Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

2.4 Digital texts
Unit 2 Using information sources
Section 1 Basic techniques and problem-solving

Another way of working with words is by using an electronic version of a text, in combination with a text editor that can search for words or phrases. Electronic versions of many texts (primarily those out of copyright, which means texts published before the twentieth century) can be found on the Internet, where some universities host large collections of electronic texts. (Look for a text on the Internet by using a search engine to search for the first few words of the text as a quotation.) Electronic versions of better-known texts can also be bought on CD-ROM. You could, for example, download all of Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion or John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. Once you have an electronic version of the text, you can use a word processor or text editor to search for all the examples of a particular word, such as the word ’persuasion’ in the novel Persuasion; this would be a good way to start understanding why the novel is named as it is. Some text editors (such as Peter Kehler’s ’Alpha’ for Macintosh, also available on the Internet) will extract out all the uses and give surrounding textual context (like an instant concordance), or you can just use the search function with a word processor. You might, for example, have an electronic version of Paradise Lost, and ask which lines contain the word ’fruit’ (the last word in the first line, and potentially a key word in the poem). The Alpha text editor pulls out ninety-three such lines as a separate file. Given this easily obtained collection of lines, various possibilities are open to you. You might notice that in nine of the lines ’fruit’ is combined with ’flower’ (a conventional combination?), that the phrase ’fruit of thy womb’ is used (thus connecting the fruit with both sex and procreation), or that the word ’fruit’ is used much more intensively in some parts of the text than in others (for example, after the first line it is not used again until line 1944, but then is used often between lines 7360 and 7991). Because your version of the text is ’digital information’, it can be reinterpreted and manipulated in various ways; you can, for example, paste the list of line numbers (for ’fruit’) into a spreadsheet and draw a graph to show the frequency of use at various points in the text.