Viral Texts as Context

In a recent article for College Literature, Gabi Kirilloff challenges the “preoccupation with method” among both digital humanities scholar and critics of the field, arguing

that the information produced from computational methods should be understood as a type of context, rather than as a textual “reading” or interpretation. While this may seem like a subtle shift, viewing computational output as context implies that impartial and flawed methods can still supply valuable information. Incorrect data and flawed methods can lead to relevant and novel textual interpretations, much as valid methods can produce uninspired interpretations.

For Kirilloff, the distinct aims of computational research need not be met by the same researchers, as “we must parse out the distinct stages of interpretation that occur during computation.” The kinds of interpretation “involved in creating a computational tool, refining the tool, and processing results” may be quite “distinct from the final acts of textual interpretation enabled by the data,” a stage that might be taken up by subject experts distinct from the scholars who developed the tool.37 This book might seem at first like a counter argument, publishing together methods, data, and scholarly arguments that seek to illuminate nineteenth-century newspaper production. At the heart of our collaboration and this book’s multigraph format, however, we identify a fundamental agreement with Kirilloff. The complex, messy, dynamic textual ecosystems that created and sustained nineteenth-century newspaper exchanges pressure archival and computational interpretation alike. None of this book’s authors would be capable of addressing the computational and humanistic questions at the heart of our project alone. The chapters in this book evidence the ways our various areas of expertise illuminate, complement, and sometimes challenge each other. And while we hope that readers from different fields will benefit from all the book’s chapters, we also acknowledge that our readers might “parse out” the arguments that speak most clearly to their intellectual priorities. For some, our data and methods will spark new ideas about textual reuse or computational classification, while others might respond to our arguments about editorial practices in the nineteenth-century printing office, or our claims about the vignette as a progenitor to literary journalism.

Even more broadly, however, this book barely introduces the many interpretations that might stem from other scholars analyzing our data on nineteenth-century reprinting, submitting seed texts to our reprint-detection pipeline, or adapting our tools to investigate textual reuse in other corpora. To that first point, for example, we might note that while our latter chapters offer literary-historical readings of some trends across our reprinting data, these represent only a tiny fraction of the readings that might be constructed from the millions of reprints identified through the Viral Texts project. Other scholars with distinct expertise from ours would no doubt find much of interest that we ignore here. For example, we know that many clusters in our data reflects the growth of national advertising campaigns in the late nineteenth century, but none among our team have the requisite expertise to pursue that line of inquiry. In other words, we would offer the larger Viral Texts project as an experiment seeking to create contexts that other scholars might explore, interpret, or challenge. We offer Going the Rounds as a set of arguments but also as an invitation to colleagues who might want to explore facets of nineteenth-century newspaper culture we have not yet explored.