Article,
Detailism, Digital Texts, and the Problem of Pedantry
TEXT Technology, 14 (2): 41--70 (2005)
Abstract
The literary academy has a long history of debates and concerns with statistical and quantitative tools for analysis. Recent trends in digital research tools and methods have tended to deemphasize the quantitative and objective character of textual study, and instead have focused on an understanding of the digital text as an intellectual model, and digital tools as ways of exploring and interpreting that model. This is true both for textual analysis tools, which have adopted a rhetoric of interpretive richness and open-ended play, and for digital editing, in which readerly enablement and editorial interpretation are at the forefront. In both domains, though, there are internal tensions: for textual analysis, the question of how the text is constituted and how far we are willing to relinquish evidentiary claims; for digital editing, the question of how to accommodate a rhetoric of “fidelity” and “accuracy” to the goals of interpretive power and readerly choice.
