Text Comparison and Digital Creativity

Summary: The spread of digital technology across philology, linguistics and literary studies suggests that text scholarship is taking on a more laboratory-like image. The ability to sort, quantify, reproduce and report text through computation would seem to facilitate the exploration of text as another type of quantitative scientific data. However, developing this potential also highlights text analysis and text interpretation as two increasingly separated sub-tasks in the study of texts. The implied dual nature of interpretation as the traditional, valued mode of scholarly text comparison, combined with an increasingly widespread reliance on digital text analysis as scientific mode of inquiry raises the question as to whether the reflexive concepts thatare central to interpretation - individualism, subjectivity - are affected by the anonymised, normative assumptions implied by formal categorisations of text as digital data.

Willem Th. van Peursen, Ph.D. (1999) in Semitic Languages, Leiden University, is associate professor of Old Testament at Leiden University. His publications include The Verbal System in the Hebrew Text of Ben Sira (Brill, 2004) and Language and Interpretation in the Syriac Text of Ben Sira (Brill, 2007).Ernst D. Thoutenhoofd, Ph.D. (1996) in Sociology and Social Policy, University of Durham (UK), is lecturer in clinical education at Groningen University. He has published in various social science disciplines on the construction of knowledge, and is an editor of the Brill book series on Scholarly Communication. Adriaan van der Weel, Ph.D. (1998) in textual studies and English literature, Leiden University, holds the Bohn chair of modern Dutch book history in the Department of Book and Digital Media Studies at Leiden University. He is an editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly, and the Brill book series on Scholarly Communication.