And—?: Using Digital Tools to Reread The Canterbury Tales

Teachers and scholars of medieval literature have long championed close reading. Some teachers lament the influence of literary theories that, once reduced to ideological criticism, seem to replace close reading and to encourage students to impose meaning on texts rather than discover ways in which meaning is created by language. Our aim is to show how newly developed digital technologies promote close reading and help to reinvigorate the study of language as a component of literary meaning. These technologies, explored within the new discipline of Digital Humanities, show that both the text and the classroom can be seen as laboratories for the exploration and discovery of meaning and the processes that shape it. Our example involves Chaucer's most frequently-used (if not his favorite) word, and.

Digital Humanities (DH) has been defined by Matthew Kirschenbaum as "a field of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities." DH "involves investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation of information in electronic form," including the study of "how these media affect the disciplines in which they are used."¹ DH embraces some new and expensive kinds of software, but one DH tool, the concordance, has long been a staple of medieval literary study. Many concordances are now available online, and like some other powerful tools, including The Middle English Dictionary, are free.²

Such tools enable what is, in DH, called "distant reading," and distant reading, as we will show, is an important way to assist close reading. Distant reading is a term used to describe the work of Franco Moretti, a scholar more famous for counting novels than reading them. Critical of "the minimal fraction of the literary field we work on," Moretti and his followers use statistical trends (involving length of novels, for example, and their sales) to illuminate the history of publishing and the history of public taste.³ Their idea is not to broaden the canon of works that are interpreted but rather to count works published and to analyze the distribution of works instead of their content.

Our application of distant reading is different. We use the term as a way to approach words in texts rather than books on the shelf, although we too are concerned with distribution and patterns rather than interpretation. We think of distant reading as the use of computational resources to identify language patterns that human readers either overlook or cannot see without the help of machines. A concordance offers a perspective on an author's corpus that would take any reader a long time to create. Users of such tools for vernacular languages need to know many things, especially that orthographical variants have to be accommodated, including i for y spellings, inflections, and vowel changes. Such matters, of course, are not obstacles. Rather, they are important components of learning how medieval languages work. Ordinary DH tools go far beyond the concordance in reassembling texts into new units. They can list sentences according to their length, their use of prepositional phrases, their density as measured by nouns, and countless other criteria. Although this sounds like something new, David L. Hoover has shown that modern quantitative studies date from the 1850s, when attempts were made to answer questions concerning the attribution of anonymous works by analyzing vocabulary and other aspects of textual composition.⁴

Medievalists interested in DH and distant reading can see impressive results in the research of Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope.⁵ In "The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of 'Green Sleeves': Digital Approaches to Shakespeare's Language of Genre," the authors address the linguistic makeup of Shakespeare's genres. Using a program called DocuScope, they "offer a portrait of Shakespearean genre at the level of the sentence, showing how an identification of frequently iterated combinations of words (either in their presence or absence) can allow us to appreciate the integrity and fluidity of Shakespeare's genres."⁶ Witmore and Hope see texts as two different types of objects: first, as historical objects and theatrical performances once acted out by real people on...