Scaffolded Hermeneutica for Literary Scholars with Novice Technical Skills

Jeremy Browne

jeremy_browne@byu.edu

Brigham Young University, United States of America

Hermeneutica

In Hermeneutica, Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair (2016) argue for an
approach to the digital humanities that deemphasizes the tool and positivist
notions of proof. Their proposed approach, also called Hermeneutica, champions
tool accessibility over tool sophistication. Similarly, scholarly play is
legitimated as a useful step in developing research questions and as a means to
reconsider established notions within literary disciplines. The aim of
Hermeneutica as a methodology seems to be the generation of
interesting humanistic questions as much as the resolution of open questions.

Rockwell and Sinclair demonstrate the difference between Hermeneutica and
typical DH approaches by quoting from Gary Wong's 2009 blog post:

[Typical DH] takes the worst part of the scientific papers (really really long
sets of tabular data in the body of the text) and the worst part of papers from
the humanities (really really complicated language where simple language would
have done) and puts it in one. If this is what the cooperation of computational
text analysis and traditional literary analysis yield, I

am scared.

Because Hermeneutica attempts to join the best parts of these fields, it has
the potential to turn DH into a discipline that is more useful for the vast
majority of non-DH humanists. It could be the means of accelerating the
mainstreaming of DH methods and bringing us to the eventual point where all
humanities are digital—a destination Claire Clivaz described succinctly
(DARIAH, 2016).

Voyant

One feature that distinguishes Hermeneutica from many other DH approaches is
its companion set of tools meant to demonstrate its application. Voyant Tools,
now referred to simply as Voyant, is a web-based, modular suite of tools meant
to be “worth thinking with” (Rockwell and Sinclair, 2016: 10, original
emphasis). The goal is to accommodate playful exploration of text and sharing
of corpora across the web. It is not designed as an industrial-grade text
analysis tool, but as a “toy” that allows scholars to uncover new questions and
gain new appreciation of texts.

Current limitations of Hermeneutica

A fundamental component of Hermeneutica is that the scholar views text through
the lens of Voyant (or other computational text analysis tools), and then
synthesizes that experience with their prior knowledge of the text and its
milieu. A problem that Voyant addresses, but does not solve, is that many
scholars who know the most about specific texts lack the technological skills
that would be considered pre-novice in DH circles. Voyant allows everyone with
a text and a browser to explore word frequencies, collocations, etc., but it
presupposes that the text is available and clean enough for use. In order for
Hermeneutica to appeal to non-DH humanities scholars, these issues of text
availability and the lack of user skill must first be addressed.

On the issue of text availability, it is not often that scholars wish to
analyze text that is rare or missing. More often they are interested in text
that is protected by various copyright laws, which prohibit posting the text to
public websites such as Voyant. Thankfully, in the Unites States at least,
Google Books' recent court victory (Stohr, 2016) now permits scholars to
publish online the analysis results derived from copyrighted texts, so long as
the original text is not recoverable by the user. To this end Rockwell and
Sinclair developed Voyant 2's “non-consumptive” mode which restricts access to
tools that allow full-text views.

While such developments represent Rockwell and Sinclair's amenability to meet
the ever-evolving needs of Hermeneuticans, accommodating users' lack
of technology skill is beyond the scope of their involvement. For example, it
is not reasonable to expect the Voyant developers to be concerned over issues
of text acquisition or text preparation. Rather, those con-cerns—while critical
to expanding the pool of potential Hermeneuticans—are issues of local
implementation. Similarly, it makes sense that Voyant would offer the ability
to link to a corpus after uploading the text, but uploading the text and
keeping track of various versions of corpora is beyond the scope of Voyant.
A local practice of adding some structure around the

Voyant suite ought to make Hermeneutica useful to a far greater audience than
it is now.

Scaffolding

In the field of instructional design, such structure is called scaffolding.
Specifically, scaffolding refers to the process of providing learners adequate
introduction and examples before allowing them to attempt a task on their own
(Bruner, 1978). For scaffolded Her-meneutica, DH-savvy professionals can work
to acquire, clean, and upload text to Voyant (and other tools), and then
provide public listings of the resulting corpora.

Examples of scaffolded Hermeneutica

We have implemented this scaffolded Hermeneu-tica approach in our Office of
Digital Humanities beginning with the Cormac McCarthy Corpus Project (CMCP).
The CMCP includes 13 Voyant corpora of McCarthy's 10 novels: one for the
complete works, one for each novel, and two for novels (The Orchard Keeper and 
The Road) where the narration has been segregated from the dialogue. But the
linchpin of scaffolded Hermeneutica is the CMCP's publicly-accessible website
that organizes these Voyant corpora. The website is built on WordPress with the
Pods content management plugin, and contains information on McCarthy's work,
descriptions of Voyant (and other tools), and listings of links to the Voyant
corpora. An essential feature of the website's structure is the ability to
accommodate revisions to the current corpora as well as the addition of other
tools in the future. Already, there is a non-Voyant sentence structure search
tool attached as a beta-testing option.

A rough version of the Cormac McCarthy Corpus Project was presented at the 2015
conference of the Cormac McCarthy Society. The reaction to these tools being
available for public use was strongly positive. One attendee referred to the
website as “a game-changer.”

The same scaffolded Hermeneutica is being implemented on two other projects: 
Machado a longa distancia and The Modernist Short Fiction Project. Preliminary
demonstrations of the approach have yielded similar reactions to what we
observed with the CMCP. Non-DH scholars become excited rather than anxious when
the digital analysis tools are scaffolded to provide them ready access. In
fact, these demonstrations turn into play sessions where non-DH scholars
repeatedly request for certain words to be added to the frequency charts and
other Voyant panels.

Hermeneutica and Voyant represent the greatest potential for growth in DH not
because they are the most technologically or theoretically advanced 
developments, but because they are the most accessible to non-DH scholars.
Still, they don't quite reach the ground level of technology skills possessed
by most researchers in the humanities. The scaffolded Herme-neutica approach
proposed in this paper seems to span that gap to make Hermeneutica more
accessible.