Digital Criticism and the Search for

Patterns

William L. Benzon
July 2014
Abstract: Literary critics seek patterns, whether patterns in individual texts or patterns in large
collections of texts. Valid patterns are taken as indices of causal mechanisms of one sort or
another. Most abstractly, a pattern emerges or is enacted as some machine makes its way in an
environment. An ecological niche is a pattern traced by an organism in its environment.
Literary texts are themselves patterns traced by writers (and readers) through their life worlds.
Patterns are frequently described through visualizations. The concept of pattern thus dissolves the
apparent conflict between quantification and meaning, for quantification is but a means to
describing a pattern. It is up to the critic to determine whether or not a pattern is meaningful by
identifying the mechanism that produced the pattern. Examples from Shakespeare and Joseph
Conrad.

Introduction: Patterns and Descriptions ........................................................................................... 1

From Quantification to Patterns in Digital Criticism ....................................................................... 4
Rens Bod on Patterns........................................................................................................................ 8
Pattern: Ramsay on Shakespeare, and Beyond................................................................................. 9
Epiphenomena? Ramsay on Patterns, Again .................................................................................. 16
Pattern as a Term of Art .............................................................................................................. 18
Patterns as Epistemological Objects ............................................................................................... 20
Patterns and Literature .................................................................................................................... 25

1301 Washington St. No. 311

Hoboken, New Jersey
bbenzon@mindspring.com

This work interview is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Introduction: Patterns and Descriptions

There is a sense, of course, in which Ive been aware of and have been perceiving and thinking
about patterns all my life. They are ubiquitous after all. But it wasnt until I began studying
cognitive science with the late David Hays that pattern became a term of art. Hays and his
students were developing a network model of cognitive structure such models became common
in the 1970s. Such networks admit of two general kinds of computational process, path tracing
and pattern recognition. Path tracing is computationally easy, while the pattern recognition is not.
Human beings, however, are very good at perceiving and recognizing patterns.
What put the idea before me as something demanding specific thought, though, are
remarks Franco Moretti made in coming to grips with his work on the network analysis of plot
structure. In Network Theory, Plot Analysis (Literary Lab Pamphlet 2, 2011, p. 11) Moretti noted
that he did not need network theory; but I probably needed networks.... What I took from
network theory were less concepts than visualization. We then examine the visualizations to
determine whether or not they indicate patterns that are worth further exploration.
That, it seems to me, should put to rest fears about the incommensurability of numbers
and meaning or, even worse, anxiety about infecting humanistic inquiry with quantitative evil.
Its not about numbers and counting. Its about patterns. Numerical work is subordinate to and in
service of looking for patterns, whether patterns in individual texts, as Moretti was doing in his
work on plot structures, or patterns in collections of hundreds and thousands of texts spanning
decades or more of historical time.
But, just what IS a pattern anyhow? How do we tell the difference between patterns and,
well, non-patterns? Those are tricky questions, questions I pursue in the posts that make up this
working paper. If what were looking for is some a priori way of specifying what patterns are so
that we can then theorize about patterns in a general way, then I think were in trouble. In the
sections, Pattern as a Term of Art and Patterns as Epistemological Objects, I suggest that there
is no such thing. What emerges from those discussions is something like this: A pattern is
something that emerges or is enacted as some machine makes its way in an environment in which
it either survives or fails where the italicized terms are understood in a very general and abstract
sense. Thus understood, patterns are relations between machines and environments.
The level of abstraction and generalization I have in mind is that which is typical of
theoretical computer science, a set of disciplines in which I am by no means expert. Nonetheless I
will hazard a few remarks. Consider the opening of the Wikipedias entry on computational
complexity:
Computational complexity theory is a branch of the theory of computation in
theoretical computer science and mathematics that focuses on classifying
computational problems according to their inherent difficulty, and relating those
classes to each other. A computational problem is understood to be a task that is
in principle amenable to being solved by a computer, which is equivalent to
stating that the problem may be solved by mechanical application of
mathematical steps, such as an algorithm.
A problem is regarded as inherently difficult if its solution requires significant
resources, whatever the algorithm used. The theory formalizes this intuition, by
introducing mathematical models of computation to study these problems and
quantifying the amount of resources needed to solve them, such as time and
storage. Other complexity measures are also used, such as the amount of
1

communication (used in communication complexity), the number of gates in a

circuit (used in circuit complexity) and the number of processors (used in parallel
computing).1
It is the second paragraph we need to think about, for it is about resources. Pattern recognition
isnt the only kind of problem that is computationally difficult, but it is one of them. And, of
course, not all computational operations are particularly demanding.
My thought then, is this, if patterns are computationally difficult, and computational
difficulty is about resources time, storage, communication lines, processors then patterns are
things that exist for, are defined by, computers abstractly understood in the most general case,
but by actual computational devices in some specific cases. No wonder thinking about them is
difficult!
Now, in digital criticism, pattern recognition is being done by the critics, not by the
computer. Computing of the big data kind requires a fair bit of computational horsepower, but
much of it is well within in the range available in current laptop machines. The number crunching
is not, in fact, computationally complex. Its relatively straightforward but simply requires a lot of
CPU cycles and a fair amount of storage to keep track of the data and of intermediate results.
Pattern recognition, on the other hand, typically leads to what is called combinatorial explosion in
which intermediate results multiply as the computation proceeds and there is no guarantee that, at
some point, the intermediate results will become absorbed into the ongoing work and finally
disappear, leaving you with a sure result either a recognized pattern, or the certainty that no
pattern is there. People do that kind of thing relatively well lots of resources in the form of
processors, where each neuron in the nervous system is considered to be a processor, giving us
100 billion processors.
So, while patterns are what digital criticism is about, the computers arent being used to
recognize the patterns. Theyre being used to create the information displays, the visualizations,
in which we recognize patterns. I note as well that this is true whether one is looking for patterns
in individual texts or in large collections of texts.
And, I warrant it is true even if you arent using computers at all. Ive been writing a
great deal about ring-composition over the past few years, but Ive not been using computers to
help me identify ring-forms except in the trivial sense that I using word-processing software
and I make tables and charts to help in the search. What I end up with are descriptions, another
frequent blogging topic.2
A description is a description, whether it is created by hand or with computer aids. The
visualizations so common in digital criticism are descriptive in kind. And so, I believe, we need
to think explicitly about description: How do we formulate descriptions? What are the roles of
verbal description, visualization, and even mathematical and logical formalism?
What are we describing? Patterns, or at any rate, possible patterns. Whether those
patterns are real or not, that is, whether or not they indicate some causal process at work in the
world, thats something we have to determine. Just how we do that, well...weve got new
disciplines to create, do we not?

