Theoretical Grounding for Computer Assisted Scholarly Text Reading (CASTR)

Abstract

Digital humanities technology has mainly focused its development on scholarly text digitalization and text analysis. It is only recently that attention has been paid to the activity of reading in a computerized environment. Some main causes of this have been the advent of the e-book but more importantly the massive enterprise of text digitalization (such as Gallica, Google Books, World Wide library, and others).

In this article, we analyze, in a very exploratory manner, three main dimensions of computer assister scholarly reading of text: the cognitive, the computational and the software dimension. The cognitive dimension of scholarly reading pertains not the nature of reading as a psychological activity but to the complex interpretative act of going through argumentations, narrations, descriptions, demonstrations, dialogues, themes, etc. that are contained in a text.