1.1 Text analysis in the arts and humanities

Key concepts

• Digital scholarship
• Data-driven research
• TextGrid and collaborative working
• HiTHeR (High ThroughPut Computing in Humanities e-Research) and use of e-Infrastructure

Introduction

According to UNESCO reports, Britain tops the European lists of research publications per year in philology, literature and other text-based studies such as philosophy. Worldwide, Britain overtook the U.S. in 2006 in terms of book publications per year. In the list of countries for number of book publications in the latest available year, Britain is no. 1. These figures emphasize the urgent need for the British textual studies communities to explore new ways of dealing with this deluge of research data.

Based on these quoted figures, collaboration becomes fundamental to digital scholarship in textual studies. No researcher alone will be able to cope with the plethora of new daily published material. Furthermore, text analysis in the humanities can be a tedious and time-consuming task. But advanced computer-enabled methods make the process easier for digital or digitised works. Researchers can search large texts rapidly, conduct complex searches and have the results presented in context. The ease brought to the analysis process allows the researcher to engage with texts more thoroughly and can then lead to the development of insightful, well-crafted interpretations of texts.

Various projects have emerged internationally in recent years that allow for a new scale of textual studies research, in keeping with the idea of new data-driven research. Software developed by the US MONK (Metadata Offer New Knowledge) project helps humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in texts, (External Link) while its sister project SEASR (Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research) enables digital humanities developers to design, build, and share software applications that support research and collaboration in textual studies. http://seasr.org/ Aus-e-Lit is an Australian project aimed at Australian literary scholars to allow them to seamlessly search across relevant databases and archives to retrieve reliable information on a particular author, topic or publication. http://www.itee.uq.edu.au/~eresearch/projects/aus-e-lit/ These are just three projects quite closely linked to e-Research initiatives, but there are many more. For over fifty years, there has been a worldwide academic movement to work on Digital Humanities, resulting in many achievements, especially in the field of textual studies. It is impossible in the space of this chapter to list all of these projects (for a history of Digital Humanities and some of the involved textual scholarship see Schreibman, Siemens et al. 2004). Instead, we shall concentrate on two projects linked to both Digital Humanities and e-Research, which exemplify in very particular ways two major new developments in textual studies research that are directly linked to the shift in methodologies based on data-driven research: the German TextGrid project illustrates the value of new collaborative research in textual studies, while the UK project HiTHeR (High ThroughPut Computing in Humanities e-Research) demonstrates the effective use of e-Infrastructure to support everyday research in the Digital Humanities.