This working paper consists of the following posts from New Savanna:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_complexity_theory
Ive used the tag description to label these posts. Click on it in the tag cloud at New Savanna
(in the right-hand column) and youll get all the posts about description.
2

From Quantification to Patterns in Digital Criticism: Here I take up the general question of
computation and quantification as set forth by several investigators and assert that patterns is
what were seeking through the use of computers, not numbers.
Rens Bod on Patterns: This is an abstract of a paper Bod gave on patterns, with the link to the
paper.
Pattern: Ramsay on Shakespeare, and Beyond: In which I examine an essay in which Ramsay
uses network diagrams to describe patterns of scene locations in Shakespeare plays and in which
he wonders: What are these patterns good for?
Epiphenomena? Ramsay on Patterns, Again: I look at a more recent Ramsay piece in which he
again foregrounds the notion of pattern, suggesting that they are emergent textual
epiphenomenal. Emergent, perhaps. Epiphenomenal, no. Theyre the main event.
Pattern as a Term of Art: This is where I introduce the idea of a pattern as a relationship
between a machine and its environment. I draw this conclusion by thinking about the ecological
niche, where the machine is an organism and its environment is its life world. To this I have
appended the abstract for an article David Hays and I wrote on evolution and complexity.
Patterns as Epistemological Objects: Now I develop that idea, this time using examples from
human cognition and reasoning. As a specific example I consider paragraph length in Conrads
Heart of Darkness, which exhibits a remarkable pattern. But is it real?
Patterns and Literature: Literature itself is a means of tracing patterns through the world.
Hermeneutical methodologies attempt to explicate the patterns that given texts trace in the world;
the more sophisticated methodologies grapple with the fact that those texts, after all, exist in the
world and so are components of the paths they trace. The naturalist critic, however, takes a step
back from the text and concentrates on describing the formal patterns in the text itself, the
patterns through which the text imposes itself on life.

Let me suggest, finally, that as I have, following others, recently sketched out an ontology based
on objects,3 I am now approaching an epistemology based on patterns. Pattern-oriented
epistemology anyone?

Living with Abundance in a Pluralist Cosmos: Some Metaphysical Sketches,

http://ssrn.com/abstract=2197108
3

From Quantification to Patterns in Digital Criticism

I would like to continue the examination of fundamental presuppositions, conceptual matrices,

which I began in The Fate of Reading and Theory.4 That post was concerned with how, in the
context of academic literary criticism, 1) reading elides the distinction between (merely)
reading some text for enjoyment, edification, whatever and writing up an interpretation of that
text and 2) how literary theory became the use of theory in interpreting literary texts. This post
is about the common sense association between computers and computing on the one hand and
numbers and mathematics on the other. I conclude by suggesting that numbers are subordinate to
pattern, that it is patterns that are the object of literary computing.
*****
Lets start with a couple of sentences from one of the pamphlets published by Stanfords Literary
Lab, Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac, A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 NineteenthCentury British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method (May 2012, 68 page PDF)5:
The general methodological problem of the digital humanities can be bluntly
stated: How do we get from numbers to meaning? The objects being tracked, the
evidence collected, the ways theyre analyzedall of these are quantitative. How
to move from this kind of evidence and object to qualitative arguments and
insights about humanistic subjectsculture, literature, art, etc.is not clear.
There we have it, numbers on the one hand and meaning on the other. Its presented is a gulf
which the digital humanities must somehow cross.
When I first read that pamphlet most likely I thought nothing of that statement. It states,
after all, a commonplace notion. But when I read those words in the context of writing a post6
about Alan Lius essay, The Meaning of the Digital Humanities (PMLA 128, 2013, 409-423) I
came up short. Thats not quite right, I said to myself, its wrong to so casually identify
computers and computing with numbers.
*****

Now lets take a look at an essay by Kari Krauss, Conjectural Criticism: Computing Past and
Future Texts (DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly, 2009, Volume 3 Number 4).7 Heres her
opening paragraph:
In an essay published in the Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Studies,
Stephen Ramsay argues that efforts to legitimate humanities computing within
the larger discipline of literature have met with resistance because well-meaning
advocates have tried too hard to brand their work as "scientific," a word whose
positivistic associations conflict with traditional humanistic values of ambiguity,
4
5
6
7

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-fate-of-reading-and-theory.html
http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet4.pdf
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/03/computer-as-symbol-and-model-on-reading.html
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/4/000069/000069.html#
4

open-endedness, and indeterminacy [Ramsay 2007]. If, as Ramsay notes, the

computer is perceived primarily as an instrument for quantizing, verifying,
counting, and measuring, then what purpose does it serve in those disciplines
committed to a view of knowledge that admits of no incorrigible truth somehow
insulated from subjective interpretation and imaginative intervention [Ramsay
2007, 479482]?
Though Ive got reservations about Ramsays proposals (see A Hothouse Manifesto: Does
Stephen Ramsay Sell Literary Criticism Short?8) I certainly have no problem with dissolving the
bond that common sense has forged between the idea of the computer and those of numbers and
math. Later on Krauss notes:
The essay develops a computational model of textuality, one that better supports
conjectural reasoning, as a counterweight to the material model of textuality that
now predominates. Computation is here broadly understood to mean the
systematic manipulation of discrete units of information, which, in the case of
language, entails the grammatical processing of strings[4] rather than the
mathematical calculation of numbers to create puns, anagrams, word ladders, and
other word games. The essay thus proposes that a textual scholar endeavoring to
recover a prior version of a text, a diviner attempting to decipher an oracle by
signs, and a poet exploiting the combinatorial play of language collectively draw
on the same library of semiotic operations, which are amenable to algorithmic
expression and simulation.
Here Krauss explicitly asserts that computers can operate on strings of linguistic characters as
well as on numbers.
Her corrective, however, isnt forceful enough. When Alan Turing formalized the
concept of computation as the operation of an abstract machine we now talk of Turing machines
he talked of that machine as reading symbols from and writing them to a paper tape according
to a set of rules. He didnt specify what those symbols meant or how, if at all, they were related to
objects and events in the external world. His conception was very abstract and general: the
machine processed symbols. Thats it.
Historically, the task of translating from one natural language to another is one of the
problems on which the modern disciplines of computer science and engineering were founded.
Research on machine translation began in the 1950s almost as soon as there were digital
computers with the requisite capacity. That task is not about number crunching. It begins and
ends in language.
*****
Lets conclude with Franco Moretti, Network Theory, Plot Analysis (2011).9 I want to look at a
long passage at the end where he starts out talking about quantification and ends up somewhere
else (p. 11):
The idea behind this study, clearly stated in its opening page, was, very simply,
that network theory could offer a way to quantify plot, thus providing an essential
piece that was still missing from computational analyses of literature. Once I
started working in earnest, though, I soon realized that the machine-gathering of
the data, essential to large-scale quantification, was not yet a realistic
8
9

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2014/04/a-hothouse-manifesto-does-stephen.html
http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet2.pdf
5

possibility...So, from its very first section, the essay drifted from quantification to
the qualitative analysis of plot: the advantage of thinking in terms of space rather
than time; its segmentation into regions, instead of episodes; the new, nonanthropomorphic idea of the protagonist; or, even, the undoing of narrative
structures occasioned by the removal of specific vertices in the network.
Looking back at the work done, I wouldnt call this change of direction a
mistake: after all, network theory does help us redefine some key aspects of the
theory of plot, which is an important aspect of literary study. This is not the
theorys original aim, of course, but then again, a change of purpose a
refunctionalization, as the Russian Formalists called it is often what happens
to a system of thought traveling from one discipline to another....
No, I did not need network theory; but I probably needed networks.... What I
took from network theory were less concepts than visualization: the possibility of
extracting characters and interactions from a dramatic structure, and turning them
into a set of signs that I could see at a glance, in a two-dimensional space.
Moretti started with quantification and ended with visualization, and visualization is ubiquitous in
the analytical work of digital humanists. Its necessary to get conceptual purchase on the data.
Heres a pair of visualizations from Morettis most recent pamphlet, Operationalizing:
or, the Function of Measurement in Modern Literary Theory (December 2013, p. 7).10

