Introduction

This special issue of Texas Studies in Literature and Language, derived from the 2010 syposium of the Texas Institute for Literary and Textual Studies, argues that digital media and tools provide new grounds for disciplinary handshakes between the two textual humanities, linguistics and literary criticism. This argument falls broadly into the purview of the "still emerging" field of the digital humanities.¹ Reflexive essays, blog posts, and manifestos by its practitioners often describe digital humanities as characterized by a fluid and diverse set of practices and a blurry mix of tributary disciplines, as emergent as a field, and yet as qualifying as an academic field only in a limited sense.² But such discussions of the field often gesture to two modes of analysis as being characteristic. The first is a kind of digital scholarship that engages traditional questions using new computational tools, benefiting from new insights that spring from the digital media's affordance of more automatic and efficient ways of analyzing larger amounts of more easily collectable data. Disciplinary convergence in this area can take place through a shared interest in similar methods, with the research questions remaining distinct along the lines of established disciplinary boundaries. A second mode of digital humanities is one that generates new questions concerning the digital as a cultural and discursive space, one in which new kinds of representation and aesthetics are generated and where the foundational concepts of human identity and interaction that underlie linguistics and literary studies in their traditional forms are questioned, reformulated, and replaced.

This special issue of TSLL intends to sharpen the meta-discourse on the digital humanities by limiting its scope to contributions from practitioners with backgrounds in those humanities that are traditionally most deeply interested in the study of textual discourse: linguistics and literary studies. The papers collected in this special issue, to different degrees, take up both of the approaches to the digital humanities sketched above, suggesting that the different modes of digital humanities scholarship relate to each other on a continuum, rather than in a dichotomous way. The contributions represent explorations of digital tools and textual questions, conducted by scholars working in, and directed at readerships in, both literary and linguistic studies. For if the rise of digital humanities is one occasion for our theme, the other is an uncomfortable history of rifts between literary-critical and linguistics practitioners in many institutions, despite the existence of bridging institutions such as the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations, and journals like Literary and Linguistic Computing. Such gaps and tensions have involved questions about scholarly value and turf, and have extended from deep questions about the location of language (cultural, historical, biological, etc.) to the very mechanics of publishing and promotion, in the continued dominance of the book form in literary criticism and of the journal article in linguistics (as Lara Lomicka Anderson and Gillian Lord have recently observed).

The essays selected for this issue, then, attempt to appeal across disciplines. But to an extent, we have also asked our contributors to write across divisions—nascent or established—within their fields.³ Computational approaches should be controversial, productively, as should any good scholarly work, but our sense is that common methodological and theoretical concerns are emerging as linguists and literary critics engage new computational approaches—and as we grapple with the new audiences for our work made possible by the web and portable computing.

The shared concerns and techniques to address them that emerge among these essays speak to new argumentative terrains: that of Franco Moretti's controversial "distant reading" tactics; or the bound-to-be equally controversial notion of "surface reading" (see Best and Marcus); or the problems and promise of mass textual data sets; or the way to bring n-gram, frequency, and keyword analyses to interpretive value using texts in multiple media. Indeed, this concern with medium bridges all of the essays; as Wai Chee Dimock has observed (extending a perspective with a long critical foreground), literature is blended by nature, "not only in the commingling of languages, but equally in the commingling of expressive media" (158-59). Acting on this observation in the analysis...