Anticipation and Apprehension: A Two Part Experience With Concordances, Databases & Ontologies.

Part I

To be entirely transparent, the task at hand appeared rather daunting when I first navigated the assignment details. In the midst of this anticipation I chose to begin composing my thoughts in a two part manner. The first part is being composed before the digital research task begins while the second part will be composed upon completion of the exercise in effort to embrace the experience entirely. 

The first thought that came to mind was a paper I read recently from the Quarterly Journal of Speech ("Whither Research?" 19.4 (1933): 552-561). William Norwood Brigance opens by retelling an attack on criticism made by Woodrow Wilson. Wilson reportedly denounced the way English departments "count the words...note the changes...and run their illusions" (Brigance 552). Furthermore, Brigance recalls Wilson's accusation that literary critics "do not reflect...they label...their minds are not stages, but museums; nothing is done there, but very curious and valuable collections are kept there" (553). In this rather vicious attack Brigance entertains the assertion that there has been a trend in criticism to this classification and counting of sentences (554) however, we should move forward from this method. 

I provide this information at the prelude to this project and to provide context for this task. My recent exposure to this type of topical word searching is predominantly negative, however, I am optimistic that this first-hand experience will alter my perception of the task. 



Part II
The question I begin with, following the concordance task, is how comprehensive and exhaustive can these tools really be toward our ultimate understanding of a text? I argue that understanding a text is far beyond the breadth that these tools can provide for us. Quantity of a words usage in a text is not necessarily equivalent to its importance. For example, every use of 'man' or 'woman' inside a text is not certainly associated with the weight of importance of man or woman comparatively. I would like to be upfront with my biases and it is that I do not think quantitatively and and numerical data initially does not appeal to my thoughts. I would like to further repeat numerical data cannot provide a sole conclusive understanding of a text. Nevertheless, it can be a means to an end of understanding insofar as quantitative tools such as the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts can provide data that leads a reader into a qualitative understanding of the meaning of the text itself. 

First I argue, with the support of this exploratory, that these tools alone simply cannot provide a comprehensive understanding of the text. The limitations are multifaceted. The initial problem associated with concordance research is that the response is a list of data, word maps, or graphs of the term in question that in themselves provide no understanding. In the scope of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of The Rights of Woman, for example, conducting a search of the word 'rhetoric' within this text will return with only one response. This data is concordant to nothing in response to the question of rhetorical elements in Wollstonecraft's piece. Herein lies the first problem, the presence or quantity of a specific term does not necessarily align with the relevance of a concept. 

Furthermore, the databases are calculative and not intelligent. What I mean by this claim is that the detection of the term itself may bring up alternative concepts not associated with the word in question. An example of this is again regarding Wollstonecraft's piece. In a concordance search of the word 'sense,' the results are not conducive to necessarily the meaning of "sensation," but include phrases such as 'give the sense of,' or 'with the sense that.' These phrases will ensue larger numbers for the term in question but actually skew the data you wish to find.

Finally, I will concede that these databases can be aides in the direction of research, or a means to a scholastic end, even though they are not in themselves the end itself. With a critical eye for the limits of databases like the Alex Concordance, Internet Archive, or Google NGram, a mindful researcher will have the sense to proceed in producing scholarship with a breadth of research inclusive to both critical, qualitative methods and semiotic quantitative data. My suggestion to the researcher would be to critically utilize these tools as a means to guide your research, but do not restrict research to a limited engine. To conclude, I return again to Brigance's discussion of Woodrow Wilson's attack on literary criticism, with which I opened this post. In order to put the techniques which Wilson denounces to generate truth or knowledge, the solution is not to discard these methods but to incorporate them into a larger breadth of research technique.