The top visualization is an ordinary bar chart. The length of a bar is proportional to the size of a
characters word-space in Antigone. While one could express this information verbally Creon
spoke 28.7% of the words; the chorus has 19.8%, etc. thats not a very good way of presenting
the information.
10

http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet6.pdf
6

The bottom visualization is even more resistant to verbal formulation. Sure, you could do
it, but the pile of words would be big and it would be all but impossible to get the synoptic view
you have in a single glance at the graph as mathematicians call such network objects. The nodes
in the graph represent characters in Antigone, the same characters as in the bar chart, while the
links (also called edges or arcs) indicate relationship between the characters. The older pamphlet
had over 50 such diagrams, though without the arrows and variable line weight. Its those
diagrams that Moretti discovered on the way to quantification.
What are those diagrams about? Let me suggest that they are about patterns. Yes, I know,
the word is absurdly general, but hear me out.
That bar chart depicts a pattern of quantitative relationships, and does so better and more
usefully than a bunch of verbal statements. You look at it and see the pattern.
The pattern in the network diagram is harder to characterize. Its a pattern of relationship
among characters. What kind of relationships? Dramatic relationships? That, I admit, is weak.
But if you read Morettis pamphlet, youll see whats going on.
The important point is what happens when you get such diagrams based on a bunch of
different texts. You can see, at a glance, that there are different patterns in different texts. While
each such diagram represents the reduction of a text to a model, the patterns in themselves are
irreducible. They are a primary object of description and analysis.
And that is my point: patterns.
As far as I know Moretti did not use a computer to discover those network patterns. He
used a computer to draw them, given human input, but he didnt feed texts into a computer and it
then read them and compiled the diagrams automatically. Moretti read the texts, identified the
characters, and drew the diagrams by hand, which were then redrawn using computer tools.
It seems to me that the automatic generation of such diagrams from textual input may be
within the capacity of current computing technology, but thats beside the point. Those diagrams
are very much in the spirit, if you will, of computing.
*****
You might want to look at these posts:
Computing = Math, NOT
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/01/computing-math-not.html
Of Lists and Litanies
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/06/of-lists-and-litanies.html
The first dispels the notion that computing is equivalent to numerical calculation while the second
is about, at least in part, certain kinds of objects, lists, that are subject to computational
manipulation.

Rens Bod on Patterns

WHO'S AFRAID OF PATTERNS?: THE PARTICULAR VERSUS THE UNIVERSAL AND

THE MEANING OF HUMANITIES 3.0. BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review. Vol. 128,
No. 4, 2013, 171-180.11
Rens Bod
RN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-110030
Abstract:
The advent of Digital Humanities has enabled scholars to identify previously
unknown patterns in the arts and letters; but the notion of pattern has also been
subject to debate. In my response to the authors of this Forum, I argue that
pattern should not be confused with universal pattern. The term pattern itself is
neutral with respect to being either particular or universal. Yet the testing and
discovery of patterns be they local or global is greatly aided by digital tools.
While such tools have been beneficial for the humanities, numerous scholars lack
a sufficient grasp of the underlying assumptions and methods of these tools. I
argue that in order to criticise and interpret the results of digital humanities
properly, scholars must acquire a good working knowledge of the underlying
tools and methods. Only then can digital humanities be fully integrated
(humanities 3.0) with time-honoured (humanities 1.0) tools of hermeneutics and
criticism.
What I'm wondering is whether or not pattern is emerging as a fundamental
epistemological/ontological entity. I've broached this idea in an earlier post focused on Moretti,
From Quantification to Patterns in Digital Criticism.
As I already said, the idea of patterns is very general. But that doesnt make it useless. On
the contrary, that generality makes the idea useful and powerful. As I noted in the introduction, It
is a commonplace in the cognitive science that the human mind (and brain) is very good at pattern
recognition. But digital computers are not so good at it. I note also that the notion of design
patterns has been popular in computer programming,12 which got it from the notion of pattern
language13 articulated by the architect, Christopher Alexander.14

11

http://www.bmgn-lchr.nl/index.php/bmgn/article/view/RN%3ANBN%3ANL%3AUI%3A10-1110030
12
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern
13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language
14
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander
8

Pattern: Ramsay on Shakespeare, and Beyond

I was looking though the syllabus for one of Alan Lius courses, Literature + (New Media &
Literary Interpretation: Close, Distant, and Other Reading)15 and came across an older (2005), and
fascinating, paper by Stephen Ramsay, In Praise of Patterns, TEXT Technology, Number 2, 2005,
pp. 177-19016 (with accompanying figures17). Its an interesting piece of work, both for what it
says about Shakespeare and for what it says about methodology.
Methodologically, Ramsay tells us he began playing around with network diagrams of
Shakespeare plays because, well, he was interested in such diagrams and wanted to see what
would show up. After a fair amount of work, including a presentation to some mathematicians
and collaboration with some data miners, something very interesting showed up. But, alas,
Ramsay doesnt know quite what to make of those diagrams and yet, despite the mystery, they
remain intellectually compelling.
And thats just fine. Thats the kind of world were in. We have the capacity to find
interesting things, but once found, explaining them is a problem. If we cant figure out how to
operate in that world this is me speaking now were not going to get very far with digital
humanities. Whatever digital humanities is, it is not a positivistic haven of certain knowledge
(Ive now returned to Ramsay).
This post is going to be a long one, over 2K words. First I present Ramsays work, then I
present some work I did on Shakespeare some time ago, work that speaks to genre by looking at a
comedy (Much Ado About Nothing), a tragedy (Othello), and a romance (The Winters Tale). I
conclude by suggesting that weve left the world defined by existing methods of hermeneutic
analysis and exegesis.

Patterns of Loci and Scenes

Ramsay looked at how Shakespeares plays moved from place to place as they moved from one
scene to the next. Heres the graph he produced for The Comedy of Errors:

15
16
17

http://english236s2012.pbworks.com/w/page/49237967/Schedule
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/57/
http://texttechnology.humanities.mcmaster.ca/ramsay_figures/
9

By standard mathematical convention such a diagram is called a graph; the ovals are called nodes
and the arrows are called edges or arcs. Each node in one of Ramsays diagrams indicates a locus
(my term) where a scene takes place and is labeled with a name or phrase designating that place.
The edges indicate the transition from one scene to the following scene; the label on the edge
indicates the following scene. It follows from the labeling convention that there will not be any
edge labeled 1.1 as that is the first scene in any play and, as such, does not follow any other
scene.
At the top of this diagram we see a locus called A hall in Duke Solinuss place. It has
one edge coming from it and directed to a locus called The Mart. That edge is labeled 1.2.
We now know that the first scene of the first act must take place in that hall in the palace. By
following the edges in act-scene order from node to node we can trace the course of the play
through space (the loci) and time (act-scene order).
Notice the locus at the lower right, A street before a Priory. As there is no edge
pointing from it, it must be the locus of the last scene in the play. To the upper left of that locus
we see a locus designated Before the house of Antipholus of Ephesus. At the right side of that
node edge 3.2 loops back to the same node, indicating that two successive scenes (3.1 and 3.2)
are set at that locus. In the middle of the diagram we can see that a number of scenes shift back
and forth among loci. Those are the kinds of features that attracted Ramsays interest.
It turns out the graphs for the various plays look markedly different.18 The graph for
Julius Caesar, for example, is very linear, while that for King Lear is linear for a while and then
becomes more richly structured. Antony and Cleopatra is still more richly structured.
The question that Ramsay then asked is this: Are the graphs for the four traditional types
comedy, history, tragedy, and romance much alike within the genre but different from those
of other genres? It turns out that they are, though Ramsay did not determine this by visual
18

