![]() Producing electronic texts and locating and accessing data within them are simple but vital functions the computer can perform, but the computer’s greatest strengths are in storing, counting, comparing, sorting, and performing statistical analysis. I will argue with John Burrows that “computer-assisted textual analysis can be of value in many different sorts of literary inquiry, helping to resolve some questions, to carry others forward, and to open entirely new ones” (“Textual Analysis”). Many kinds of evidence produced by statistical methods are simply not accessible without a computer. When the collection of texts is larger or the items to be investigated occur more frequently, however, it becomes impossible to perform the work without a computer (imagine studying personal pronouns in one hundred Victorian novels). In these cases, the computer is valuable despite the fact that one could perform the activities without it. ![]() For example, it would seem perverse not to use an available digital text of a work for searching for a vaguely remembered passage that is important for an argument or for locating every significant example of a word or phrase, and studying a concordance remains an effective method for understanding a text. I would argue that almost any literary study can benefit from at least some modest and basic kinds of computer assistance. Instead of debating the causes for this neglect, I will concentrate here on computational methods that can be of use in many different kinds of literary research (for two contrasting views, see Ramsay Hoover, “End”). Computer-assisted textual analysis has a long, rich history, despite the fact that, as has often been noted, it has not been widely adopted in contemporary literary studies.
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