Context, Online Tools, and Epistemology

This week’s exploratory was without a doubt the most difficult for me conceptually.   Although I understood each of the tools, I struggled to make sense of them in relationship to each other and to the context of the course.  Although it seems that many of you were able to embrace the seeming lack of context to create insightful and productive texts, I struggled to do so.   It is a little bit embarrassing to admit, but I struggled hard.  For me, this project – and even the sentences that I just typed about this project – became about the binary of context and lack of context.  I perceived both the online tools and the data they produced as being without context.  The Alex concordance presented me with 500-word excerpts of Wollstonecraft and Bacon.  These excerpts appeared outside the context of the texts.  They were listed on a separate page in numbered, non-textual manner, and I could not access the text from that page.  The tool, for me, became an agent that removed the words from the text and left me with just the words; however, I wasn’t left with enough words – or rather with words from enough texts – to make what I felt was a defendable claim about the text or the words.  As a result, I felt untethered.   I was, of course, not untethered.  It was simply that my thinking about the exploratory, the online tools, and the data they produced was shaped by an unproductive binary between context and lack thereof that kept me from seeing that I was the context.   

I failed to see that the tools could not be entirely without context, as they were tools in my use.  As a software, the tools have processes that work behind the scenes to pull information from its database.  The creator of the tool decides how the information will be presented or how the data will be organized.  The creator also decides which versions of texts to pull from.  He/she also determines where in the text the tool will pull information from and what constitutes a searchable term (i.e. does the tool search for plurals?  For both capitalized and lower case versions of a word?).  I cannot control those things (which incidentally are the elements of the tools that left me feeling decontextualized), but I control what kind of data is pulled.   I control the key word the text searches for.  As the user or operator, I control whether the text pulls 5 or 500 words with the key word.  I decided that the Alex collocation should pull all instances of the word “Language” in Vindication of the Rights of Women.  That control alone provides some context in the sense that my actions have context within the course.  The text has meaning for the course, as does the term, therefore the data pulled by the collocation has context.  That data may be removed from the context of the text itself, but that does not mean that it is entirely without context.   In other words, the tools cannot be entirely without context because I am not entirely without context.  This thinking, which led to a productive idea about the relationship between the operator and the tool (productive in the sense that it holds repercussions for the exploratory and more dramatically for my work in other courses), happened when I shed an unproductive binary that had resulted in hours of misery in the days before.

What I am really touching on here, I think, leads to a discussion about epistemology.  The online tools that we used can be seen as a kind of database reading.  With enough information across enough texts we can potentially make claims about larger conceptual concerns across texts and historical periods.   In this exploratory, of course, we had neither enough texts nor enough time to make those kinds of considerations.    Even still, it could be that these kinds of tools - or, rather, the ways that we use them - represent an epistemology or a way of knowing about texts and about validating what we know about textual analysis.  (The rest of you may, of course, have already figured this out, and, if that is the case, I apologize for repeating it here, but I failed to see this in my first attempts at using the tools, so I feel the need to discuss it here now.)  I do not mean, of course, that the individual tools used for this exploratory represent an epistemology; they have too many limitations for that.  I would, however, argue that their potential represents an epistemology.  Epistemology is, of course, a theory of knowledge and of the nature of knowledge.  As discussed in our rhet/comp digital culture course this week, databases, and potentially collocations, represent an alternative to close reading in which claims are made based on the presence of information across multiple texts.  If we had a full survey of Enlightenment texts about rhetoric, for example, we might use the collocation to make the claim that the term eloquence comes to mean rhetoric during this period.  Granted, it would take a much more sophisticated collocation than Alex or the Internet Archive to accomplish something like this, but it may be possible.  

To my mind, this form of analysis via database is a way of knowing, a system that produces knowledge.  With the right amount of data, it would be possible to create knowledge about texts.  (I have a few issues with this in terms of how such claims possible without reading texts and seeing information in context, but I will admit that doing so is possible).  In addition, in explaining exactly how the databases are developed and programmed, this epistemology interrogates how it creates knowledge.   There are, admittedly, limitations to collocations and other online tools, but there are limitations to the systems of Aristotle, Erasmus, Perelman, and Campbell as well, limitations that we have spent the last five week discussing and that all lead back to context.

At the end of our last class period, Dr. Graban made a comment that links epistemology and context.  She stated – roughly – that Aristotle’s system of rhetoric served to reinforce an oppressive social understanding of "polis".  Her comment helps to place Aristotle in a specific context, a context that illustrates the assumptions underlying his epistemological system and that has bearing on the knowledge created through that system.  Do we discount or consider unsophisticated some of the knowledge created through Aristotle’s system because of that oppressive context?  Do we posit, for example, that what we can create with his commonplaces is limited because of the way they perpetuate his context?  I ask this question because many of the other theorists that we have read in this strand – Erasmus, Perelman, Bacon, Campbell – all cover similar ground to Aristotle.  They all treat on similar themes; they all reorganize and reclassify rhetorical systems in the face of a changing context.  I guess what I am after here – and I realize that it is a bit half baked at this point – is whether or not a shifting context can invalidate the knowledge created by an episteme and create the need for a new one.  In the case of this week’s exploratory, the context in which we worked – in terms of the course context and the limitations of the online tools – meant that the knowledge created from the database episteme was not valid or at least highly questionable.  Can the same be said for the larger epistemic systems that we have studied this semester?