http://texttechnology.humanities.mcmaster.ca/ramsay_figures/
Ive appended these graphs to this section. They are, alas, rather small, but the overall shape is
obvious. Still, you might want a closer look at them. Therefore Ive also given links to the
diagrams on the web.
10

inspection. First he characterized each play in terms of features of its associated locus-scene
graph (p. 186):
1) the number of distinct loci,
2) the total number of scenes,
3) the number of single-instance scenes (I assume this means loci with only
one scene),
4) the number of loops, where successive scenes occur at the same locus, and
5) the number of switches, where a string of scenes alternates between some one
locus and one or more other loci.
With the help of Bei Yu, a graduate student at the University of Illinois who worked with the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications, he used Baysian methods to classify the
patterns of Shakespeares plays as indicated by the above five features.
It took a bit of work to figure out how to conduct the analysis, but they came up with
something that worked (p. 188):
The comedies are, for the most part, clustering together, and the tragedies are, for the
most part, clustering together. There are several curious anomalies, but the clear cases
seem to have been adjudicated properly. Moreover, the curious anomalies appear to
conform to some of the more famous critical statements about the plays. For example,
one very inuential critic has argued that both Othello and Romeo and Juliet resemble
comedy, without making any mention of low-level structural features (such as scene
loops and switches).

The remarkable thing is that this classification scheme worked at all. Its not at all perfect, but its
good enough that we have some serious thinking to do. Why should such simple and apparently
purely formal features turn out to be reasonable indicators of genre, at least within Shakespeares
corpus?
I dont know, though Ill have something to say in that direction in the next section of this
post, and neither does Ramsay. But, for my money, he evades the issue, or rather, he doesnt
seem to know how to face it squarely.
Heres the paragraph that follows the previously quoted passage:
One is temptedalmost behoovedto make sense of the entire arrangement. Indeed, we
might almost convince ourselves that such matters as number of scenes and number or
loops prove something essential about Shakespeares genres. But this, of course, is
nonsense. These methods and visualizations prove nothing at all. Indeed, to assert that
these extremely low-level features are somehow constitutive of genre would be to
perpetrate a ham-fisted abuse of statistics and a grotesque parody of scientic method
simultaneously. But what, then, does all of this do?

Heres what bothers me: But this, of course, is nonsense. These methods and visualizations
prove nothing at all. That denial is too strong, and in misleading terms. Its not a matter of
proving anything or of being constitutive of genre. Ramsay comes closer to the mark at the end
of the next paragraph:
It forces us to move our eyes over Shakespeares plays as Eulers eye must once have
moved over the bridges of Knigsberg. I have never thought (at least in structural terms)
of the ways in which The Tempest resembles comedy, the ways that Alls Well that Ends
Well (one of the infamous problem comedies) resembles (of all things) history, or the
ways in which Henry V resembles tragedy. The fact that Im being led in such directions
by low-level structural featuressome of which barely register in ones consciousness
during the ordinary act of readingraises an obvious question: How do the low-level
matters of dramaturgy relate to the high-level matters of genre?

Thats the question we must ask ourselves. Ramsay has a bit more to say in this article, but he
doesnt propose an answer to that question. I dont have an answer either, but I have done some
work on Shakespeare that overlaps with some of Ramsays passing observations.

11

More Shakespearean Patterns, of a Different Kind

Ramsays graphs, and the five features he derives from them, are descriptions. One of the things
Ramsay has gotten from those graphs is the realization that this or that play, which is normally
classified as X, is also rather like Y. So, Othello is like a comedy, Henry V is like a tragedy, and
so forth (and he lists more examples in the article than Ive quoted above). At several points in his
Anatomy of Criticism Northrup Frye has observed that, in effect, a tragedy is a comedy where the
last sequence (of three sequences), the reconciliation, has gone missing (see my post Frye on
Comedy and Tragedy).19 That is to say, and to put it crudely, there is a deep play that is
expressed variously as a comedy or a tragedy or a history, whatever, depending on
circumstances. That is, depending on those circumstances, the deep play will require either this
or that pattern of locations and scenes to get from the opening state to the final state.
What are these deep plays and what are the circumstances that allow/force them to be
expressed in one form or another?
Before we get to that, however, I want to note first of all, that in the comedies there is
typically a physical setting or settings where a comedys middle sequence takes place, e.g. the
forest of Arden. Thus the loci where scenes are set are thematically active. For the comedies,
then, one would like to know how these loci are positioned Ramsays locus-scene graphs.
Returning to the larger issue, that of Shakespeares deep plays, It turns out that
Shakespeare has undertaken a natural experiment that affords us some clues on this, one Ive
examined in At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeares Greatest Creation?20
(Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems 21(3): 259-279, 1998). In each of Much Ado About
Nothing, a comedy, Othello, a tragedy, and The Winter's Tale, a romance, we find a protagonist
who mistakenly believes the woman he loves to be unfaithfulin Much Ado Im talking about
Claudio-Hero plot. In the comedy the male protagonist makes the mistake during courtship; in the
tragedy the mistake happens shortly after marriage; and in the romance, the mistake occurs well
into the marriage. If we examine the relationships between the characters, we find that it gets
closer as we move from one play to the next. And that's not all. There seem to be systematic
differences among the configuration of characters in these plays. And that has led me to wonder
whether or not those differences are related to the fact that we are dealing with three different
genres, comedy, tragedy, and romance. Are these configurations merely incidental features of the
plays or are they intrinsic to the different genres?
With this in mind, consider the following table, in which the first column names the
function a given character takes in the play:
Protagonist
Mentor
Deceiver
Paramour
Beloved

Much Ado
Claudio
Don Pedro
Don John
Borachio
Hero

Othello
Othello

Winter's Tale
Leontes

Iago
Cassio
Desdemona

Polixenes
Hermione

Does this table depict something for which an explanation is necessary or does it depict a merely
contingent set of relationships between these plays? If an explanation is necessary, what kind?
What that table suggests to me is that we have three different ways of mapping a single
mindShakespeares, the readers, whateveronto the multiple characters of a play. Claudio,
Othello, and Leontes each has different capabilities; and so they draw on different capabilities
within the reader.

19
20

http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/12/frye-on-comedy-and-tragedy.html
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1507240
12

