PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

In the emerging field of digital style analysis, scholars have been dwelling on a perceived irreconcilability of “distant reading” [Moretti 2000] and “close reading” [Fish 2012] [Ransom 1937]. This situation is somewhat reminiscent of the “paradigm wars” in social science, where for years, one could either adhere to a quantitative or a qualitative mindset. Taking seriously both the hermeneutic and the empirical traditions of (digital) stylistic research, the present paper proposes “a mixed-methods” coalition of approaches. To establish links between the mixed-methods paradigm from Social Sciences [Creswell and Plano Clark 2007] and stylistic practices within Digital Humanities (DH), the present article discusses common methods of distant, close, and ‘scalable reading’ as well as a flexibly adjustable definition of style [Herrmann et al. 2015]. In the practical part of the paper, I report a ‘mixed-methods digital stylistics’ study on Franz Kafka’s prose. Scaling the degree of abstraction and contextuality of the data according to particular research questions, I combine (1) “quantitative hypothesis testing” (examining Kafka’s stylistic “uniqueness” by means of a stylometric measure); (2) “quantitative exploration” (analyzing the first hundred statistically overrepresented words in Kafka); and (3) “qualitative text analysis” (KWIC and close reading to investigate the functions of a particular style marker in the context of Kafka’s The Judgment [Das Urteil]). Generally, for digital stylistics, I propose (a) raising epistemological and methodological awareness within the field, and (b) framing the research within the mixed-method paradigm that in fact seems very well suited to DH.