‘We can’t read it all’: Theorizing a

hermeneutics for large-scale data

in the humanities with a case study
in stylometry

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............................................................................................................................................................
Hannah Ringler
Department of English, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh,
PA 15213, USA
......................................................................................................................................

Correspondence: Hannah
Ringler, Carnegie Mellon
University, Pittsburgh, PA
15213, USA. E-mail:
hringler@andrew.cmu.edu
.................................................................................................................................................................................
Abstract
Computational methods often produce large amounts of data about texts,
which create theoretical and practical challenges for textual interpretation.
How can we make claims about texts, when we cannot read every text or analyze
every piece of data produced? This article draws on rhetorical and literary
theories of textual interpretation to develop a hermeneutical theory for gaining
insight about texts with large amounts of computational data. It proposes that
computational data about texts can be thought of as analytical lenses that make
certain textual features salient. Analysts can read texts with these lenses, and
argue for interpretations by arguing for how the analyses of many pieces of data
support a particular understanding of text(s). By focusing on validating an
understanding of the corpus rather than explaining every piece of data, we allow
space for close reading by the human reader, focus our contributions on the
humanistic insight we can gain from our corpora, and make it possible to glean
insight in a way that is feasible for the limited human reader while still having
strategies to argue for (or against) certain interpretations. This theory is dem-
onstrated with an analysis of academic writing using stylometry methods, by
offering a view of knowledge-making processes in the disciplines through a close
analysis of function words.

1 Introduction doubled every year from 2015 to 2020. In digital

As ‘big data’ has found a place in the sciences and
humanities alike over the last few decades, the prob-
lem of how to tackle interpretation and meaning-
making with unassailable amounts of data has
gained interest while continuing to be theoretically
and practically difficult. On arXiv, an open-access
archive for research in some science, technology, en-
gineering, and math (STEM) areas, the search hits
for ‘interpretable machine learning’ have nearly
humanities spaces, researchers have been grappling
with how data from computational analysis can con-
tribute to traditional humanistic inquiry: Rockwell
and Sinclair (2016), for example, engaged explicitly
with how computational tools can model different
views of texts that help analysts to read them in new
ways, and Ramsay (2011) theorized an ‘algorithmic
criticism’ in which tools enable criticism and inter-
pretation rather than just verify hypotheses. Digital
tools in the humanities should ideally ‘assist the

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022. V

C The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on 1157
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https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab100 Advance Access published on 10 December 2021
H. Ringler
critic in the unfolding of interpretive possibilities’
(Ramsay, 2011, p. 10), but when faced with tables
upon tables of numerical data about a corpus or text,
the realities of how to actually make that happen are
often unclear.
Stylometry is one example of a method that has
been especially tricky to tackle in terms of interpret-
ation because of the large amount of data produced.
Stylometry methods are most commonly used for
authorship attribution, and typically work by calculat-
ing distances between texts in a corpus with the ex-
pectation that texts with smaller distances between
them are more stylistically similar and thus more likely
to be written by the same author. The methods are
quite effective, and have been used for cases like iden-
tifying the authorship of Federalist papers (Mosteller
and Wallace, 1964), and suggesting that Robert
Galbraith, the author of A Cuckoo’s Calling, was actu-
ally a penname for J.K. Rowling (Juola, 2013).
The distances calculated between texts with styl-
ometry methods are typically based on the distribu-
tion of most frequent words, which are often function
words like the, and, or of. Thus, Evert et al. (2017)
explain that the distances between texts (and determi-
nations of authorship) are therefore based on many
variables that are likely weak discriminators on their
own, as opposed to a small number of stronger vari-
ables. Interpreting the results of a stylometric analysis,
or in other words asking, why does this work? or what
do we learn from discriminating authors?, has been
widely recognized as difficult because of the huge
amount of data and variables at play (e.g. Mosteller
and Wallace, 1964; Craig, 1999; Burrows, 2002;
Kestemont, 2014). While some have begun to explain
why stylometry methods work from a mathematical
perspective (e.g. Argamon, 2008) or begun to analyze
what they might tell us about authors or genres (e.g.
Craig, 1999; Argamon et al., 2008; Noecker et al.,
2013), we still lack a robust interpretive framework
for thinking more theoretically about how to make
sense of the amounts of data produced by these meth-
ods and others like them. Certainly fields like data
science or statistics have developed interpretive theo-
ries for certain purposes, but as van Zundert (2016)
explains, the use of computation in textual interpret-
ation and bringing together of disciplines requires new
forms of hermeneutics, given the theoretical and
1158 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
methodological tensions in working with texts in
particular.
In this article, I use stylometry methods as a case
study for investigating hermeneutic questions in com-
putational humanities work: when faced with large
amounts of numerical data, how do we make sense
of it in a way that helps us to interpret artifacts and
engage in humanistic inquiry, even though we may
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not be able to read every text? What is our hermen-
eutical theory? Mailloux (1991) reminds us that a her-
meneutic theory does not guarantee an accurate or
‘correct’ interpretation, but rather ‘provide[s] add-
itional argumentative strategies for making one’s
case’ (p. 246). When we use computational methods
in the humanities to make claims about artifacts, what
are our argumentative strategies for making the case
for an interpretation of lots of data? I take up these
questions in part in this article, drawing on theory on
textual interpretation to make an argument for a her-
meneutics or interpretive theory for stylometry meth-
ods in particular that has as its goal gaining insight
about the corpus. In doing so, I hope to offer more
traditional humanistic insights into a particular cor-
pus, while proposing a theoretical framework for
thinking about how to interpret textual corpora
through computational methods that produce large
amounts of data.
2 Interpretation of Texts in
Computational Humanities
In literary and rhetorical criticism, the human reader
has been historically valued as an integral part of her-
meneutics. From Richard’s (1929) close reading to
Black’s (1978) rhetorical criticism, interpretation of
texts has historically involved analysts reading individ-
ual texts with different processes so as to better under-
stand them and their contexts. Moretti (2013) most
notably challenged this focus on individual texts in his
argument for ‘distant reading’, spurring theoretical
debates about the place and value of human close
reading within and given distant reading approaches
(e.g. Hockey, 2000; Ramsay, 2011).
While close and distant reading each can stand on
their own to allow new and nuanced readings of texts,
considering how they might complement each other is

