Literary Computing: A Helpful Tool or One Step Closer to Blade Runner?

The first known usage of computer-assisted literary study took place in the 1960’s where they converted a text into an electronic version and used the new medium to detect strings of words and patterns—essentially what English scholars do during a close reading of a text, except with a little helping hand from technology. Over time, this method evolved and now literary computing has become more prominent, especially with the rise of technology in every other aspect of society. Some might fear that literary computing will antiquate the study of the literature, however, the computer is merely a tool without any ability to analyze a text; it points out patterns on the surface of the text and it’s still up to the reader to analyze those patterns in order conclude how they create meaning. Literary computing is still in its infancy and many critics of this new methodological excavation explain that it needs to be clarified that the computer is just a tool in the early stages of the analyzation process and that the interpretation of a text is still ultimately the responsibility of the people reading it. A literary text is a viewed as a deliberately crafted set of images and innovative usages of language that have an aesthetic quality on the surface, but in an analysis, all of these external components work together to create meaning. The computer can just be one more tool in the initial picking apart of the words, it acts as annotation. One thing that cannot be overlooked in the literary computing method is forms of “external intervention”, meaning the computer should not be overestimated due to the ambiguity of a text’s meaning. Is literary computing something that I agree with? No. It’s interesting and cutting-edge and just another way in which we will develop a reliance on machines to make our lives easier and I think it is an insult to the text to use a computer on it. Most texts arose organically, from author’s mind to paper and organically, from text to reader’s mind, is how it must be treated. I don’t care how easy the computer makes the “menial” part of the close reading because I don’t believe there is anything menial about recognizing patterns and deconstructing language—it’s what I spent the last four years being trained to do and to be half-replaced by a computer is problematic because if computers can interact with the humanities, then what else will they be capable of?