"To make them see". A Digital Humanities approach to the "philological circle"

Way back in 1948, Leo Spitzer put forward the notion of the “philological circle”, which was based on a traditional method of reading and rereading the literary text (Spitzer 1948). Imagined as the “to-and-fro voyage” from outwards details to the inner centre of the work of art, “the philological circle” was later described as “a cyclical motion whereby linguistic observation stimulates or modifies literary insight and whereby literary insight in its turn stimulates further linguistic observation” (Leech – Short [1981] 2007: 12). This movement from linguistic description to literary appreciation (and back) is what traditional stylistics and modern computer stylistics have in common. It is against this background that the impact of digital resources and tools for the description, analysis and interpretation of language in literary texts through what has been termed the “corpus stylistics circle” (Mahlberg 2013) is discussed in the present article. By providing examples from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, changes in the way language data can be visualized using different tools are described in view of the contribution they can make to the emergence of a digitally wise (Prensky 2009) generation of readers in the wider context of the Digital Humanities.