also a fruitful, if difficult, space. Many scholars have
argued for the value of combining the two approaches,
arguing, for example, that ‘the macroscale perspective
should inform our close readings of the individual
texts’ (Jockers, 2013, p. 28), that artificial views of a
text ‘encourage a reader to read it differently’
(Rockwell and Sinclair, 2016, p. 189), or that macro
approaches can help us model and theorize about the
relationships between specific textual and social vari-
ables (Underwood, 2016, p. 531). The models that we
develop of texts and corpora with computational
methods can also be used to gather insight into the
texts themselves—the model becomes a springboard
for imagining new interpretive possibilities in readings
of individual texts, as opposed to only looking at a big
picture (this is what Breiman, 2001, p. 199 refers to as
the ‘information’ goal in statistical data analysis). In
some sense, using computational methods in this way
is still distant in that in can provide a look at an entire
corpus, but closer in that it highlights features of par-
ticular texts to be noticed and analyzed by a reader.
These patterns, once noticed, might lead to new in-
sight into a text or corpus as close reading traditionally
would provide, but also are insights which distant
reading alone cannot interpret and which close read-
ing alone cannot easily provide given the limits of the
human serial reader to both notice and trace them
across entire corpora.
To fully explore and more deeply understand the
patterns revealed by computational methods then, we
need to grapple with the role of the human reader and
close reading. The relationships and patterns that stat-
istical models reveal can function as a sort of analytical
lens, making present textual patterns that may have
previously gone unnoticed but which the analyst can
now read for with the knowledge that they statistically
recur. For example, a stylometry analysis might show
that the frequency of the helps statistically differentiate
one corpus from another. This is a pattern likely to
have gone unnoticed by the average serial reader, both
because of how common (and thus, frequently un-
noticed) the is, and how slight (even if regular) the
difference between corpora might be. Once pointed
out by models though, the analyst can return to close
reading texts with a focus on this word to more deeply
investigate.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
We can’t read it all
With very large textual corpora though, serial
reading for a particular feature quickly becomes an
unmanageable task. An analyst might serial read
through a handful of texts and develop ideas about
why certain textual patterns occur, but how do we
know that the reasons scale? As corpora get larger,
statistical differences become more stable but the
analyst’s ability to read each text closely wanes.
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When working with big data in the humanities, com-
putational methods offer a unique insight into regu-
larly occurring patterns that can act as lenses to shape
our close reading, but we also face a verifiability prob-
lem in knowing that our interpretation scales appro-
priately to the entire corpus. Some initial work has
begun to fruitfully theorize how to move between
close and distant reading toward interpretation (e.g.
Piper, 2015), but there are still many practical and
theoretical challenges to developing hermeneutics
for the variety of computational methods in the
humanities, especially regarding questions of scale.
2.1 Ricoeur’s hermeneutical arc and
big data
Paul Ricoeur was a 20th-century philosopher who
engaged with text interpretation and hermeneutical
theory, and whose work can help us to think critically
about text interpretation theoretically, including in a
big data context. Ricoeur (1981) described hermeneut-
ics as ‘the theory of the operations of understanding in
their relation to the interpretation of texts’ (p. 43), and
saw the understanding of texts as at least somewhat
separate from the author’s intent and created by readers
at different points in time. In particular, Ricoeur (1981)
theorized a ‘hermeneutical arc,’ or different phases that
readers go through in constructing their understanding
of a text. Bell (2011) slightly adapted this arc for dis-
course analysis into what he called the ‘interpretive arc’.
The ideas share a lot of similarities, and I draw my
description of the ‘arc’ that follows heavily from both
sources, as Bell’s adaptation has a useful focus on text-
ual interpretation as we might do in close reading.
Ricoeur describes the process of interpretation as
having several steps that the reader progresses
through. First, the reader experiences distanciation,
meaning texts are necessarily estranged and separated
from the author and their original intent through time
1159
H. Ringler
and context (Ricoeur, 1981). Second, the reader expe-
riences pre-understanding, which is the state of mind
