Words in a world of scaling-up:

Epistemic normativity and text as data

Authors

  • Sayan Bhattacharyya

Keywords:

Digital humanities, subaltern, power/knowledge, postcolonial, distant reading, grammatization

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 normativity 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.

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Author Biography

Sayan Bhattacharyya

Sayan Bhattacharyya is Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, University of Pennsylvania. Prior to his present appointment, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Electronics Engineering from Jadavpur University in India and his PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He also holds graduate degrees in Computer Science and Engineering and in Information Science from the University of Michigan. His interests are in digital humanities and text analysis, in postcolonial theory and literature, and in literary theory.

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Published

2021-11-03

How to Cite

Bhattacharyya , S. (2021). Words in a world of scaling-up:: Epistemic normativity and text as data. Sanglap: Journal of Literary and Cultural Inquiry, 4(1), 31–42. Retrieved from https://sanglap-journal.in/index.php/sanglap/article/view/86