A lot of this text analysis stuff is
about treating text documents as data.
And while you can get valuable insights
from these analyses it's important to understand that the original
creators of these documents were not creating content or depositing
data. Jane Austen did not create content. She wrote novels.
When she set out to write these novels,
which we could describe as comedies of manners in the main, she
inadvertantly described the society in which she lived, one in which,
for women a 'good' marriage was necessary to ensure financial
security, and one in which communication and travel was difficult,
leading to a small and compressed social circle.
Critical reading of these novels allows
us to build a portrait of how they lived.
I've picked on Jane Austen as an
example, but I could just as easily have chosen Aristophanes or
Juvenal.
It is important to understand that the
to approaches are complementary. When for example I used the Google
Ngram viewer to plot the
use of the term Burmah, you could get some measure of the
significance of use of the term to the ordinary reader at the time.
It doesn't tell you anything about how
colonial society functioned.
This isn't of course to rubbish topic
modelling or other such techniques. It lets you identify topics of
concern within a corpus, just as looking at the frequency of medieval
property transfers might identify times of social turmoil and
change.
So we need to be critical in our
approach. Topic modelling and other text mining techniques are now
possible due to the sheer amount of digitised text available, and
they definitely give an index of popular concern.
They are however not a substitute for
critical analysis. Rather, they complement it ...
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