Words in a World of Scaling-up: Epistemic Normativity and Text as Data

Abstract

Cultural and literary studies have long been cognizant that apparatuses for knowledge production can render certain kinds of texts “illegible.” The relationships between knowledge, power and episteme that produce this occlusion have traditionally been explored and analyzed at the level of engagement with specific social and literary texts. This paper describes how a similar problem can arise in the context of the analysis of large-scale bodies of text. Our example is an analytical tool, intended for discovering trends and patterns in large text corpora. By describing what happens when the tool is applied to a large, heterogeneous and diverse textual corpus, we show how textual inscriptions that stand in a relationship of subalternity to structuring normativities of the text corpus could become invisible unless they already conform to the epistemic assumptions underlying those normativities. We conclude by discussing how my observations relate, by analogy and by allegory, to some issues of interest in discussions of world literature. Keywords: Digital humanities; subaltern; power/knowledge; postcolonial; distant reading; grammatization