The myth of the new: Mass digitization, distant reading, and the future of the book

Abstract

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Literary and Linguistic Computing following peer review. The denitive publisher-authenticated version Gooding, P, Terras, M. and Warwick, C. (2013) 'The myth of the new : mass digitization, distant reading, and the future of the book.' Literary and linguistic computing., 28 (4), pp. 629-639 is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqt051. Additional information:Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. and that it is therefore necessary to begin working to increase our understanding of this technology and to move the debate onwards using evidence from the real world.

Big data, bigger dilemmas: A critical review

“…Some humanists and social scientists have expressed concern that “playing with data [might serve as a] gateway drug that leads to more‐serious involvement in quantitative research” (Nunberg, , para. 12), leading to a kind of technological determinism that “brings with it a potential negative impact upon qualitative forms of research, with digitization projects optimized for speed rather than quality, and many existing resources neglected in the race to digitize ever‐increasing numbers of texts” (Gooding, Warwick, & Terras, , para. 6–7).…”

Exploring Literary Landscapes: From Texts to Spatiotemporal Analysis through Collaborative Work and GIS

“…Not without causing controversy, this 'identification with new scientific methods gives the impression of a revolutionary new style of research emerging in the humanities', as Paul Gooding, Melissa Terras, and Clair Warwick have put it. 16 Beyond the understandable refusal to change scholarly paradigms and procedures, criticism of the application of scientific methods in the humanities is also based on the problems raised by the manipulation of large volumes of digital data, including both technical issues (such as the mixed quality of optical-characterrecognition digitisation) and epistemological concerns (such as bias generated by the automated creation of textual metadata).…”

Towards a flexible open-source software library for multi-layered scholarly textual studies: An Arabic case study dealing with semi-automatic language processing

“…On the basis of our experience and of authoritative scientific papers [4] [6][7][8][9][11] [13][14] [16][17][18], this field of the digital humanities has shown to require programming interfaces and abstract data structures for multi-lingual and multi-witness texts [16]. Since literary cross-lingual studies are constantly growing and evolving, both in number and in complexity, related soundness applications have become more and more demanding [6][8] [17].…”

“…Since literary cross-lingual studies are constantly growing and evolving, both in number and in complexity, related soundness applications have become more and more demanding [6][8] [17].…”

“…Studies performed by an abstract framework allow to reuse early results, to facilitate interoperability and integration, and to investigate worthy parallel phenomena [2] [9][14] [17][18].…”