Digital Transformation in the Study of Cultural Discourse: From Classical Analysis to Network-Based Textual Analysis

Abstract

Digitalization that is currently happening in the humanities has fundamentally reorganized the epistemological and methodological principles on which the cultural discourse is studied. The paper challenges the paradigm shift of traditional hermeneutic and critical thought to a system of computationally mediated techniques, especially network-based textual analysis. Under this new paradigm, texts are no longer understood as discrete cultural texts but as active nodes within discursive, intertextual and complex networks. This study is based on the theory of Cultural Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Carbaugh, 2007) and Actor-Network Theory (Latour, 2005) by defining the concept of discourse as assemblage of practices that are relational and defined by human and non-human actors. The study operationalizes the visualization and quantification of the textual relationships in various corpora by the use of the digital tools like Gephi, Voyant Tools, and Textometrica. The comparative dataset used in the empirical analysis consists of thirty cultural texts of which fifteen are a classical print-based text and fifteen a born-digital text across various temporal, geographical and linguistic contexts, such as Arabic postcolonial essay, diasporic poetry and current digital narratives. The results indicate that the network based methods of analysis reveal latent structural patterns, recurrent themes, and ideological constellations that are mainly hidden as a result of traditional methods of close reading. Moreover, the combination of computational procedures also increases interpretive granularity and at the same time opens up the breadth of inquiry, allowing analyses on large scales, multilingually, and cross-culturally. This research improves the development of Digital Humanities and suggests a model that is scalable and replicable to study such cultural discourse in more digitized knowledge spaces.