Text and Document in Digital Humanities

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1. Core Argument: Expanding the Humanities Toolkit

This chapter argues that digital scholarship expands the materials humanists study, moving beyond traditional texts to include a wider array of digital elements. It focuses specifically on how text and document are defined, processed, and utilized, highlighting both new opportunities and challenges in representation and analysis.

2. Redefining "Text" in the Digital Realm

The concept of "text" has evolved from purely literary works (poems, novels) to encompass any cultural object that can be "read" and interpreted.

• From Canon to Corpus: Digital projects like the British Women Romantic Poets Project challenge traditional canons by aggregating non-canonical works, enabling synchronic analysis of a historical period.

• Intertextuality and Interoperability: Digital texts are often studied as part of a network. Aggregators like NINES link disparate projects, allowing for cross-searching and interoperability, which prevents the creation of isolated "stovepipes" of data.

3. The Document as Evidentiary Authority

A document is defined as any object furnishing information or evidence. Digitization often elevates a text to a document by assigning it greater authority and truth claims about the past.

• Examples: Charters, wills, deeds, and receipts are being digitized, making vast archives accessible for new forms of query-based research. For instance, Probing the Past provides searchable probate inventories from the Chesapeake region.

• Enhanced Analysis: Advanced imaging technologies, like multispectral imaging used by the Lazarus Project, can recover damaged texts, increasing their value as scholarly documents.
4. Key Implications for Scholarship

• Representation vs. Reality: While digital collections can be more comprehensive, they are still curated representations. Scholars must avoid the trap of assuming digitized archives fully capture historical reality.

• The Aggregation Effect: Large-scale projects like London Lives, which aggregates 240,000 manuscript pages, allow researchers to work with a volume of evidence previously unimaginable, potentially leading to more robust and challengeable interpretations.

5. Conclusion

The digital transformation of text and document fundamentally alters humanistic research. It provides powerful tools for access and analysis but requires a critical approach to issues of selection, authority, and the very nature of evidence. The digital humanist must navigate the balance between the vast possibilities of aggregated data and the unique materiality of original sources.