Neither Othello nor Leontes has a mentor comparable to Claudio's Don Pedro. Don Pedro
talked with Hero's father, Leonato, and arranged the marriage. We see that happen in the play.
We must infer that Othello arranged his marriage to Desdemona, whose father didn't even know
about the marriage. We know nothing about how Leontes managed his marriage to Hermione, but
he doesn't have anyone associated with him who could be called his mentor.
Further, there is no deceiver in The Winter's Tale comparable to Don John or Iago.
Leontes deceives himself. Iago, Othello's deceiver, is closer to Othello than Don John is to
Claudio. Among the presumed paramours, Cassio is closer to Othello than Borachio is to Claudio.
Polixenes and Leontes have known one another since boyhood; they are so closely identified that
we can consider them doubles. Thus relationships between key characters and the protagonist
become more intimate as we move from the comedy to the tragedy to the romanceand some
characters, mentor and deceiver, seem to disappear.
Note also that the protagonist becomes more powerful as we move through the sequence
of plays. Claudio is a youth just beginning to make his way in the world. Othello is a mature man,
a seasoned general at the height of his career; but there are men who have authority over him.
Leontes is king (and father); there is no mundane authority higher than his. Perhaps this increase
in power is correlated with the apparent absorption of functions into the protagonist. The
absorption of functions increases the behavioral range of the protagonist. And this increased
range is symbolized by higher social status.
Finally, notice that as we move from the comedy, to the tragedy, to the romance, the
deception moves further into a marriage sequence that begins with falling in love, moves to
betrothal, then to the marriage ceremony, the subsequent consummation, and finally to settled
married life. In the comedy the deception falls between the betrothal and the ceremony. It is
between the ceremony and the consummation in the tragedy while it happens well into married
life in the romance.
What have we got so far?
That table depicts a pattern, but one defined over relationships among plays rather than a
pattern confined to a single playa mode of analysis inspired by Lvi-Strausss work on myth.
Ive justified giving that pattern particular attention by the fact that the characters in each of the
plays are involved in the same situationa man is deceived about the actions of his beloved.
Given how that common situation aligns the characters, other terms of comparison emerge:
capabilities, position in the social system, and distance into the marriage sequence.
All these things seem bound together, but I still dont see a causal model emerging from
this pattern. Its just a description, albeit an interesting one.
In that Franco Moretti has been interested in configurations of characters in a variety of
texts, including Shakespeares plays, we can think of this pattern as existing in or at least being in
touch with the territory hes been investigating with his graphs (in the second pamphlet from the
Literary Lab Network Theory, Plot Analysis, 2011).21 This pattern thus establishes some kind of
oblique connection between Morettis graphs and Ramsays giving us three related sets of
patterns.

But Wheres an Explanation?

But how do we get an explanatory account out of these patterns? I dont know. In my
Shakespeare article (At the Edge of the Modern) I introduce quite a bit of psychology to deal with
the deception plot: some psychoanalysis, some of what is now called evolutionary psychology
(the term hadnt been coined when I drafted the article), and some work on maturation during the
life cycle. But it still doesnt add up to a causal model for Shakespeares deployment of genre.

21

http://litlab.stanford.edu/LiteraryLabPamphlet2.pdf
13

What it is, is speculation, albeit interesting and suggestive speculation. Nor do I see much
hope of arriving at some kind of casual explanation without more speculation and more fishing
expeditions in search of suggestive patterns.
Given what Ive said about Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, and The Winters Tale,
one obvious next step would be to examine Ramsays graphs for those three plays (which arent
among the figures for his article) and see what turns up. Think of it as a fishing expedition of
narrow scope. Theres no specific agenda, were not looking for anything in particular, but who
knows, something interesting might show upthough we might have to do more than simply look
for loops and count loci. Well probably want to look at what happens in each scene, and THATs
likely to be a messy job.
Assume that something interesting does show up. What then? Thats only three plays out
of over thirty. How do we extend those results to the rest of Shakespeares oeuvre?
The only thing Im fairly sure about is that were not going to solve these problems by
looking for models within the existing repertoire of hermeneutic strategies, for none of them were
created to solve these kinds of problem. These arent hermeneutic problems. They arent about
what the plays mean, theyre about the mechanisms and processes whereby they are constructed.
Is the profession ready to address such questions?

Appendix: Three Plays, Three Patterns

Julius Caesar:
http://texttechnology.humanities.mcmaster.ca/ramsay_figures/plate_10.jpg

14

King Lear:
http://texttechnology.humanities.mcmaster.ca/ramsay_figures/plate_11.jpg

Anthony and Cleopatra:

http://texttechnology.humanities.mcmaster.ca/ramsay_figures/plate_6.jpg

15

Epiphenomena? Ramsay on Patterns, Again

About a month ago I posted on Ramsays article about patterns in the scene structure of
Shakespeares plays. Now Im looking at a more recent piece, The Meandering through
Textuality Challenge,22 from a 2011 MLA panel, Digging into Data. Patterns come up again:
I have many times suggested pattern as the treasure sought by humanistic inquiry:
which is to say, an order, a regularity, a connection, a resonance. I continue to insist that
this is, in the end, what humanists in general, and literary critics in particular, are always
looking for, whether theyre new critics, new historicists, new atheists, new faculty, or
New Englanders...
This would be a banal observation ... were it not for the fact that (like these worn phrases,
once upon a time) it encourages us see a connection that might otherwise be obscured.
For if humanistic inquiry is about pattern, then it isnt completely crazy to suggest that
computers might be useful tools for humanistic inquiry. Because long before computation
is about YouTube or Twitter or Google, it is about pattern transduction.

So far so good. I especially like that last bit, that computation is about pattern transduction. Im
not entirely sure what that means, nor am I at all disturbed by that. Whatever it means, it draws
the readers attention away calculation and number, which is a good thing.
Ramsay goes on to say:
... we do not present the task of literary criticism or historiography as the process of
finding some intact, but buried object beneath the surface. Thats because we have for a
very long time now conceived of the patterns were looking for not as out there, but as
in here not as preexisting ontological formations, but as emergent textual
epiphenomena.

Again Im not so sure, but I want to think about this uncertainty, just a bit.
When I go looking for patterns in texts as far as I can tell Im looking for something
thats out there in the sense that I am not, as a critic, projecting that pattern onto the text. Ringcomposition really is there, whether in the Japanese film Gojira,23 or in Heart of Darkness,24 or
elsewhere (Coleridge, Tezuka, Coppola)25. Now I understand that those texts, considered as
inscriptions on some surface (whether ink on a page, emulsion on celluloid, or a pattern of light
on some surface) must be read by a mind in order for the phenomenon to be fully manifest, but
that certainly doesnt make them epiphenomenal.
Textual patterns are not side-effects (emergent textual epiphenomena). Theyre the
main event. They are as real (preexisting ontological formations?) as the ink splotches or pixels
that constitute them. That is, they are real if WE are. If, were not real, then
Perhaps thats what one gets from using computation as a model for mental process, a
way of thinking about texts as a thinkable unity of sign and process (cf. the post, Texts, Traces,
and Hyperobjects26). As long as and to the extent that digital critics confine their computational
thinking to matters of back office support for the real work of reading theyre stuck with the
existing roster of hermeneutic systems and their attendant mysteries and mystifications.

22
23
24
25
26

http://stephenramsay.us/text/2011/01/06/the-meandering-through-textuality-challenge/
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/12/ring-form-opportunity-no-4-gojira-is.html
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/heart-of-heart-of-darkness.html
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2013/12/center-point-construction-coleridge.html
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/03/texts-traces-and-hyperobjects.html
16

Ramsay ends his piece by suggesting that digital criticism might be more revolutionary than
anything that has happened in literary study in fifty years. But that revolution will be still-born
unless Ramsay and his colleagues can come up with some way to think of textual patterns as
something more substantial than emergent textual epiphenomena. If they dont want to think of
the mind as, in some sense, computational in kind, well then, give me another conceptualization.
But somehow weve got to get across the barrier that critics cobbled together27 between
hermeneutics on the one hand and linguistics, cognition, and neuroscience.
Downing that barrier does not mean we get to enter a happy land of positivist truth.
Nothing of the kind. As far as I can tell, it means, among other things, that we must devote
enormous effort to cobbling together descriptions of textual phenomena (patterns) without the
immediate prospect of explaining them. We need the descriptions so that we know what it is
were trying to explain.