that the reader encounters a text with (Ricoeur, 1981).
For any text, a reader might have some knowledge or
preconceived notions of the topic, author, and so
forth, which shape their impression of the text before
they ever read it. Next, the reader experiences naı̈ve
understanding, or their initial, even visceral and im-
pressionistic, guess at what the text means (Ricoeur,
1976). Ricoeur talks about this initial understanding
as a guess in that readers do not have access to what
authors meant, and the understandings generated
here are starting points and not the result of analysis.
After developing these initial guesses, the reader
moves into more analytic processes, which are the
processes we are working towards with computational
data in the humanities.
Following naı̈ve understanding, the reader moves
into developing explanation (or what Bell (2011) calls
‘analysis’) and then understanding. Bell’s reading of
Ricoeur is especially useful here, as Bell envisions ex-
planation/analysis as the goal of discourse analysis
with texts. Bell (2011) describes these phases as fol-
lows: ‘Understanding is mediated by explanation/ana-
lysis, which is fulfilled in understanding. While
explanation lays out the parts through analysis, under-
standing grasps the whole through synthesis’ (p. 534).
In other words, analysis of the text helps to explain bits
and pieces of what the text means. Combined as a
whole, the reader can then gain understanding or
‘the ability to take up again within oneself the work
of structuring that is performed by the text’ (Ricoeur,
1991, p. 18). The processes of analysis may validate (or
challenge) the reader’s initial guesses about what the
text means, but are ‘the second-order operation
grafted onto this understanding which consists in
bringing to light the codes underlying this work of
structuring that is carried through in company with
the reader’ (Ricoeur, 1991, p. 18).
Ricoeur was not interested in computational text
analysis, but turning back to the problem of inter-
preting big data in the humanities, we can think
about reading computational data similarly to
how Ricoeur describes reading texts. We are dis-
tanced from it in a sense, in that computational
representations of texts are strange, numerical rep-
resentations of actual written texts. We may even
come to these corpora with notions about what
1160 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
they might reveal. After we conduct computational
analyses, we are then in a space to start making
guesses about what those numbers mean. But at
this point, we are only in Ricoeur’s ‘naı̈ve under-
standing’. It is not until we return to reading indi-
vidual texts that we can start the process of analysis/
explanation and making sense of bits and pieces of
data (e.g. making sense of why the is one of many
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weak discriminators in a stylometric analysis).
But how are we to know that the explanations of
those bits and pieces scale? In other words, how do we
validate the understandings that we are forming and
gathering bits of evidence to support? Ricoeur
addresses the concern of validating guesses (though
not specifically on a corpus scale), falling somewhat
in line with Karl Popper’s (1959) falsifiability thesis:
there are many possible interpretations, but the best
interpretation is the one that is the least capable of
being falsified (Ricoeur, 1976, p. 79). Bell (2011) fur-
ther explains that, ‘as discourse analysts, we know that
we are not actually able to prove that our reading of a
text is the ‘right’ or even the best one. But we can try to
demonstrate that competing readings are less valid or
probable than the alternative’ (p. 537). In sum, the
more probable interpretation of a text is that which
‘takes account of the greatest number of facts fur-
nished by the text’ (Ricoeur, 1981, p. 175). Heuser
and Le-Khac (2011) actually make a related point
about computational text analysis, arguing that inter-
pretation can be made ‘more rigorous by having to
account for a wide set of related observations’ (p. 85).
When arguing for an interpretation of computa-
tional data, we can do so not by objectively proving
our understanding is correct but rather by demon-
strating how our understanding takes account of as
many facts as possible furnished about the corpora
through both computational and traditional analyses.
The distinction between analysis and understanding
becomes useful here, as many different pieces of ana-
lysis might support one particular understanding. By
showing how several disparate pieces of data analysis
all support one understanding of the corpus (even if
each analysis results from close readings of only a few
texts), we account for more and more facts and
strengthen the argument for both the analyses and
that particular understanding.
A hermeneutics for big data in the humanities can
thus focus on demonstrating how the analyses of

