Conjectural Criticism: Computing Past and Future Texts

Abstract

Broadly conceived, this article re-imagines the role of conjecture in textual scholarship at a time when computers are increasingly pressed into service as tools of reconstruction and forecasting. Examples of conjecture include the recovery of lost readings in classical texts, and the computational modeling of the evolution of a literary work or the descent of a natural language. Conjectural criticism is thus concerned with issues of transmission, transformation, and prediction. It has ancient parallels in divination and modern parallels in the comparative methods of historical linguistics and evolutionary biology. The article develops a computational model of textuality, one that better supports conjectural reasoning, as a counterweight to the pictorial model of textuality that now predominates in the field of textual scholarship. "Computation" is here broadly understood to mean the manipulation of discrete units of information, which, in the case of language, entails the grammatical processing of strings rather than the mathematical calculation of numbers to create puns, anagrams, word ladders, and other word games. The article 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. The intended audience for the article includes textual scholars, specialists in the digital humanities and new media, and others interested in the technology of the written word and the emerging field of biohumanities.