27

The Critic's Will to Meaning over the Resistance of the Text, http://newsavanna.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-critics-will-to-meaning-over.html
17

Pattern as a Term of Art

In continuing to think about pattern I remembered some old notes Id made about the concept of a
biological niche. Id decided that a niche was a pattern that some organism traced or
inscribed in an environment.
Back THEN I was the concept of pattern to explicate the concept of niche. In this current
context, the focus, of course, is on pattern.
That is, I am developing pattern as a term of art and so I want to recast the ordinary
notion just a bit. The ordinary notion of patterns is that, well, theyre everywhere. The ordinary
notion is indifferent to how patterns are identified. The means of identification is off stage; its
not even implicit; its simply not there.
Ive decided that that wont do for my purposes. As a term of art the concept of pattern is
inherently relational. As a tentative formulation, a PATTERN can be said to be inscribed in a
matrix by a vehicle. In the case of a biological niche, the organism is the vehicle, the environment
is the matrix, and adaptation (or perhaps merely living) is the means of inscription.
What I like about the niche discussion is that it isnt about humans. The niche is not a
pattern conceived by humans. Thats one thing.
The other is that patterns emerge as the result of a process. Niches emerge as organisms
live and become adapted to their environment. The patterns Im interested in are the result of
human perception and cognition.
Here are my old notes, from 1988, somewhat edited.
*****
The last time I looked (in the 1970s) I was unable to find a clean definition of the niche, and of
correlative terms such as environment and habitat. Environments are complex and so are
organisms. The niche seems to be a pattern which exists only in the relationship between an
organism and its environment.
There are biologists who talk about a niche as existing independently of any organism.
The niche exists and the organism moves into it. This really isn't satisfactory. For there is a sense
in which organisms create niches. And Im not thinking of the concept of niche construction,
where an animal actively modifies its environment by building nests and trails and so forth,
though that is obviously as aspect of the process.
One can think of an organism as a set of capacities. Given some pre-existing organism, it
creates a niche when placed into the appropriate environment, namely, an environment whose
structure corresponds to the organism's capacities.
But, in fact, there is no such thing as a pre-existing organism. Organisms always exist in
environments, to which they are always (more or less) adapted.
In the abstract we can imagine talking about the material, energetic, and informatic
patterns which are such that organisms, perhaps of a specific chemistry (such as one based on
carbon and oxygen), are evolved to exploit them. Consider the following definition (which
presupposes the arguments in A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity28):
A niche is a collection environmental phenomena in which low energy utilization of
information allows an organism economically to obtain the energy and materials it needs
to maintain its life.
28

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1591788
18

As far as I can tell they only way to identify such a collection of environmental phenomena is to
design and an organism which can successfully exploit them. And the best way to design such
an organism is to evolve it.
I take it then that there is no way to identify a pattern of environmental affordances (to
borrow a term from J. J. Gibson) independently of identifying an organism that utilizes them. To
be sure, you may read a biologist talking about such things as a niche for two kilogram night
foraging herbivore, but thats only because they know that such creatures exist and have one in
mind when writing those words. Such formulations sound like the biologist is simply looking at
an environment and spelling out a niche pattern based on general theoretical notions. But those
theoretical notions are based the examination of real organisms in real environments.
Its irreducible: Niches are patterns, and those patterns are identified by the organisms
that occupy the niches. Thats the simplest way. And its not very simple. The universe is
irreducibly complex.
*****
This account of patterns, and my opening remarks about computing, suggests that the following
article is a useful extension of the above remarks. If I am not mistaken, though, those I made the
above remarks after Hays and I had at least finished a draft of this article.
William L. Benzon and David G. Hays. A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity.
Journal of Social and Biological Structures 13: 33-40, 1990.29
Abstract: While science has accepted biological evolution through natural selection, there is no
generally agreed explanation for why evolution leads to ever more complex organisms. Evolution
yields organismic complexity because the universe is, in its very fabric, inherently complex, as
suggested by Ilya Prigogine's work on dissipative structures. Because the universe is complex,
increments in organismic complexity yield survival benefits: (1) more efficient extraction of
energy and matter, (2) more flexible response to vicissitudes, (3) more effective search. J.J.
Gibson's ecological psychology provides a clue to the advantages of sophisticated information
processing while the lore of computational theory suggests that a complex computer is needed
efficiently to perform complex computations (i.e. sophisticated information processing).

29

http://ssrn.com/abstract=1591788
19

Patterns as Epistemological Objects

When I posted From Quantification to Patterns in Digital Criticism I was thinking out loud. Ive
been thinking about patterns for years, and about pattern-matching as a computational process. I
had this shoot-from-the-hip notion that patterns, as general as the concept is, deserve some kind
of special standing in methodological thinking about so-called digital humanities likely other
things as well, but certainly digital humanities. And then I discovered that Rens Bod was thinking
about patterns30 as well. And his thinking is independent of mine, as is Stephen Ramsays.31
So now we have three independent lines of thought converging on the idea of patterns.
Perhaps theres something there.
But what? Its not as though theres anything new in the idea of patterns. Its a perfectly
ordinary idea. THATs not a disqualification, but I think we need something more if we want to
use the idea of pattern as a fundamental epistemological concept

From Niche to Pattern

In my previous patterns post, Pattern as a Term of Art, I argued that the biological niche is a
pattern in the sense we need. Its a pattern that arises between a species and its sustaining
environment. Organisms define niches. While biologists sometimes talk of niches pre-existing the
organisms that come to occupy them, that just a rhetorical convenience.
That example is important because it puts patterns out there in the world rather than
them being something that humans perceive in the world. But now its the human case that
interests me, patterns that humans see in the world. But we dont necessarily regard all the
patterns we see as being real, that is, as existing independently of our perception.
When we look at a cloud and see an elephant we dont conclude that an elephant is up
there in the sky, or that the cloud decided to take on an elephant-like form. We know that the
cloud has its own dynamics, whatever they might be, and we realize that the elephant form is
something we are projecting onto the world.
But that is something we learn. Its not given in the perception itself. And that learning is
guided by cultural conventions.
We see all kinds of things in the world. Not only does the mind perceive patterns, it seeks
them out. What happens when we start to interact with the phenomena we perceive? Thats when
we learn whether or not the elephant we saw is real or a projection.
With this in mind, consider this provisional formulation:
An observer defines a pattern over objects.
The parallel formulation for ecological niche would be:
A species defines a niche over the environment.
The pattern, the niche, exists in the relationship between a supporting matrix (the environment, an
array of objects) and the organizing vehicle (the species, the observer). Just as theres no way of
identifying an ecological niche independently of specifying an organism occupying the niche, so
theres no way of specifying a (perceptual or cognitive) pattern independently of specifying a
mind the charts the pattern.
30

http://www.bmgn-lchr.nl/index.php/bmgn/article/view/RN%3ANBN%3ANL%3AUI%3A101-110030
31
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/englishfacpubs/57/
20

As a practical matter, of course, we often talk of patterns simply as being there, in the world, in
the data. And our ability to understand how the mind captures patterns is still somewhat limited.
But if we want to understand how patterns function as epistemological primitives, then we must
somehow take the perceiving mind into account.
The point of this formulation is to finesse the question of just what characteristic of some
collection of objects makes them a suitable candidate for bearing a pattern. We can understand
how patterns function as epistemological primitives without having to specify, as part of our
inquiry, what characteristics an ensemble must have to warrant treatment as a pattern. We as
epistemologists are not in the business of making that determination. Thats the job of a
perceptual-cognitive system.
Our job is to understand how such systems come to accept some patterns as real while
rejecting others. How does that happen? Through interaction, and the nature of that interaction is
specific to the patterns involved.

