“Après le déluge, More Criticism”: Philology, Literary History, and Ancestral Reading in the Coming Posttranscription World

“Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation” is a motto found throughout the work of the Glaswegian artist and writer Alasdair Gray—and it is one which might well be applied to those engaged in what has been called “digital humanities.” The future offers the promise, by 2017 if the estimates of the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) are correct, of not just the whole of printed Renaissance drama but every surviving printed book in English from the early modern period, transcribed and available for searching and “data mining” on the laptops of every academic, postgraduate, and undergraduate in the field. Whatever this nation will be, if “nation” is really the right word for the inhabitants of this postdeluge, information-rich world, it will have many members.

Even now, large sections of the drama are available—far more than the most assiduous readers can claim familiarity with (and this promise is also a threat to which we will return).¹ But material availability is simply the most basic step in research: the transcription rates of the TCP are impressive, as is the scale and ambition of the project, but it is merely providing data. It will be up to academics and their students to use the data, and doing so will require not just work but also relearning and retheorizing. It will also involve the field in a shift in research methods and teaching requirements.

As the full range of Renaissance printed material becomes available, our subject changes: we can ask different questions and we can answer the old ones with new, alien methods. Someone planning a book on the history of English genres in 1960 could legitimately have laid out a research plan that would have been equally legitimate in 1860, or 1760: a wide range of reading, certainly, but selective reading, and even more selective writing when it came to evidence. The narrative would arise out of the reading, but that reading could be only partial, so the claims made would have to be judged on rhetorical grounds: Are they persuasive, seductive? No? How else could it be said?

Plan a book about the rise and fall of genres now, and it is possible—and arguably necessary—to “read” everything, or at least everything that has been digitized. The narrative, if there is one, lies in the data, and the claims stand or fall on the size of the sample, the statistical significance of the results, the care with which the procedures have been applied.

Franco Moretti has written such a book for the genres of the novel—and we are planning a study on the genres of English prose in the seventeenth century.² In the past, such works would have been “magisterial” in the sense of broad surveys which constructed a grand narrative, judged on the quality of their prose and organization of materials. Now we are faced with something more like an epidemiology of literary populations, light sluicing across a map where the virus has passed. We are required not simply to identify a number of exemplary texts but also to take account of all the evidence—every case, every death, every recovery.

Pedagogy and Research

What is brave about this new world is the ridiculous availability of data; to live in it, our students will need different skills, and we will have to change the way we prepare them. Interestingly, we are finding that the gap between pedagogy and research is narrowing: as we learn new methods, our students follow closely; and the nature of the research procedures means undergraduates and postgraduates can make genuine contributions.

Literature students in 2020 will, as a matter of course, want to run basic concordance and other procedures on their assigned texts—their tutors/advisers (in advanced instruction at least) will expect them to run log-likelihood tests before writing, for example, on “love” in Shakespeare. (And how long will it be before “log-likelihood” can be used in a context...