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Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 32, No. 302.
Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
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Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
[1] From: Bill Benzon
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.299: toward a theory of the corpus (106)
[2] From: Bill Benzon
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.299: toward a theory of the corpus (117)
--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2019-01-03 13:44:36+00:00
From: Bill Benzon
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.299: toward a theory of the corpus
Comments to Rovira interspersed.
> --[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: 2019-01-01 14:23:40+00:00
> From: Jim Rovira
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.296: toward a theory of the corpus
>
> This looks like a fascinating collection, Bill. My initial thoughtsâ¦
[snip]
> 3. Do you mean "brain" or "mind"? Do you think that mind even exists? If
> you really mean brain, then shouldn't this work be done in collaboration
> with brain scans taken while reading?
I mean mind, not brain. To be sure, the mind is what the brain does, but then in
a sense one might also say that the weather is something that the earth does. I
think of the mind as a kind of neural weather, a notion I develop in
considerable detail in chapters 2 & 3 of my book on music, Beethoven's Anvil,
particularly on pp. 71-74. I've also got a short paper on the topic, NEURAL
WEATHER, An Informal Defense of Psychoanalytic Ideas, https://www.academia.edu/3
7605450/NEURAL_WEATHER_An_Informal_Defense_of_Psychoanalytic_Ideas
> 4. Can you really talk about -the- mind? The mind of the reader or the mind
> of the author? The mind of the author after the work has been written or
> while composing? Are any two readers' minds necessarily going to produce
> the same map?
Sure, why not talk of the mind? It's an idealization, which I discuss on pp.
29 ff. We use such idealizations all the time. There is no such thing as the
English language, for example. What there is is a bunch of ideolects, one for
each English speaker. When we talk of the English language, we're talking
about an idealization over something that (we assume) exists in those many many
ideolects. There must be substantial commonalities, otherwise language would be
useless for communication.
Keep in mind that I'm talking of corpus techniques. A typical corpus contains
texts by many authors, some of whom will be readers of one another's works
(though that's incidental).
This is a very different conceptual world from that of interpretive criticism.
You need different concepts to navigate in this world.
> 5. What I like about it is that it recognizes it's doing work different
> from literary studies while not being as committed to invective about it. I
> really enjoyed the comparison between salt and NaCL. I still dislike
> reading generalities about "literary studies," however, because they seem
> careless. The field is too diverse.
Yes, literary studies is diverse. But, to lapse into my analogy, for a chemist
interested in the study of NaCl, the differences between ordinary table salt,
iodized table salt, sea salt, kosher salt, and whatever other kinds of artisanal
salt you want, those differences are irrelevant. NaCl is NaCl regardless of what
other substances it may be mixed with in what amounts. A very wide range of
literary critics talk of conducting close readings to discover meanings hidden
in texts.
> 6. I suspect you deal with this question within the volume, but can't it be
> said that you're interested in generating a different kind of meaning?
Yes, literary studies is diverse. But, to lapse into my analogy, for a chemist
interested in the study of NaCl, the differences between ordinary table salt,
iodized table salt, sea salt, kosher salt, and whatever other kinds of artisanal
salt you want, those differences are irrelevant. NaCl is NaCl regardless of what
other substances it may be mixed with in what amounts. A very wide range of
literary critics talk of conducting close readings to discover meanings hidden
in texts.
> Isn't a map (so to speak) a sort of meaning, or a step on the way to a
> different sort of meaning? At some point, doesn't every activity leads to
> reading some product and making meaning out of it? That is where the payoff
> of all of our studies lie. That is where comprehension of the object is
> formed. If you defer this process from one set of inert symbols to another
> you start to sound Derridean.
Whatever I am, I am not Derridean. I work in a very different conceptual world.
[snip]
> 8. Isn't the corpus that matters for your study the corpus in the reading
> mind rather than the corpus in the digital files? So every pattern
> generating activity is dealing with two corpora: the digital one and the
> mental one.
No, the corpus I mean really is the corpus that gets digitized and subjected to
various computerized analytic procedures. I am arguing that there's much more
we can learn in that process if we take it seriously rather than treating it as
a curious appendage to standard literary criticism oriented around the close
reading of meanings hidden in texts.
The intellectual world of literary study need not revolve around meaning. There
are other ways to think about language and mind.
