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equired elaborate coding in an earlier era of digital work. xxv The value of any computational analysis hangs, however, on deciding what is able to be parameterized (subject to a quantitative or otherwise standard assessment). The terms of the metric or measure according to which any search or analytic process is carried out is framed with particular assumptions about the nature of data. Questioning what is considered data, what is available for analysis, is as substantive a consideration as what is revealed by its analysis. I am not just making a distinction between what can be measured easily (because it is discrete and lends itself to digital processing, such as counting the number of e’s in a document) and what cannot (calculating the white space that surrounds them). Rather, I am intent to call attention to the difference between what we think can be measured and what is outside that conception entirely (e.g. the history of the design of any particular “e” as expressed or repressed in its form). The critique of post- structuralism posed to structuralist formalisms exposed assumptions based in cultural value systems expressed as epistemological ones. The very notion of a standard metric is itself an ideology. (The history of any “e” is a complicated story indeed.) The distinction between what can be parameterized and what cannot is not the same as the difference between analogue and digital systems, but between complex, culturally situated approaches to knowledge and totalized, systematic ones. xxvi Metalanguages and metatexts The automated processing of textual information is fundamental to digital humanities, but, as stated earlier, so is the creation and use of meta-texts used as description and enhancement of information, but also, as performative instruments. As readers and 1.1 History / 3/2008 / 31
writers we are habituated to language and, to some extent, to the “idea of the text” or “textuality” as well. Insights into the new functions of digital metatexts build on arguments that have been in play for twenty years or more in bibliographic, textual, and critical studies. xxvii Meta-languages have a fascinating power, carrying a suggestion of higher order capabilities. xxviii As texts that describes a language, naming and articulating its structures, forms, and functions, they seem to trump languages that are merely used for composition or expression. A metatext is a subset of meta-language, one that is applied to a specific task, domain, or situation. Digital metatexts are not merely descriptive, they are not simply higher order commentaries on a set of texts. They are performative and in many cases, contain protocols that enable dynamic procedures of analysis, search, and selection, as well as display. Even more importantly, metatexts express models of the field of knowledge in which they operate. By the structure and grouping of elements within the outline of metadata (what elements should be part of the metadata for a title, publication information, or physical description of an artifact?) or the terms a metadata scheme contains (media or formats of graphical forms, the media of their reproduction, or just a description of the imagery or pictorial elements), these instruments have a powerful effect. They shape the fields in which they operate quite explicitly by defining what can and cannot be said about the objects in any particular collection or online environment. Metadata schemes must be read as models of knowledge, as discursive instruments that bring the object of their inquiry into being. This insight, like many others taken from the encounter between digital technology and text works and practices, opens our horizon of understanding about traditional texts as well as the basic humanistic projects of scholarship and interpretation. 1.1 History / 3/2008 / 32
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