Text Analysis and Digital Humanities in English Studies. An Introduction

Over the past decades, Digital Humanities have moved from being a niche discipline to a fast-growing research field, covering all areas where the humanities meet digital methods, resources, and tools. This digital revolution has triggered paradigm shifts in disciplinary fields as diverse as philology, history, geography, music, cultural heritage, literature, and linguistics. Indeed, the impact of the digital turn in literary and linguistic studies can be felt in a number of areas, from archiving, to editing, to computer-aided critical and stylistic analysis, as well as in the development of tools for the representation and visualization of language data in texts of any kind (Schreibman et al. 2016). More crucially, the huge amount of textual data available in digital format to the literature and language scholars alike has had a significant impact on the range of research questions that it is possible to address (Hiltunen et al. 2017). Nonetheless, digital approaches to text analysis in English Studies – mostly in the field of corpus linguistics and corpus stylistics – have had limited interactions with Digital Humanities, while it is exactly these interactions that will bring about true innovation. The time has come, therefore, for corpus linguistics, literary stylistics, and Digital Humanities to finally come together as they “theoretically have much in common, but in practice more often than not operate within disciplinary boundaries” (Mahlberg and Wiegand 2020: 323). Methodological triangulation that builds on commonality and convergence among these cognate areas will be beneficial to understand further the dialogical relationship among them, and be conducive of interdisciplinary development. This issue of Textus aims to foster such interdisciplinary dialogues and encourage methodological triangulations between Digital Humanities, corpus approaches, and other methods for computer-aided text analysis in English Studies. It will provide a forum to showcase cutting-edge research and stimulate reflections on the potential of the interplay between computer-based approaches to text analysis and Digital Humanities in English Studies, from both the perspective of literature and language studies.