Overview

A groundbreaking study of how abstract linguistic signs circulate in literature, intellectual history, and popular culture. Linguistic forms are essential to meaning: like words, they make a semantic contribution to the things we say. We inherit them from past writers and speakers and fill them with different words to produce novel utterances. They shape us and the ways we interpret the world. Yet prevalent assumptions about language and the constraints of print-finding tools have kept linguistic forms and their histories hidden from view. Drawing on recent work in cognitive and construction grammar along with tools and methods developed by corpus and computational linguists, Daniel Shore’s Cyberformalism represents a new way forward for digital humanities scholars seeking to understand the textual past. Championing a qualitative approach to digital archives, Shore uses the abstract pattern-matching capacities of search engines to explore precisely those combinatory aspects of language—word order, syntax, categorization—discarded by the “bag of words” quantitative methods that are dominant in the digital humanities. While scholars across the humanities have long explored the histories of words and phrases, Shore argues that increasingly sophisticated search tools coupled with growing full-text digital archives make it newly possible to study the histories of linguistic forms. In so doing, Shore challenges a range of received metanarratives and complicates some of the most basic concepts of literary study. Touching on canonical works by Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Kant, even as it takes the full diversity of digitized texts as its purview, Cyberformalism asks scholars of literature, history, and culture to revise nothing less than their understanding of the linguistic sign.

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9781421425504

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Objections such as these open theoretical cans of worms - yet they also validate Shore's project, simply by reflecting his deep engagement with ultimate humanistic concerns. Cyberformalism acknowledges that the subjective contemplation and discussion of meanings and values is not just one disposable strand in humanities research; instead, it is paramount to the philologist's vocation... Many of us will then thank Daniel Shore for having set forth a vision of the digital humanities that puts the human first, the data science second, rather than the other way around. * Los Angeles Review of Books * Shore's charge that we move from investigating discrete linguistic signs to combinatory linguistic forms is illuminating and will appeal to general readers as well as those specifically interested in digital humanities, English literary history, theology, grammar, and linguistics... Shore's scholarly range in this book is tremendous. He moves from contemporary digital technology to constructivist grammar to the niceties of seventeenth-century theology with ease, and so does the reader. -- Daniel DeWispelare, George Washington University * Modern Philology *

Objections such as these open theoretical cans of worms - yet they also validate Shore's project, simply by reflecting his deep engagement with ultimate humanistic concerns. Cyberformalism acknowledges that the subjective contemplation and discussion of meanings and values is not just one disposable strand in humanities research; instead, it is paramount to the philologist's vocation... Many of us will then thank Daniel Shore for having set forth a vision of the digital humanities that puts the human first, the data science second, rather than the other way around. * Los Angeles Review of Books *

Author Information

Daniel Shore is the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Milton and the Art of Rhetoric.

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