many pieces of data support a particular understanding
of a text or corpus. Indeed, we can even conduct add-
itional computational analyses and create more data so
as to cross-validate our understanding with new forms
of data analysis that we can test our understandings
(rather than specific analyses) against. This approach
to hermeneutics has resemblances to Piper’s (2015)
model of computational hermeneutics wherein a reader
oscillates between close and distant reading to converge
on an interpretation, but expands upon that model by
theorizing how to form and argue for a deeper textual
interpretation from a model despite not being able to
read every text and explore every piece of data. By
focusing on validating an understanding rather than
many different explanations of many different pieces
of data, we allow space for close reading by the human
reader, focus our contributions on the humanistic in-
sight we can gain from our corpora, and make it pos-
sible to glean insight in a way that is feasible for the
limited human reader while still having strategies to
argue for (or against) certain interpretations.
3 A Case Study in Stylometry
Moving from theory to praxis is difficult, and thus this
section is intended to both illustrate this hermeneutical
theory and detail it more specifically for stylometry
methods. Stylometry methods are most commonly
used in a classificatory way, meaning that they show
similarity between texts that share the same classifica-
tion (like authorship). Many computational text ana-
lysis methods are effective at classification, and to gain
insight into corpora from these methods, we can start
by investigating what textual features they use to make
classifications and then asking what those features tell
us about the corpus. Stylometry methods in particular
show similarity between texts by summing up small
differences in the usage of several words to calculate
‘distances’, and thus the distance between texts as a
whole is the accumulation of many small differences.
These methods, then, create a useful type of data to
demonstrate what this hermeneutical process might
look like, simply because of the wealth of data they
create and how differences in each word’s frequency
might not be especially informative on its own but
together accumulate to a larger effect (Evert et al.,
2017). In that sense, there is an opportunity for lots
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
We can’t read it all
of pieces of data to be analyzed that all point to one
larger understanding.
In the remainder of this section, I first describe the
corpus used for analysis and then detail the stylometry
analysis and analysis of separate pieces. I then present
this analysis and show how many pieces of data can be
analyzed to argue for broader understandings of the
corpus.
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3.1 Methods
3.1.1 Corpus
A wide variety of corpora could be used to illustrate
hermeneutical theory, but this analysis in particular
uses academic research texts. Academic texts are
often already a source of corpus and detailed discourse
analysis in the English for Academic Purposes com-
munity, and can speak to more theoretical debates
around disciplinarity and epistemology. To focus
this analysis, academic research texts are conceived
as representing knowledge-making processes as they
appear in text across disciplines. While philosophers
as far back as Plato in Theaetetus or Gorgias to
Descartes to Kuhn (1962) theorized various social
and logical influences in how we conceive of know-
ledge, rhetoricians and language scholars often point
to the role of texts for socially constructing and trans-
mitting that knowledge: for example, Bazerman
(1992) argued for the importance of focusing on texts
when considering knowledge production in academic
disciplines, claiming that the text is ‘the medium
through which knowledge is transmitted and is the
matter in which knowledge is embodied outside the
consciousness of any individual’ (p. 31).
Research texts thus textually represent the huge
variety of knowledge-making processes that occur
within the academy. Knowledge-making processes
are plural and many as we consider the wide range
of disciplines and types of knowledge in the academy
(and indeed, vastly more so when we look outside the
academy). In crafting a text, authors work within the
processes and standards that a disciplinary commu-
nity needs for accepting their claim. For example, a
biologist who outlines the details of an experiment
and a literary historian who recounts the historical
context around a novel are both supporting their final
claims by narrating particular lines of inquiry and
knowledge-producing processes. Because of this,
1161
H. Ringler
rather than distinguishing disciplines in terms of the
specific content matter that they engage with, writing
theorists like Carter (2007) have found it more pro-
ductive to conceive of disciplines as ‘ways of knowing
and doing’ rather than static repositories of know-
ledge. For example, Carter categorizes disciplines
like animal science, accounting, and engineering as
‘problem-solving’ disciplines, and other disciplines
like biology, chemistry, and sociology as ‘empirical
inquiry’ disciplines. Especially because of the con-
stantly shifting state of knowledge in a discipline
over time, thinking of a discipline as a particular
way of knowing and doing around an idea allows
for a more stable description of the work of a
discipline.
These particular ways of knowing and doing are
precisely the knowledge-making processes that hap-
pen in a discipline, and the ways that knowledge gets
constructed in texts. As such, generic features and
regularities within texts or disciplinary writings give
a window into certain regularities within the social
acts of what disciplines do and how. MacDonald
(1994) echoes this, claiming that ‘if academic writing
is a form of knowledge-making, then differences in
knowledge problems or ways of addressing such prob-
lems should account for much of the variation among
the disciplines’ (p. 21). For example, different meta-
genres like the scientific article or literary criticism
structurally represent the epistemic commitments of
the metadisciplines they are tied to (Carter, 2007).
This analysis thus investigates what we can learn about
knowledge-making and disciplinarity through study-
ing textual features as represented in a stylometric
computational model.
The actual corpus consists of the texts of 1,625
academic journal1 articles, gathered equally from thir-
teen disciplines. The goal of the corpus construction
was to obtain a random sampling of articles published
in disciplines across academia that was not heavily
influenced by time or specific publication venues.
For this reason, each discipline’s subcorpus was gath-
ered equally across five top publication venues in the
field,2 and across the five-year span of 2013–17. For
example, in the education sub-corpus, five articles
were randomly selected from all of the research articles
published in each year (2013–17) in the following
journals: Higher Education, American Educational
Research Journal, Early Childhood Research Quarterly,
1162 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
Educational Researcher, and Teaching and Teacher
Education (five years * five journals * thirteen disci-
plines ¼ 1,625 articles). In total, the corpus contains
13,604,023 words.
Each text was formatted as a .txt file and cleaned by
hand to remove footnotes, endnotes, appendices,
headers and footers, bibliographies, page numbers,
and other unreadable characters. Image captions and
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section headers were retained because the text of these
have some meaningful place in the argument of the
text itself, and do not regularly serve as only citation-
related or otherwise meta information (while foot-
notes or endnotes do sometimes provide detail that
is pertinent to the text itself, depending on the citation
style they sometimes provide purely bibliographic in-
formation and thus were not retained to be consist-
ent). The goal was for each text file to contain only the
text of the article itself, and to remove other extrane-
ous or meta-related information.
3.1.2 Stylometric analysis
Stylometric analyses typically use the top most
frequent words to show similarity between texts,
which in most corpora are primarily function words.
For this particular analysis, I chose to calculate distan-
ces between texts using only a list of 209 function
words (rather than the top most frequent words), so
as to focus the analysis on words more clearly related
to form and style rather than content (though the two
are not neatly separable), as well as to demonstrate
methods of interpretation that will be more easily
transferrable to other stylometric analyses. In practice,
using only function words or the top 200 most fre-
quent words produced very similar results. The list of
209 function words used in this analysis was derived
from the Longman Grammar (Biber et al., 1999), and
excluded pronouns given their close connection to
subject matter.
Figures 1 and 2 show the corpus visualized using
Delta distances (Burrows, 2002) with only function
words, and visualized as a network per Eder (2017)
in Fig. 1 and as a dendrogram in Fig. 2.
Figure 1 demonstrates that, based on the frequen-
cies of function words, disciplinary writing clusters
together. In other words, articles within the same dis-
ciplines appear to have similar frequencies of function
words and therefore small distances and thicker lines
between them. Figure 1 suggests two large groupings
 We can’t read it all