Two Simple Examples: Animals and Stars

Let us consider some simple examples. Consider the patterns a hunter must use to track an
animal, footprints, disturbed vegetation, sounds of animal movement, and so forth. The causal
relationship between the animal and the signs in the pattern is obvious enough; the signs are
produced by animal motion. The hunter knows that the pattern is real when the animal is spotted.
Of course, the animal may not always be spotted, yet the pattern is real. In the case of failure the
hunter must make a judgment about whether the pattern was real, but the animal simply got away,
or whether the perceived pattern was simply mistaken.
Constellations of stars in the sky are a somewhat more complex example. That a certain
group of stars is seen as Ursa Major, or the Big Dipper, is certainly a projection of the human
mind onto the sky. The set of stars in a given constellation do not form a group organized by
internal causal forces in the way that a planetary system does. The planets in such a system are
held there by mutual gravitational attraction. The gravitational force of the central star would be
the largest component in the field, with the planets exerting lesser force in the system.
But the stars in the Big Dipper are not held in that pattern by their mutual gravitational
forces. Whatever that pattern is, it is not evidence of a local gravitational system among the
constituents of the pattern. Rather, that pattern depends on the relationship between the observer
and those objects. An observer at a different place in the universe, near one of the stars, for
example, wouldnt be able to perceive that pattern. And yet the stars have the same positions
relative to one another and to the rest of the (nearby) universe.
Our knowledge of constellations is quite different from the hunters knowledge of
tracking lore. One cannot interact with constellations in the way one interacts with animals. While
one can pursue and capture or kill animals, one cant do anything to constellations. They are
beyond our reach. But we can observe them and note their positions in the sky. And we can use
them to orient ourselves in the world and thus discover that they serve as reliable indicators of our
position in geographic space.
These two patterns attain reality in a different way. The forces that make the animals
trail a real pattern are local ones having to do with the interaction between the animal and its
immediate surrounding. The forces behind the constellations are those of the large-scale
dynamics of the universe as projected onto the point from which the pattern is viewed.

A Case from the Humanities

Now lets consider an example thats closer to the digital humanities. Look at the following
figure:

21

The red triangle is the pattern and I am defining it over the vertical bars. That is, I examined the
bars and decided that theyre approximating a triangle, which I then superimposed on those bars.
The bars preexisted the triangle.
I also created those bars, but through a process that is different and separate from that for
the triangular pattern. Each bar represents a paragraph in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness; the
length of the bar is proportional to the number of words in the paragraph. The leftmost bar
represents the first paragraph in the text while the rightmost bar represents that last paragraph in
the text. The other bars represent the other paragraphs, in textual order from left to right.
The bars vary quite a bit in length. The shortest paragraph in the text is only two words
long while the longest is, I believe, 1502 words long. In any given run of, say, twenty paragraphs,
paragraph lengths vary considerably, though there isnt a single paragraph over 200 words long in
the final 30 paragraphs or so.
But why, when the distribution of paragraph lengths is so irregular, am I asserting the
overall distribution has the form of a triangle? What Im asserting is that that is the envelope of
the distribution. There are a few paragraphs outside the envelope, but great majority are inside it.
The significant point, though, is that there is one longest paragraph and it is more or less
in the middle. That paragraph is considerably longer (by over 300 words) than the next longest
paragraphs, which are relatively close to it. The paragraphs toward the beginning and the end, the
end especially, tend to be short.
What wed like to know, though, is whether this distribution is an accident, and so of
little interest, or whether it is a sign of a real process. In the first place I observe that, in my
experience, paragraphs over 500 words long are relatively rare this is the kind of thing that can
be easily checked with the large text databases we now have. Single paragraphs of over 1000
words must be very rare indeed.
And that longest pattern is quite special. It is very strongly marked. If you know Conrads
story, then you know it centers on two men, Kurtz, a trader in the Congo, and Marlow, the captain
of a boat sent to retrieve him. Marlow narrates the story, but it isnt until were well into the story
that Kurtz is even mentioned. And then we dont learn much about him, just that hes a trader
deep in the interior and he hasnt been heard from in a long time.
That longest paragraph is the first time we learn much about Kurtz. Its a prcis of his
story. The circumstances in which Marlow gives us this prcis are extraordinary.

22

His narrative technique is simple; he tells events in the order in which they happened
his need for a job, how he got that particular job, his arrival at the mouth of the Congo River, and
so forth. With that longest paragraph, however, Marlow deviates from chronological order.
He introduces this information about Kurtz as a digression from the story of his journey
up the Congo River to Kurtzs trading station. Some of what he tells us about Kurtz happened
long before Marlow set even sail; and some of what we learn happened after the point in
Marlows journey where he introduces this paragraph as a digression.
What brought on this digression? Well, Marlows boat was about a days journey from
Kurtzs camp when they were attacked from the shore. The helmsman was speared through the
chest and fell bleeding to the deck. Its at THAT point that Marlow interrupts his narrative to tell
us about the remarkable Mr. Kurtz whom he had yet to meet. Once he finishes this most
important digression he returns to his bleeding helmsman and throws him overboard, dead. Just
before he does so he tells us that he doesnt think Kurtzs life was worth that of the helmsman
who died trying to retrieve him.
That paragraph its length, content, and position in the text is no accident. That
statement, of course, is a judgement, only based only on my experience and knowledge as a critic,
which have been shaped by the discipline of academic literary criticism. But its not an
unreasonable judgement; it is of a piece with the thousands of such judgements woven into the
fabric of our discipline.
Conrad may not have consciously planned to convey that information in the longest
paragraph in the text, and to position that paragraph in the middle of his text, but whatever
unconscious cognitive and affective considerations were driving his craft, they put that
information in that place in the text and at that length. The apex of that triangle is real, not merely
in the sense that the paragraph is that long, but in the deeper sense that it is a clue about the
psychodynamic forces shaping the text.
Just what are those psychodynamic forces? I dont know. The hunter can tell us in great
detail about how the animal left traces of its movement over the land. Astronomers and
astrophysicists can tell us about constellations in great detail. But the pattern of paragraph lengths
in Heart of Darkness is a mystery.
*****
Why do I consider this example at such length? For one thing, Im interested in texts. Patterns in
text are thus what most interest me.
Secondly, that example makes the point that description is one thing, explanation another.
Ive described the pattern, but Ive not explained it. Nor do I have any clear idea of how to go
about explaining it.
Theres a lot of that going around in the digital humanities. Patterns have been found, but
we dont know how to explain them. We may not even know whether or not the pattern reflects
something real about the world or is simply an artifact of data processing.
Third, whereas much of the work in digital humanities involves data mining procedures
that are difficult to understand, this is not like that. Counting the number of words in a paragraph
is simple and straightforward, if tedious (even with some crude computational help). And yet the
result is strange and a bit mysterious. Whod have thought?
Note that I distinguish between the bar chart that displays the word counts and the pattern
I, as analyst, impose on it. When I say that the envelope of paragraph length distribution is
triangular, Im making a judgement. That judgement didnt come out of the word count itself.
And when I say that that pattern is real, Im also making a judgement, one that Ive justified if
only partially by discussing what happens in that longest paragraph and that paragraphs position
in the text as a whole.

