Advances in computational analysis for text documents has opened new avenues for the analysis of historic documents. In particular, this work focuses on analysing a collection of 519 Australian World War I diaries held by the State Library of New South Wales. Digital transcripts of these diaries were made available by the library in conjugation with the 100-year anniversary of the war. However, at the time, the library did not anticipate their use for computational analysis methods. As such, this paper will begin by presenting our work on cleaning this data to make it suitable for computational analysis. Specifically, we will focus on the need for consistency and structured metadata. The diaries were linked with service records from the AIF Project, allowing us to gain a full understanding of the men behind the diaries. Statistics regarding our authors will be presented, showing a survivorship bias and a bias towards those who lived in New South Wales. This is unsurprising as there is a higher chance a diary would survive if the author also survived, and the acquiring library is in New South Wales. We will discuss the need for understanding such biases when analysing collections like this one. Finally, based on the clean data, results from various computational analysis techniques will be presented to understand what the diarists wrote about and how they felt about it. These techniques include considering word frequencies, tf-idf, topic modelling, and sentiment analysis.

In this paper, we report on our project to study the discourses of the Digital Humanities and Social Sciences in the first two decades of digital computing. We have constructed a corpus of articles, books and chapters from the 1950s and 60s across the whole spectrum of the Computational Human Sciences (CHS), broadly conceived. Using qualitative coding, we identify machines and methods used by the researchers. Using text analysis, we interrogate the rhetoric of early digital research in the Humanities and Social Sciences. What were the central methods of study across the different disciplines? How did scholars explain and justify their new methods? What rhetorical or affective devices did they use to obtain acceptance for their results? How can this history help us understand the breadth of CHS today? By using contemporary DH tools to study the early development of computational approaches across the HASS disciplines, we hope to provide a richer basis for the methodological debates that plague our disciplines in the present.

There is an emerging trend in scholarship which aims to draw links between poststructuralism and digital text analysis. In his revisionist history Code: From Information Theory to French Theory, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan suggests the poststructuralist movement fulfilled “the promise of a theoretically rigorous approach to communicative codes” (2) made by advances in cybernetics. N. Katherine Hayles also stamps the poststructuralist seal of approval on foundational cybernetic methods such as “the null strategy” (644) which assumes texts generated by humans and machines are indistinct. In any case, the poststructuralist conceptualisation of language has an uncanny tendency to share technical nomenclature with digital text analysis. But it is in the corpus of James Joyce, and particularly Ulysses, that many of these terms and methods meet in apposition. This paper will substantiate the link between poststructuralism, Joyce’s lexicon and digital text analysis. It will begin with a brief overview of the poststructuralist account of language. The lens will then pivot to Joyce, and articulate why poststructuralism offers a viable theoretical framework for a critical reading of Ulysses. It will then attempt to superimpose the lexicon and methodology of digital text analysis onto the poststructuralist account of Joyce. This effort will be empowered by elaborating the metaphor first proposed by Derrida that Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are a “1000th generation computer” (147). This conceptual model of language as it inheres to poststructuralism and digital text analysis will provide impetus to foreground ULEXIS; a digitised lexical companion to Ulysses.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. “Two words for Joyce”. Post-structuralist Joyce: Essays from the

French. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, pp.145-161.

Geoghegan, Bernard Dionysius. Code: From Information Theory to French Theory.

Sign, Storage, Transmission. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2023.

Hayles, N. Katherine. “Inside the Mind of an AI: Materiality and the Crisis of

Representation.” New Literary History 54, no. 1, 2023, pp. 635–66.