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Fig. 1 A visualization of distances between texts in a corpus of 1,625 academic journal articles. Each text is colored
according to its discipline. Every point represents one unique article, and thicker lines indicate that the texts are closely
related in terms of function word frequencies (for more detail, see Eder, 2017). The distances were calculated using
Burrows’ (2002) Delta, and were completed in R with Stylo (Eder et al., 2016). The visualization itself was created with Gephi
(Bastian et al., 2009)

of disciplines on the left (sciences) and right (human-
ities). These groupings indicate similar frequencies of
function words between groups of similar disciplines,
or metadisciplines (Carter, 2007).
The split between the humanities and sciences
becomes even more pronounced when the distances
are visualized on a traditional dendrogram using clus-
ter analysis, as in Fig. 2. Figure 2 is created using the
same Burrows’ Delta measurements used for Fig. 1.
The dendrogram in Fig. 2 is created by drawing con-
nections between whichever two texts have the smallest
distance between them, and then working up this way
to build the whole tree. In this sense, it privileges the
first-nearest neighbor when mapping how close texts
are. The diagram in Fig. 1 is created using a technique
described by Eder (2017), and is especially informative
because the connections depicted take into account
not only the first-nearest neighbor, but also the second
and third. In that sense, Fig. 1 gives a more nuanced
view as to the many relationships between texts, while
Fig. 2 allows for an easier visualization of groups.
An analysis could focus on any level of grouping
from comparing two subcorpora to comparing every
individual text. I choose a high-level, two subcorpora

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022 1163

H. Ringler

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Fig. 2 A dendrogram created using agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis. The distances between texts were calculated
using Burrows’ Delta. Each endpoint represents one text, which are colored according to discipline

XP A l B l 
split (suggested by the groupings in Figs 1 and espe-  i i i i
DðiÞ ¼   
cially 2) to prioritize a broad view of the corpus and c¼1 ri ri
manageability of analysis. To analyze this split, I focus
on the words that drive the difference between the where D ¼ the total distance contributed by a function
humanities and sciences. These words are identified word i summed over every pair of humanities and
by calculating the distance contributed by each func- science texts; i ¼ the function word being analyzed;
tion word to the distance between every possible pair c ¼ the combination of humanities and science texts
of humanities and science texts, and then summing up being compared; P ¼ the total number of unique pairs
the total distances by word. To isolate the distance of humanities and sciences texts (for this particular
contributed by each word throughout the whole cor- corpus, that is 625,000 possible unique pairs); A, B
pus, I slightly modify the traditional Burrows’ Delta ¼ texts being compared; Ai ¼ frequency of i in text
formula to the following: A; Bi ¼ frequency of i in text B; li ¼ mean frequency

1164 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022

 We can’t read it all

Table 1. The top eleven function words that contribute most to the distance between the sciences and humanities
Word D Subcorpus Log-likelihood Effect size N
the 794,889.6 Sciences 286.41 0.053 864,090
with 786,419.2 Sciences 1,367.87 0.347 98,942
for 784,973.8 Sciences 1,599.56 0.319 137,746
but 778,957.4 Humanities 5,001.60 1.372 32,883
by 759,898.5 Sciences 385.97 0.205 81,460
not 756,177.8 Humanities 5,471.20 1.045 60,362

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is 753,195.3 Sciences 1,140.84 0.247 171,836
who 751,306.2 Humanities 9,514.77 4.188 15,109
where 749,233.5 Sciences 2,604.24 1.182 15,724
can 747,434.4 Sciences 1,374.20 0.599 37,359
to 744,783.4 Humanities 7,502.43 0.491 304,778

The D column shows the sum of the Delta distances between each science and humanities text for that particular function word. The
subcorpus column shows which subcorpus (sciences or humanities) that the function word is most common in, based on which subcorpus
has the highest average z-score for that word. The table also shows the log-likelihood measure of the word for the subcorpus it is most
common in (using the less-common subcorpus as a reference corpus), the effect size of the word for the subcorpus it is most common in
using log-ratio (Hardie, 2014), and the total number of instances in the corpus (N).

