Post #10: Searchable Units in The Woman in White

This week, I’d like to use this space to think through Alan Liu’s “What is the Meaning of the Digital Humanities to the Humanities?” and then write some on my work with the digitized version of The Woman in White. I’ve recently been looking through the digitized US publication of The Woman in White (1860), which was serialized by Harper’s Weekly near the time that the novel was serialized by All the Year Round.

Liu takes up the assumption that the digital humanities are not concerned with the “humanities,” and are not, for instance “concerned with race, gender, alternative sexuality, or disability” (410). The issue here, Liu argues, has more to do with the meaning making in the humanities than with the digital humanities: “an understanding of the digital humanities can only rise to the level of an explanation if we see that the underlying issue is the disciplinary identity not of the digital humanities but of the humanities themselves” (410).  To support and explore this claim, Liu explains Heuser and Le-Khac’s project to find meaning in their language data analysis of British novels. Heuser and Le-Khac used Correlator to find word cohorts (the “semantic cohort method” (411)) when performing their data analysis, but were focused these concerns: “[W]hat is the meaning of changes in word usage and frequencies and other quantifiable aspects of culture….We can see now that the greatest challenge of developing digital humanities methods may not be how to cull data from humanistic objects, but how to analyze that data in meaningfully interpretable ways” (412). The discovery of “abstract” and “hard” word cohorts led them to “themes,” but this shows an issue for Liu: “Of course, Heuser and Le-Khac assume that there are preexisting themes to be found in the word cohorts of primary materials and also that the main mission is to discover them” (414).

So that the cohorts could be “filtered and filled out in ways that made sense” (415), they used the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which gives semantic classifications through a timeline. Liu is skeptical: “By installing the HTOED as what amounts to a plug-in for Correlator, Heuser and Le-Khac sowed their hermeneutical process with a coseed of human semantic interpretation. They thus ‘solved’ the meaning problem…” (415). The “human semantic interpretation” part, I believe, is what Liu then troubles: It’s an “initial fallacy that there are immaculately separate human and machinic orders” (417). The HTOED is not, according to Liu, “pretechnological” since it “originated as a thoroughly entangled human-technological… semantic act” (417). There’s no real separation here from technology. I’m understanding from Liu that the humanities (or “Humanistic knowledge”) are (and have been, as shown by the HTOED) being pushed into certain molds that leave out the “residual yearnings for spirit, humanity, and self” (420). The humanities “must compete in the world system with social, economic, science-engineering, workplace, and popular-culture knowledges that do not necessarily value meaning…” (419). I went to the site 4Humanities to see the kinds of posts and information there. Most recently, there’s an infographic with iconic figures next to their majors (all from the humanities). There are posts every couple weeks or so.

For my own work with The Woman in White, I am not using Correlator, and I am not, unfortunately, creating an algorithm to look up words associated with prophetic language. My work with the novel is quite elementary. The version (here: https://archive.org/details/womaninwhitenove00collrich) allows me to do word searches, and since I am looking specifically at the entanglement of dreams/prophetic visions with the language of captivity, I began by searching for “dream” and synonyms, finding many more hits than I had expected (even though I just finished this book). I was interested to see if there are any differences with the prophetic language between the serialization in All the Year Round and the one in Harper’s Weekly. This is part of a larger research interest of mine regarding influences on/from nineteenth-century gothic literature.

While I began quantifying the work to find these potential differences (which wasn’t leading me anywhere), I remembered that the US serialization contained illustrations whereas the one in All the Year Round did not. We spoke in class about searchable units while reading Moretti, I believe, and I thought about this while “searching” the digitized novel for images of dreams, prophecy, and captivity. Apart from an illustration of Sir Percival locked in the burning vestry (where, I think, the entanglement of the church and captivity is most clear in the novel), there are no illustrations of the dreams (I wasn’t surprised by this) and none of the prominent asylum (I was surprised by this). While the absence of asylum images could seem like a stopping point, I think it’s significant, even if I don’t know what to make of it yet.