The other half to thinking about the poetics and politics of code has to do with the way in which digital technology has been employed to interpret texts in new ways, i.e. the digital humanities. Because I have some limited experience with the emergent field, I thought I’d make a short plug for how useful it can be. I can’t pretend to understand the mechanics behind the software of companies like Lit Lab, but I know that thinking about literature this way has helped me think broadly about putting literature in context and what it means to find multiple “truths” from a text. Aside from offering a way to map complicated plots and character relationships, the digital humanities allows us to examine patterns of language and meaning.
At my home institution, the professor who introduced me to the digital humanities offered an example of their use that I’ll never forget. He explained that the discipline’s leading proponent, Franco Moretti, had thrown all of Shakespeare’s known works into his digital generator and found that his tragedies, particularly Macbeth, had a greater frequency of words like “the” (which is something Kathryn Schulz said was true of Gothic literature as a whole). This may seem nonplussing, but Moretti theorized that the specificity of this semantic move enhances the haunting, unsettling atmosphere of such works. The idea being, hearing Lady Macbeth say, “I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry” is somehow creepier than if she had said, “I heard an owl” or “some damn owl” etc.
I also think that there is more subjectivity inherent to the digital humanities than might be assumed: in order to organize information into the categories the software presents at the end of the process, someone has to come up with categories and tags. This, to me, is not far from how cultures of commentary affect our understanding of texts. Scholars employ categorization methods when they interpret texts, just on a smaller scale than what is possible with computational generators.
The danger would be to utilize the digital humanities exclusively. Moretti suggests that distant reading should “supplant, not supplement, close reading,” and this would clearly be a mistake for literary studies. Close reading offers us nuance and breadth of meaning. Particularly with massive canonical texts like Shakespeare’s folio, where every word has multiple connotations, examining the specific words can open the text to new frames of interpretation. The field of digital humanities is still relatively new, so it’s hard to say where upcoming technologies will lead it in the coming years, but I think it would be hard to dismiss the utility of examining literature at least partially from this perspective. And given recent decades’ turn toward self-reflexivity and the need to “locate” ourselves in our scholarship, perhaps it is also an imperative of our times that we utilize progressive technology to reach further and further back. If nothing else, remapping texts is inherently about our pedagogical need to re-contextualize ourselves in the scope of literature - and humanity - over time.