of i in the corpus; ri ¼ standard deviation of frequen-
cies of i in the corpus.
Table 1 demonstrates which words contribute
the most to the total distance between sciences
and humanities texts in the corpus. This table forms
the basis of the textual analysis, methodologically
detailed in Section 3.1.3.
3.1.3 Textual analysis
For the top four function words in each subcorpus,
several individual texts were identified that had the
most average z-scores for both subcorpora on each
word. I serial read through each of these texts, taking
note on the first read of the general argument and
structure of the texts. Using a concordance table, I
then re-read through the texts paying attention to
where the function words tended to be used and in
what kinds of constructions. While function words are
indeed often used in a variety of different ways (for
example, to can be used as part of an infinitive and a
preposition), automatically tagging for these patterns
is difficult to do accurately and other approaches can
be used to pull out more interpretively useful patterns.
In particular, as patterns of usage emerged and sug-
gested understandings of the corpora, I then tested
those understandings in several ways: comparing
them to how other function words were being used;
conducting rhetorical analyses with Docuscope3
(Ishizaki and Kaufer, 2012), which helped to identify
rhetorical strategies that support different under-
standings of the corpus; and by using the descriptions
of function words in grammar resources like the
Longman Grammar (Biber et al., 1999) to identify cer-
tain rhetorical patterns that the words were used in.
While it was not feasible in most cases to verify the
precise frequency of usage patterns (outside of mas-
sive hand-coding efforts), the various strategies listed
here allowed for a refinement and testing of the under-
standings of the corpora that the function words sug-
gested. Ultimately, the function word analysis allowed
for new insights into knowledge-making processes as
they occur textually across disciplines and expansions
of existing insights that other types of analyses have
suggested on their own, by drawing attention to very
specific grammatical patterns and rhetorical moves
that regularly occurred throughout the texts.
3.2 Analysis: A theory of knowledge
production in the humanities and sciences
When we look at the function words in Table 1, then,
what do these words reveal about the work of these
disciplines? What kinds of theories of knowledge pro-
duction across the sciences and humanities do they
support? Beginning with the sciences, the analysis sug-
gests that much of scientific writing is heavily engaged
in description of the physical and technological
worlds. On average, at least 5.4% of science papers
are made up of descriptive language, as opposed to

Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022 1165

H. Ringler
only 3.6% in the humanities.4 This description ultim-
ately forms the basis of analysis that supports building
precise models and theories about these worlds that
are more generalizable and useful for future applica-
tions. The process of creating knowledge in this way is
represented by the prevalence of the, with, and for in
the sciences, per Table 1.
In the sciences broadly, the primarily supports
naming physical objects, undergirding heavy physical
description. This description is primarily of particular
objects, as opposed to abstract or general objects: it
allows for naming distinct tools, processes, data, and
so forth. Of all of the noun phrases in the sciences
corpus that start with the, 45.1% of the words after
the determiner in these noun phrases are either aca-
demic terms or descriptive words (as opposed to
35.4% in the humanities—humanities the-noun
phrases have much higher occurrences of character
references, narrative terms and public entities). For
example, in a physics paper on the photodissociation
dynamics of H2O using a VUV-induced pump-probe
approach, the authors write the following in the intro-
duction when briefly summarizing their study:
The interpretation of the delay-dependent dy-
namics of the water isotopologues is supported
by a mixed quantum-classical approach to cal-
culate not only the molecular trajectories in the
~ 1B1 state, but also investigate the
dissociative A
influence of different final electronic states, ac-
cessible by photoionization with a single probe
photon, on the observed delay-dependent yield
(Baumann et al., 2017, p. 2).
The first instance refers to the interpretation they do
in their own paper, but the remaining uses all specify
particulars: the authors are interpreting the specific
delay-dependent dynamics, investigating the particu-
lar water isotopologues, studying specific molecular
trajectories in a particular state, investigating the exact
influence of states on a specific yield. Each of these
uses of the implies that there is only one possible in-
stance of each. In other words, there are not multiple
types of or possible delay-dependent dynamics, nor
conceivable other A~1B1 states, nor possible other
observed delay-dependent yields: the text itself makes
it impossible. By determining each of these with the,
the authors limit the description to their specific study
by restricting the possibility for other possible
1166 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
interpretations or meanings of those specified objects,
and create only one true, possible object.
This function of the might be seen more clearly
when contrasted to article usage in the humanities.
While the of course exists in humanities writing, it is
slightly less frequent because objects are often framed
as plural and many. For example, this sociology paper
describes models created to represent how separated
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parents’ custody situations influence the time pressure
experienced by those parents:
In line with our expectations, sole-resident
mothers experience more time pressure than
mothers with shared residence in Models 1
and 2 (Table 2), although the difference is
slightly smaller when conflict is controlled for.
When we alternate the reference category, we
observe that sole-resident mothers also experi-
ence more time pressure than nonresident
mothers in Models 1 and 2 (see the notes to
Table 2) (van der Heijden et al., 2016, pp.
476–477).
The instances of the here all refer to the study itself:
the difference observed in models, the reference cat-
egory, and the notes to Table 2. The is notably ab-
sent, though, when referring to sole-resident
mothers, time pressure, and nonresident mothers.
In other words, the authors do not write, ‘In line
with our expectations, the sole-resident mothers
experience. . .’ and therefore do not localize sole-
resident mothers to this particular study. Neither
do they write, ‘the sole-resident mother experi-
ences. . .’, creating one model sole-resident mother.
Instead, the authors pluralize the subject, recogniz-
ing the varied and generalized group of possible
sole-resident mothers represented by the statement
(possibly even including those outside of the de-
scription of their immediate study).
In addition to the, with and for are also frequently
used in the sciences. With ultimately supports naming
features of particular objects (as in a phrase like, ‘the
object with the round structure’), while for allows
authors to theorize more abstractly about those
objects (as in a phrase like ‘For a value a, we can write
the following equation’). This analysis does not spe-
cifically detail these usages both for the sake of space
and as it only intends to illustrate the analytic process.
Ultimately though, the function words showing up as