23

My sense of these matters is that, going forward, were going to have to get comfortable with
identifying patterns we dont know how to explain. We need to start thinking about, theorizing if
you will, what patterns are and how to identify them.
*****
Ive written a good many posts on Heart of Darkness:
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/search/label/heart%20darkness
I discuss paragraph length in two different posts.
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/distribution-of-paragraph-lengths-whats.html
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/hd7-digital-humanities-sandbox-goes-to.html
Ive called that central sentence the nexus and discuss its position in the text:
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/heart-of-heart-of-darkness.html
In this post I annotate the nexus, adding commentary every two or three sentences:
http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2011/07/heart-of-darkness-6-some-informal-notes.html
Heres a downloadable working paper that covers these and other aspects of the text.
http://ssrn.com/abstract=1910279

24

Patterns and Literature

So, patterns. Some patterns operate on the time and scale of sensory perception; we see, hear,
smell, touch, and taste things in the course of everyday life. But other patterns require more time
and deliberation. That our solar system consists of planets and asteroids in transit about the sun is
a pattern, but its not one given in sensory perception. Rather, its one that can be inscribed on a
surface (where on can see it at human scale) and that emerged through thousands upon thousands
of observations made by hundreds of individuals conversing over the course of centuries.
Literary texts (and films) are a bit like that. They are devices for capturing patterns of
(mostly, generally) human life. Depending on the text, the reading may take only minutes or
hours, perhaps over the course of days, but the writing likely took longer. Each text rests on a
history of texts from which it draws and against which it reacts, and a body of texts requires a
community to keep it in circulation.

Lifeways and Literature

Susan Langer (Feeling and Form) would say that these textual patterns embody virtual
experience. Wayne Booth (The Company We Keep) talks of literature as a way of trying out
modes of life, while more recently, Keith Oatley (Such Stuff as Dreams) writes of literary
experience as simulation. We can say that these patterns are meant to be taken up by ones whole
psyche, ones whole being even that they are meant to facilitate unity of being.
Kenneth Burke writes of this in Literature as Equipment for Living from The
Philosophy of Literary Form (1973). Using words and phrases from several definitions of the
term strategy (in quotes in the following passage), he asserts that (p. 298):
... surely, the most highly alembicated and sophisticated work of art, arising in
complex civilizations, could be considered as designed to organize and command
the army of ones thoughts and images, and to so organize them that one
imposes upon the enemy the time and place and conditions for fighting
preferred by oneself. One seeks to direct the larger movements and
operations in one's campaign of living. One maneuvers, and the maneuvering
is an art.
Finally, it is not, after all, as though life happens OVER THERE, while literature takes place in a
separate space IN HERE such that literature is completely external to life. Its not that simple.
Literature takes place in and reacts on life.

Interpretive Criticism
Provisionally, we can say that a text represents certain states of affairs in the world; call
that content. Texts use various devices to organize their contents; call that form. In
Oatleys terms the content is the world simulated while the form is the machinery used
to run the simulation.
In critical practice, distinguishing form and content can be difficult. Ordinary
literary criticism, mainstream literary criticism, is focused on interpretation. As far as I
can tell, that seems to be an exercise in re-stating the lifeways captured in a text in a
different kind of language. Such interpretations are always partial; they always leave
some aspects of a text untouched. And while hermeneutic criticism takes note of textual

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devices, of formal matters, that is not its focus. It attends to form as a way of explicating
meaning, of retracing the lifeways originally traced in the text.
I would further say that such criticism strives to keep in touch with the ordinary
practice of reading and taking up literature. Hence it is common to talk of an
interpretation as a reading of the text. The introduction of technical and quasi-technical
concepts and vocabulary tends to get in the way of such reading and hence is
problematic. On the one hand we hear calls for critics to drop the scientism, as this is
thought to be, and write in ordinary language. On the other hand, critics themselves feel
and express anxiety about their activity, thinking of it as somehow parasitic on primary
texts and not an activity unto itself Im thinking here of the anxieties Geoffrey Hartman
expresses in The Fate of Reading.
But it can be parasitic only if it is (seen as) doing the same thing as literature; it
the aim is to do something different, well then, its no longer parasitic. Biology, for
example, needs living things as its objects of investigation; but no one would think of
biology as parasitic upon life. And so literary criticism needs texts as objects of
investigation. It is only to the extent that criticism aims, not at the texts, but through the
texts to life itself, that it can be parasitic.
Naturalist Criticism
Insofar as possible, I want to separate the investigation of form from the investigation of content
and, further, to focus on form. Im not interested in what a text means; Im not primarily
concerned about what it exhibits about human lifeways. I want to examine how the exhibit is
structured, how the simulation is run.
When I write of the importance of description, Im mean the description of formal
patterns. Until we know what those patterns are, we cannot hope to understand the mechanisms
behind them. As a practical matter, our sense of what to look for may be informed by our
intuitions, and even models, of those mechanisms. But the emphasis is on describing the form.
In my own work ring-form or center point construction has emerged as a central concern
I suspect that is because its linear symmetry works against, cuts across, the cumulative effects
of textual progression, but thats a digression. In all those texts Kubla Khan, Heart of
Darkness, Metropolis, The Sorcerers Apprentice, Gojira, etc. the formal pattern is cleanly
separable from the context. Their subject matter is quite different but, to a first approximation,
their form is the same.
How does that form work? The form is a pattern that we, as critics, see in the text. What
mechanisms are responsible for that pattern? Obviously we cannot even begin to answer the
question until weve described the pattern.
I am tempted to assert that, in the long run, we can treat such patterns as real only if we
can find a mechanism to explain them. Yet I dont quite believe that. It is because I believe the
patterns are real that I search for mechanisms that explain them.

An Ethical Imperative
Finally, while the goal of naturalist criticism is not interpretive, much less ethical, there is an
ethical dimension to the activity itself. Let us once again consider Edward Saids lament
(Globalizing Literary Study, PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 1, 2001, pp. 64-68):
I myself have no doubt, for instance, that an autonomous aesthetic realm exists,
yet how it exists in relation to history, politics, social structures, and the like, is
really difficult to specify. Questions and doubts about all these other relations
have eroded the formerly perdurable national and aesthetic frameworks, limits,
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and boundaries almost completely. The notion neither of author, nor of work, nor
of nation is as dependable as it once was, and for that matter the role of
imagination, which used to be a central one, along with that of identity has
undergone a Copernican transformation in the common understanding of it.
If there is any hope of recovering a robust sense of that autonomous aesthetic realm, it is though
an understanding of the devices of literary form.
The content of literary works is tied to and anchored in history, politics, social
structures, and the like. But the way the context is captured and presented is anchored in the
inherent powers of the human mind. The formal patterns of texts are the traces of those powers. It
follows that the way to understand those powers is to understand literary form.
The formalists WERE right in believing that form conferred (a degree of) autonomy on
texts. But they were wrong in thinking that that autonomy applied to the meaning in a way that
lifted it outside of history. The achievements of form are more limited. Form confers upon the
reader the power of using literature to establish a critical distance from his/her historical moment
and thereby to resist it, to work against it. The reader does this, not by apprehending a preexisting eternal meaning, but by giving an order to his/her experience that it does not have in the
context of daily life. What the reader then does with that order, that is his/her free choice, as free
as any choice we have.
I conclude by observing that, to the extent that a robust understanding of literary form
needs to be based on an appropriate idea of computation, the ethical imperative behind a
naturalist criticism is compatible with, if not inherent in, digital criticism.

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