Christian Texts and History • Re:‘computational stylistics’

"Libby and some other modern practitioners distance themselves from the term ‘stylometry’ and use the term ‘computational stylistics’, with an attempt to correct the errors of stylometry and use a more theoretically grounded scientific methodology designed to avoid the “messes”."

In one sense I hope to have made clear that what I have attempted here is certainly not “just running math” on the New Testament. That is precisely what has been tried and has failed. The question I have tried to raise in this work is quintessentially a hermeneutical one. I hope that I have also been clear that I am not arguing that uncritical pre-modem conservative/pietistic hermeneutics on the one hand or materialist enlightenment hermeneutics on the other should be dragged back to the hermeneutical table. Neither dogma nor positivism has gotten us very far. What can computational stylistics offer the hermeneut? Nothing, surely, if it is done positivistically. ...

What I have argued for here, then, consistent with the way opened by Kripke (contingent necessary truths) and Peirce, is that one exploratory way forward from the current impasse is to expand the empirical phenomenal boundary toward us (the subject) again, but this time nonpositivistically. In this way, I believe, a chastened and humbled “empirical turn” can be added to the linguistic and sociological turns already underway in NT studies. The framework of such a turn is abductive, as I have argued in Chapter Two. What I envision is a kind of hermeneutical spiral, but different from Osborne’s.

The first element is abduction itself, the use of inference and validation to arrive at the best explanation. This is what I have tried here—empiricism to be sure, but a flavor of it extracted from its damning association with positivism.

The second is historical analysis with openness to possibilities. A hermeneutic of openness requires that new stances in terms of history and historicizing be explored. This is not to say that work in the historical-critical venue should be in any way devalued. Yet it, along with all such methods used in NT studies must ask of itself what it should ask of all methods: Are our criteria testable? Are they open to falsification? If the answers to both questions are in the negative, then from what quarter can such a claim to privilege come?

The third element is textual in two ways: (a) via synchronic analysis of the text but one that is linguistically-informed (Tracy’s linguistic turn) and (b) via responsible diachronic textual analysis that speaks into what actually can be said rather than speculated regarding the text’s prior state.

The fourth is openness to existential data—the inbreaking of the text and the Person behind the text into our Erklârung [explanation; statement, declaration].

These four poles, the empirico-critical pole, the historical pole (as distinguished from but not exclusive of the historical-critical pole), the textual pole and the existential pole are all needful for us to develop a hermeneutic which remains open to (does not deprivilege) the claims of the text before we even begin ...

https://www.academia.edu/86714480/Disen ... and_Praxis
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4. Overall Conclusions from the Two Worked Examples Enabled by the Digital Humanities

These two case studies demonstrate, at least in an initial way, that digital humanities can offer the NT scholar a Kearney-esque optimism that creative work is still possible in NT studies. Accordingly, against certain strains of NT scholarship that leave us only to our own perspectives, we call upon digital humanities to continue to use its strengths—both its frictions and its convergences—to cast new light on old problems not only in NT studies but across the spectrum of the humanities. Yet this call is not an unbounded one. Such a call must resist the totalizing tendencies that deny all possibility of coherence on the one hand (unbounded postmodernism) while also resisting hegemonic circularities (via the various insidious brands of positivisms that seem to always attach themselves to critical empirical methods) on the other ...
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