highly distinctive of the sciences point to a process of
knowledge creation itself that focuses on describing
the localized, specific physical and technological
worlds to build models and theories of them.
The humanities appear to operate quite differently,
in that they are fundamentally interested in grappling
with and understanding the human experience. They
might make theoretical claims about what humans do
and how they create meaning and why, ranging from
how social groups behave under certain conditions to
how art fits into a certain cultural period. In doing so,
humanists are necessarily dealing with the incredible
contingency and complexity that surrounds the
human experience. The claims that are made then
are largely made in the service of understanding and
interpreting human action, as opposed to prediction
or direct future utility. For example, a literary theorist
would not necessarily offer an analysis of a piece so as
to predict future pieces, but so as to better understand
the cultural or social forces that created that piece.
Wrestling with the human experience as part of aca-
demic inquiry dates back to at least the ancient Greeks,
and we find the continuation of that long line of work
most clearly in the humanities today.
Knowledge production in the humanities is driven
by interpreting and analyzing human action, which
typically starts with stories about people. Humanities
papers broadly are filled with narrative stories about
people and what they have done in the world: many
papers have large sections or scattered chunks of the
paper that are recounting what people, characters, or
groups did. On average, humanities texts are made up
of at least 2.9% explicitly narrative-based language (as
opposed to only 1.6% in the sciences). These stories
with characters and narrative language then form the
basis of analyses, providing human actions and deci-
sions to explain, interpret, and complicate. This type
of work is especially supported by three words in
Table 1: who, to, and but.
Who as a relative pronoun supports storytelling in
texts. As a whole, humanities texts spend a large
amount of time talking about people—on average,
humanities papers have roughly three times the
amount of character language as science papers
(4.3% versus 1.3% of the text), with most of that space
being used to name specific character types (1.9%) or
proper names (0.9%). As a relative pronoun, who
refers back to these specific names and characters in
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
We can’t read it all
order to allow isolate them or add relevant detail that
is useful for analysis. For example, in a history paper
analyzing the collection and exhibition of photo-
graphs during the Second World War liberation of
Paris, the author writes the following about German
soldiers:
But while public photography was thus restricted
for the French, the German soldiers who visited
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Paris came armed with cameras (Clark, 2016, pp.
840–841).
The who here clarifies the specific group that Clark is
talking about: not all German soldiers, but German
soldiers who visited Paris. By using this construction,
Clark is able to name a subgroup of people and thus
enable further discussion on why the German soldiers
in Paris had cameras and what they did with them.
Casting various people as part of larger groups sup-
ports placing stories about specific people into larger
narrative structures (e.g. placing a story about camera-
armed soldiers in Paris into a larger Second World
War narrative). The same construction can also be
used to add analytical detail about a person, which
allows more complex storytelling by connecting sep-
arate narratives together through the same character.
For example, in a performing arts research article
about the Shigang Mama Theatre Group in Taiwan
and how their theatre explores their postcolonial cul-
tural identities in the wake of an earthquake, the au-
thor describes scenes from a particular performance:
The second scene, ‘The Raining Sound of the
Temporary House,’ depicts the childhood
memory of a Hakka woman, Yu-Chiung, who,
along with her grandmother, was evacuated
from their house after it collapsed during the
earthquake (Hu, 2013, p. 452).
The use of who here allows this sentence to have two
main statements of action: the second scene depicting
the memory of a Hakka woman, and the woman being
evacuated from her house after the earthquake. The
statements of action are intimately connected by Yu-
Chiung, who serves a vital role in both. The who serves
as a relative pronoun that restates ‘a Hakka woman,
Yu-Chiung’ that was established in the first main
clause, in order to use that same character as the
main subject in the second clause. These kinds of con-
structions support a complex storytelling because it
1167
H. Ringler
allows both the movement of characters from one
statement of action to another, and the intimate con-
necting of those two statements of action. In this case,
it is clear that the memory being depicted in the se-
cond scene is related to the evacuation of Yu-Chiung
and her grandmother, primarily because of the con-
necting of the two sentences through the relative pro-
noun: if the clauses were split into two sentences, Hu
would need to do more work to explain that Yu-
Chiung’s evacuation is related to the memory, and
not just a separate detail about her given for context.
In this way, the relative pronoun is supporting more
complex stories through allowing characters to move
through many narratives.
While who supports naming people in complex nar-
ratives, to allows for an analysis of the actions of those
people (as in, ‘she acted to represent her people’). But,
then, supports the building of complexity in those
actions, recognizing that one action can have multiple
meanings. For in building an argument, a writer
explores multiple paths and alternatives to come to a
decision space (Kaufer and Butler, 2000), and but sup-
ports that type of exploration. The details of these two
words are again elided here, but the function words
here point to a process of knowledge-making in the
humanities as one that begins with narrative and results
in complex, nuanced analysis of what characters do.
4 Reflections and Conclusions
In this analysis, it became infeasible to validate that
every (or even most) instance of a function word could
be explained in the same way given both the size of the
corpus and method of data analysis. While one analyst
could hand-code through several texts and find pat-
terns, there is no assurance that those patterns neces-
sarily hold up as you move across disciplines or
authors, or even that the texts being hand-coded which
are average in frequency are necessarily average in how
they use the words. Rather, the individual texts being
analyzed for function word usage suggest certain
understandings of the texts—here, for example, who
suggested a focus on characters and narrative elements.
This understanding, rather than particular analysis of
who, was then validated with other analytical techni-
ques that suggested a similar understanding.
1168 Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
This analysis produced humanistic insight into
a large corpus that was not only feasible, but useful
for understanding the broad knowledge-making
processes that occur across disciplines and the
rhetorical moves that undergird them. Moreover,
though, this analysis illustrated both what it looks
like to develop a defensible interpretation of a
computational model of a corpus when we simply
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could not read it all or look at all of the data, as well
as what kind of space there is for human close read-
ing in that process. The movement between the
stylometry results and other techniques like
Docuscope or counting phrasal patterns demon-
strated a movement between close and distant
readings. With these new kinds of additional data
though, the argument for an understanding of the
corpus strengthened even without being able to
account for every possible instance of who or any
other word. This approach of focusing on under-
standings ultimately forms an argumentative strat-
egy for an interpretation of computational data
that can be used as a key knowledge-making pro-
cess for the field of digital humanities, by moving
the focus of the analysis away from being compre-
hensive in accounting for data and towards
answering humanistic questions with a sufficient
amount of evidence for a strong argument.
The human reader also functions crucially in this
process. Focusing on the results of any computational
model, but perhaps stylometry in particular with its
focus on function words, certainly makes the text
‘strange’. A close reader would be incredibly unlikely
to focus on the occurrences of who or the in academic
writing without this model (indeed, other analyses of
academic writing have tended to focus on more notice-
able features like novelty moves, modality in claims, or
citations, e.g. MacDonald, 1994; Hyland and Bondi,
2006), much as keeping a distant read without a close
look at the texts might have been unlikely to realize that
who forms such a crucial part of storytelling in these
genres. By moving the focus to an understanding of this
corpus though, the analysis had space for a close human
reader to move beyond the computational data and
make connections to outside theories and contexts to
talk about the purpose of these function words in the
overall argument of the texts. The close reading can
complement the distant in the reader’s ability to draw
connections and understand how a pattern might fit

