Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 39, No. 436.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2026-04-24 21:10:57+00:00
        From: Yann Audin <yann.audin@umontreal.ca>
        Subject: Concordancing/consequences for research?

Dear McCarty, McGann and others (Mcs and no-Mcs alike),

I am about a year away from being that "freshly minted PhD" who will try to be
employable despite a tendency for chasing too many hares and letting most of
them slip. I'm learning to live with the fact that I will ask many questions and
find few answers.

I find some solace in the few spaces where interdisciplinary discussions can
occur; they are very few of them and I just lost mine. McGill's Building 21 was
such a community, and it just lost its address due to the university taking back
its space. I didn't go half as much as I should have over the last two years. On
one hand, I moved twice, each time a bit further from its characteristic green
door on Sherbrooke street. On the other hand, most of the B21 people I knew
graduated and left; and no one wants to feel like leftovers.

I went back a few days ago to see their last showcase event and got reminded of
some discussions I had on the nature of math, the philosophy of physics, and the
limits of language. I know none of that will matter in terms of employability,
but it was worth the few hours every week.

That's enough eulogizing... All of this to say that approaching research as a
path to a quick answer is the least interesting way to look at it. A friend of
mine is studying cancer---I hope she finds answers; I study DH, theory, and
Philip K. Dick's letters---I hope to never be done.

Responding to Jerome McGann, scholarship to me is a living discussion, it might
be archived on paper and in databases, but as a practice it might resist the
current technological changes better than science. "Scholarship" might be an
action-verb, and in a context where solutions are useless, solution machines (AI
and such) won't cut it.

Anyway, I hope this was not too off-topic, I actually wanted to share Dolores M.
Burton, series on concordances in Computers and the Humanities published in 1981
and 1982:


  *Automated concordances and word indexes: The fifties;
  *Automated concordances and word indexes: The early sixties and the early
centers;
  *Automated concordances and word indexes: The process, the programs, and the
products;
  *Automated concordances and word-indexes: Machine decisions and editorial
revisions.

...and mention her English Stylistics: A Bibliography co-written with Richard W.
Bailey which has a wonderful chapter on "Statistical Approaches to Style" with
some references to the earliest books and articles in Literary Computing (some
of which came before computers)!

Cheers,

Yann Audin
PhD Candidate
Literature and Digital Humanities
University of Montreal
https://yann-audin.github.io/Cybermeneutics/


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