Bill Benzon
bbenzon@mindspring.com
917-717-9841
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stc4blues/
http://www.bergenarches.com/#image1
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 2019-01-03 12:50:58+00:00
From: Bill Benzon
Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.299: toward a theory of the corpus
Reply to Francois Lachance below:
> On Jan 2, 2019, at 3:52 AM, Humanist wrote:
>
> Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 32, No. 299.
> Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London
> Hosted by King's Digital Lab
> www.dhhumanist.org
> Submit to: humanist@dhhumanist.org
>
>
> [1] From: Francois Lachance
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.296: toward a theory of the corpus (35)
>
> [2] From: Jim Rovira
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.296: toward a theory of the corpus (98)
>
>
> --[1]------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Date: 2019-01-01 22:28:06+00:00
> From: Francois Lachance
> Subject: Re: [Humanist] 32.296: toward a theory of the corpus
>
> Bill
>
> I'm intrigued by the set of contrast your recent message to Humanist lays
> out.
>
>> Date: 2018-12-31 21:00:21+00:00
>> From: Bill Benzon
>> Subject: Toward a Theory of the Corpus
>
>> 3. Why computational critics need to know about constitutive computational
>> semantics -- Simple, you need to know the lay of the land. That can be
>> expressed in four contrasts:
>
> 1) close reading vs. distant reading,
> 2) meaning vs. semantics,
> 3) statistical semantics vs. computational semantics, and
> 4) corpus as tool vs. corpus as object.
>
> My question: how are these pairs linked? Are they a simple listing without
> any relays between the elements of one pair and the elements of another?
> Or are there relationships e.g. close reading plugged into corpus as
> object? In short do these sets of contrasts represent a stabile
> representation or are they modelling a mobile set of relations?
>
> --
> Francois Lachance
> Scholar-at-large
> http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachance
> https://berneval.blogspot.com
Well, Francois, in the working paper those contrasts come after a dozen or so
pages of explanation and examples. Without that they're pretty empty and
there's really not much I can do in a short email reply. Think of them as
compass points on a complex map. The relations between the pairs are of various
kinds.
For example, if you're doing 'close reading' then 3 and 4 are irrelevant
and only the 'meaning' pole of 2 is relevant. If you're doing 'distant
reading' then 3 and 4 may be relevant depending on what techniques you're
using. But only statistical semantics, and not computational semantics (as I
have defined the term).
I should note as well that I dislike the terms 'close reading' and
'distant reading' but use them only because they're out there and aren't
going go. Talking of interpretive or analytic commentary on literary texts as
'reading' obscures and mystifies the process, allowing us to forget that it
take several years of instruction and practice to do it competently. One result
of this mystification is that literary critics will sometimes talk as though one
hasn't read a text until one has produced a (professional grade)
interpretation of it. That would seem to imply that most readers have been sleep
walking until the 1950s, which is when 'interpretation' became the focal
activity of academic literary criticism (though, of course, with earlier roots).
That of course is nonsense; nobody actually believes that. But this
mystification of reading makes it easy to talk that way.
And so with this talk of being close or distant. Close reading doesn't mean
you hold the text, say, no more than six inches from your face. It means that
your argument involves the use of quotations, paraphrases, and summaries of the
text. This is obvious and it seems rather silly of me to point it out. But the
spatial metaphor implied by this notion of 'distance' also allows us to
think of texts as having places where meaning can be hidden from view. The point
of getting close, then, would be to ferret out these hidey-holes and bring those
hidden meanings out into the open. Again, when put this way, it seems and is
silly. But just what do we mean when we talk of hidden meanings?
An as for text, what is that? In a few limited contexts it is a physical object,
perhaps a codex, or perhaps the strings of symbols on the pages of a codex. But
considered as something we 'read' the text is, in the words of Rita Copeland
and Frances Ferguson (which I quote on page 8), 'an ideal, immaterial object,
a conceptual site for the investigation of knowledge, ownership and propriety,
or authority ... What institutions, linguistic procedures, commentary forms, and
interpretive protocols stabilize text as an object of study?'
What's interesting about digital criticism based on the techniques of corpus
linguistics is that we pretty much know what the text is. It is the digital
representation of those symbols on the page, no more, no less. The procedures
have a mathematical form that requires some learning, but once you're made
your peace with them you discover that what you do is more explicit and less
mysterious than searching of meanings hidden in the nooks and crannies of
immaterial texts. It's a different conceptual world, very different.
Bill Benzon
bbenzon@mindspring.com
917-717-9841
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stc4blues/
http://www.bergenarches.com/#image1
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