Poststructuralism and the ARTFL Database: Some Theoretical Considerations. (1994)

In order to attract new scholars to computers in the humanities, some researchers suggest that poststructuralist theories should inform how one queries textual databases. This paper argues that if we adopt a poststructuralist methodology to analyze texts with computers, we must recognize the assumptions that motivate poststructuralist theories. Using such theories to find an ultimate in literature would entail contradictions because these theories deny the possibility of an ultimate in literature. Although computers can be used effectively in conjunction with current critical theory, they will never uncover the one true of a text. The fact that present online text databases offer seemingly limitless opportunities to analyze literature in comprehensive ways has prompted much optimism about the future of computers in the humanities. Indeed, large corpora of texts immediately available in their entirety with a few strokes on the keyboard represent a remarkable achievement in applying computer technology to disciplines in the liberal arts. By rendering texts written in natural-language machine-readable, students of literature can let the computer do tasks that even with an authoritative concordance would be tiresome and time-consuming. Thematic studies that required long hours of reading and rereading in order to observe how certain words express a particular idea can now be executed in less than a minute. This radical reduction in the time necessary to work out a literary analysis enables one to pursue more ambitious studies that can treat many themes at once. In addition to thematic studies, the development of sophisticated morphological analyzers is opening the way to systematic linguistic and semantic investigations into the imperceptible shifts and transformationso f language that occur within a text or over time through many texts. Not only can we see how ideas are developed through language, but we can also observe how language itself operates to produce meaning. Given the exponential rate of advances in computer technology over just the past ten years and the promise of even more amazing things to come, it is no wonder that the possibilities for computerized literary studies appear endless. Unfortunately, most of the academic community does not share this enthusiasm. In a recent essay, Mark Olsen has addressed the lukewarm response of the academic community to computers in their midst, identifying two reasons that scholars seem reluctant to embrace the new technology.[1] First, previous literary studies employing computer methodologies have appealed only to researchers who have already adopted these methodologies in their own work. Instead of attracting new people to accept and use the technology, these individuals have ended up forming an isolated discipline complete with journals and conferences that nobody else reads or attends. The reason for this is that the wider academic community does not appreciate the conclusions drawn from the results of computerized literary analyses: as far as the majority is concerned, these analyses fo not really tell us anything we did not know without computers. Second, those who use computers to read literature have fallen out of touch with recent developments in literary criticism, namely poststructuralism. While the rest of academia was wrestling with semiotics, posychoanalysis, reader-response theory, and deconstruction, computer buffs continued to crunch words to uncover meanings without questioning what meaning meant. As a result, those who have been devoted to computers during the past ten to fifteen years find themselves removed from mainstream literary debates because their work has not contributed to current ciritical theory and has more or less ignored it. In order to demarginalize computer literary studies, Olsen proposes that those who use computers to study literature incorporate poststructuralist theories into their research models: The most surprising element of this problem is the relatively limited acceptance of critical models that stress intertextuality and sign theory among those interested in computer analysis of text. …