Feb 08

View from the Meta-Plateau: Examining Adolph’s Elementary Modes of Electronic Text Analysis

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Rhetoric

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Electronic text analysis gives researchers means of interpreting words and their arrangements on a meta-level. After all, symbolic meaning (the heart of every letter and syllable of all human language) is what makes and connects us as human beings.

This kind of study has shown that lexis and grammar do not exist independently from one another, but rather they are inextricably linked.

Lexis and grammar are the systems of meaning and practical usage that pervade how meaning is conveyed, from literature to political rhetoric. Achieving an understanding of one is to ascertain an understanding of the other, and both create avenues of insight. Dr. Adolphs introduces two elementary modes of electronic text analysis:

(1) intra-textual analysis, and

(2) comparisons of collections of texts with references, which may include other electronic texts or data.

Cover design of Svenja Adolphs,

The latter is important for groups of both literary and non-literary works, referred to as “corpuses” by linguists. ETA enables researchers to cross-analyze bodies of work, such as Shakespeare’s plays. Intra-textual analysis is useful for examining symbolic patterns and meaning relevant to one work. In Introducing Electronic Text Analysis, Dr. Adolphs charts a spectrum of “narrator involvement” in a novel based on recurring words and grammar; the recurrences indicate the narrator’s action or thought pertaining to the story’s events. Thus, ETA is capable of assisting scholars in purveying stylistic characteristics based on patterns of speech and thought presentation. ETA even assists scholars pursuing hunches–that Woolf’s use of the word “poetry” in To the Lighthouse may actually have a negative connotation, for example.

In this way, ETA gives credence to realms of literary reality; there are sub-levels of meaning, insinuation, and faint impressions left from author’s personal biases with thought and language. ETA can also be used on political ideology, indicating that even the non-subjective sphere of human politics can be deconstructed and analyzed at the very kernels of rhetoric. As a tool, ETA enables researchers to depart from the universal, de facto objectivity, and pursue what is really being said.

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