4 Our focus is not on Philosophical Hermeneutics (associated with Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer a.o.), but on hermeneutics as a broadly adopted practical method in Literary Studies and other disciplines targeting the interpretation of works of art. As Newton (1989) points out, the term, which has long been central in the German tradition, gained prominence in the Anglo-American tradition with the work by Hirsch (1967). ''The central concern of hermeneutics is the problem created by the fact that texts written in the past continue to exist while their authors and the historical context which produced them pass away in time. Reading such texts therefore becomes inseparable from the question of interpretation.'' (Newton 1989: 116). 5 See also the discussion of the aims of text interpretation in Mantzavinos (2016).

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