T.L. Andrews

Cultures of Formalization: Towards an encounter between humanities and computing

The past three decades have seen several waves of interest in developing crossovers between academic research and computing; molecular biology is often cited as the prime exemplar of ‘what computation can do for a field’. The humanities and social sciences have also been the terrain of such interactions,at times through bottom-up collaborations, and at times through concerted policy-driven efforts (Wouters and Beaulieu 2006). The main developments vary across national contexts and disciplines. In our local context (in the Netherlands), we can roughly identify the following waves: the ‘history and computing’ and ‘literature and computing’ efforts of the 1970s and 1980s;the collaboratory and infrastructure discussions of the last decade; the current efforts at developing computational humanities, and recent emphasis on virtual research environments (VREs) of which Alfalab1 can be regarded as an example.

Qu’est-ce qu’un texte numérique? A New Rationale for the Digital Representation of Text

In this article we aim to provide a minimally sufficient theoretical framework to argue that it is time for a re-conception of the notion of text in the field of digital textual scholarship. This should allow us to reconsider the ontological status of digital text, and that will ground future work discussing the specific analytical affordances offered by digital texts understood as digital texts. Following from the argument of Suzanne Briet regarding documentation, referring to Eco’s understanding of ‘infinite semiosis’, and accounting for the reciprocal effects between carrier technology and meaning observed by McLuhan, we argue that the functions of document and text are realized primarily by their fluid nature and by the dynamic character of their interpretation. To define the purpose of textual scholarship as a ‘stabilisation’ of text is therefore fallacious. The delusive focus on ‘stability’ and discrete ‘philological fact’ gives rise to a widespread belief in textual scholarship that digital texts can be treated simply as representations of print or manuscript texts. On the contrary—digital texts are texts in and of themselves in numerous digital models and data structures which may include, but is not limited to, text meant for graphical display on a screen. We conclude with the observation that philological treatment of these texts demands an adequate digital and/or computational literacy.