“Operationalizing”: or, the Function of Measurement in Modern Literary Theory

Abstract

“Operationalizing” refers to a process which is absolutely central to thenew field of computational criticism, and of the digital humanities. Itmeans building a bridge from the concepts of literary theory, throughsome form of quantification, to literary texts. The concept of “characterspace,”coined by Alex Woloch in The One vs. The Many, smoothly into“word-space”—“the number of words allocated to a particular character”—and, by counting the words each character utters, we can determinehow much textual space it occupies. Measurement does not lead from theworld, via quantification, to the constructions of theories; if anything, itleads back from theories, through data, to the empirical world. The measurementof character-space undermines the older notion, replacing itwith the idea of a conflict arising near the center of the network. In this context, this paper attempts to demonstrate how the unprecedentedempirical power of digital tools and archives offers a uniquechance to rethink the categories of literary study. Digital humanities maynot yet have changed the territory of the literary historian, or the readingof individual texts; but operationalizing has certainly changed, and radicalized,our relationship to concepts: it has raised our expectations, byturning concepts into magic spells that can call into being a whole worldof empirical data; and it has sharpened our skepticism. A theory-driven,data-rich research program has become imaginable, thanks to this enterpriseof operationalizing.