Between surface and depth: towards embodied ontologies of text computing across languages

Abstract

Translation theory and cases present to the Digital Humanities an interesting problem that fundamentally complicates text computing and challenges the flat dimensions of quantification. While distant reading, for example, in one language is relatively straightforward, computation across languages poses epistemo-semiotic challenges. What it is here to overcome, among other things, is technological conformism rooted in predominantly monolingual digital textual scholarship; disembodied textual ontologies that arise from some reductive forms of quantitative reading as well as the hierarchical discretization of a text; and, finally, thin computing that gratifies the notions of text as inscription rather than as experience, which echoes the problem raised by Geertz's anthropological concept of ‘thick description’. By drawing on my research into the design of cross-linguistic distant reading and the modelling of repetition strings as equivalents of dynamic translatorial response, I will discuss a possibility of thick computing as suspended between textual surfaces and depths.