within the overall argument of the text, while the dis-
tant reading can complement the close by drawing at-
tention to patterns to be noticed at scale and giving
additional evidence for possible understandings.
Refocusing hermeneutics for computational
text analysis with a goal of gathering evidence for
an understanding is a strategy to be developed
more fully for different methods. Stylometry models
in particular have been historically difficult to ex-
plain, because function words feature so prominently
in them: Mosteller and Wallace (1964, p. 17) talk
about function words as ‘the filler words of the lan-
guage’ and Kestemont (2014) remarks that they are so
unlikely to be noticed by writers or readers. Some
other work (e.g. Craig, 1999) as well as this analysis
demonstrates function words’ uniqueness in their
ability to allow (or in their absence, disallow) certain
types of language patterns and rhetorical moves. The
patterns evidenced by function words may not neces-
sarily be the ones that stick out to a reader as most
significant in a text, but they are the patterns that
make up the actual bulk of a text’s volume. By focus-
ing on these words and not necessarily explaining
every possible instance of how they might appear
(an unwieldy task when working with grammar),
but rather considering what kinds of argumentative
patterns they allow, we have a strategy for interpret-
ation that allows us to make claims about what these
analyses show and back our interpretations up with
evidence.
Moving forward, there is more work to be done on
expanding this hermeneutics from theory to praxis,
especially as it relates to other types of computational
methods: how much evidence do we need to justify an
understanding? What kinds of evidence might we be
not accounting for that could change our understand-
ing? How do you gather different types of evidence for
an understanding with a logistic regression model, a
keyword analysis, a topic model, or any other types of
approaches? How might thinking about hermeneutics
more carefully and fully influence the development
and use of tools in machine learning fields? These
are big questions, but questions whose answers can
change the capabilities of computational humanities
work in contributing to the humanities and comput-
ing fields alike. I am hopeful that this hermeneutical
theory in particular helps to focus and allow analyses
in a way that is feasible and defensible, while opening
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Vol. 37. No. 4, 2022
We can’t read it all
up distant reads to allow more clearly for close reading
that can lead towards stronger humanistic insight of
corpora.
Notes
1. Computer science was the only discipline gathered
from conference papers as opposed to journal
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articles. This is because computer science, more
than other disciplines, tends to value conference
papers over journal articles (perhaps because of their
timeliness) and tends to publish its higher quality and
most novel research in them (Meyer et al., 2009;
Vrettas and Sanderson, 2015).
2. The thirteen disciplines chosen include the following:
computer science, chemical engineering, physics, cell
and molecular biology, statistics, education, soci-
ology, political science, linguistics, literature and lit-
erary theory, philosophy, history, and performing
arts. The disciplines were chosen to span the range
of fields represented at the four digit level of 2010 CIP
codes provided by the National Center for Education
Statistics (2010). For example, computer science
accords to CIP code 11.07, chemical engineering to
CIP code 14.07 and so on. Within each discipline,
publication venues were chosen among those with
the highest h-5 values for 2013–17 as provided by
SCImago (n.d.) and Google Scholar (n.d.) for the
discipline, while also trying to balance choosing jour-
nals that spanned the range of scholarship produced
in a discipline.
3. Docuscope is now freely available to researchers to
download. See: https://www.cmu.edu/dietrich/eng
lish/research-and-publications/docuscope.html.
4. These percentages, and others like it throughout the
analysis, are calculated via Docuscope (Ishizaki and
Kaufer, 2012). The noun phrases were isolated using
spaCy (Honnibal and Montani, 2017) in Python.
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