Jonathan Hope from Strathclyde University gave a presentation to the Renaissance Graduate Seminar at the English Faculty last night about DocuScope, a major collaborative project based at Carnegie Mellon University for the ‘computer-aided rhetorical analysis’ of texts. The team behind DocuScope includes computer scientists, linguistics specialists, and literary scholars, and the idea is based on a system (or a ‘text analysis environment’, as the project website puts it) that was originally created for the analysis of students’ creative writing. In essence, a teacher could run writing samples through a computer programme, and use its statistical analysis of rhetorical features as the basis for further discussion with students – getting them to think about why one writing sample features a much greater frequency of a certain linguistic feature than others, for example.

In its current shape DocuScope is much more mind-bogglingly complex. Hope illustrated this by showing us what its analysis of the whole known corpus of early modern drama looks like.  I won’t try to explain how the system actually works (you can read expert accounts elsewhere, like here) but it was interesting to see the forms of output that can be generated, such as dendrograms, which arrange the works according to how similar they are to each other, and depict strong and weak connections between texts based on their linguistic features. The entire corpus of Shakespeare’s plays has also been filtered through this mysterious machine, and Hope showed us some of the colourful visual representations of these results. According to DocuScope’s categories of rhetorical analysis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor are least similar to other plays, and The Merchant of Venice is least dissimilar.

Some of the limitations and possible pitfalls of this tool are obvious, others less so. But the point of DocuScope is clearly to raise questions, not provide answers – indeed, Hope referred to it as ‘a problem factory’, which serves to provoke further debates. DocuScope has much potential; in the future it could, for example, provide another slant in investigations of authorship or dating of texts. One more general point that Hope’s paper raised was the growing necessity for scholars in the arts and humanities to develop their skills of statistical interpretation. An understanding of how statistics may be used and abused will increasingly become essential for teachers and researchers working with digital tools and resources.

Launched today, the British Newspaper Archive digitizes millions of newspapers published between (roughly) 1700 and 1950. Sadly, it’s a subscription service–but also a godsend to research in innumerable fields. Click here to have a look.

Linda Bree came to talk to the History of Material Texts seminar last week, on the subject of ‘Scholarly Publishing and Technological Change’. As someone who knows the world of academic publishing from every possible direction–Linda is Editorial Director for Arts and Literature at Cambridge University Press, and a scholar working on the ‘long eighteenth century’–she is uniquely placed to tell us what is going on out there, and her talk was indeed eye-opening.

As someone who subscribes to the scholarly orthodoxy that new technologies don’t replace old technologies, but force creative adaptation, I had completely missed what to her was the most important feature of the current landscape: digital printing, and Print-On-Demand technology. Although POD can be unreliable (do you really trust Amazon to deliver you a decent facsimile of that novel from 1833?), for scholarly publishers it is transformative. It gives old books a new lease of life (CUP calls its project to digitize its back-catalogue the ‘Lazarus programme’!) and allows supply to be more closely tailored to demand for new books. It also promises to make publishing leaner and greener, since digital files can be printed out in locations across the world, cutting transportation costs. And you may be able to have a book freshly printed by your local bookshop, if something like the Blackwell’s ‘Espresso Book Machine’ takes off more widely.

Other areas of the picture Bree painted were more murky. The question of how libraries will survive when they are spending their budgets not on buying books but on renting digital content; or of how publishers will survive as the web fosters the illusion (or the ideal) that content should come for free–these were left hanging. In the short term, though, it seems that the physical book will remain the medium of choice for academic monographs. If you’ve got to read a big chunky book full of footnotes, cross-references, and appendices, a book that you may want to scribble on and store away for future reference, ink on paper remains indispensable. For now.

The novelist Jeanette Winterson has just published her autobiography, entitled Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, and on Saturday the Guardian Review published an extract from it. The broad outlines of the story are familiar to anyone who has read her Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (or who has seen the TV adaptation). A magnificently mirthless Pentecostal Christian woman living in a two-up, two-down terraced house in Accrington adopts a daughter who becomes the principal victim of her oppressive domestic regime. Among the many bans to which the young Winterson is subject is a ban on literature–she’s not allowed to read books, because ‘the trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late’. ‘Too late for what?’, the girl wonders, sensing a world of pleasures and dangers that lies just out of view.

The story from there unfolds rather like the inspiring autodidact narratives that Jonathan Rose collected in his study of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001). It’s the tale of an individual empowered by books, and above all by the books in the local library, which in Accrington was a stone building finished in 1908 with money from the Carnegie Foundation, with carved heads of Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer and Dante outside and the words ‘KNOWLEDGE IS POWER’ on a giant stained-glass window within. There, Winterson remembers, she worked her way through the fiction section, starting with A for Austen. But she also bought herself books, which she hid under her mattress in layers composed of 72 paperbacks each. She was, she recalls, ‘going up in the world’ until her mother found the hidden treasures, threw them all out of the window into the backyard, and set light to them, leaving only charred fragments behind.

The event was, in Winterson’s retelling, foundational. Literature went inward: ‘The books had gone, but they were objects; what they held could not be so easily destroyed’. The bonfire of the vanities was the birth of the writer. But this writer is exceptionally alert to the inextricability of fact and fiction, and she must surely be aware of the resonance of her book-burning narrative. What went on in this terraced house in Lancashire is an uncanny recapitulation of the scene early in the first part of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) in which the priest and the barber go through the mad knight’s library deciding which books to keep and which to massacre. The evil chivalric romances that have so beguiled Quixote are flung out of the window into the courtyard, where they are burnt to ashes by the housekeeper during the night. (Winterson’s burning is also a nocturnal event).

The main discrepancy between the two accounts is that Cervantes’ censors go through the books with some care, and find innumerable reasons to save their skins (ranging from sheer love, via the beauties of style, to personal associations: ‘Keep it back, because its author’s a friend of mine…’) They set the scene for a narrative that is enormously affectionate towards the absurd stories that it spoofs. No such luck for D. H. Lawrence and his companions in the twentieth century. They end up as ‘burnt jigsaws of books’, fragments which turn prose into broken poetry.

It’s over 20 years since Jonathan Goldberg published Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance, a study of how early modern students were disciplined by their teachers to become at once fine penmen and docile subjects of the crown. I remember being sceptical, when I first read it, about Goldberg’s claim that the pen-holding hands depicted in writing manuals were actually being violently dismembered (‘the body and its natural life are menaced by writing’). But a couple of weeks ago I came across these pointing hands in the margins of a late sixteenth-century book.

As Bill Sherman has taught us, in his more recent study Used Books, the manicule was one of the most important symbols that early modern readers used to process their reading. But although Sherman emphasizes the ‘excessive and quirky’ nature of many manicules, including those that emerge from elaborate ruffs, or sprout leaves and flowers, or turn phallic to mark discussions of male genitalia, I don’t think he has any that actually bleed. I’m just sorry that I’ve missed Hallowe’en for this post…