The human response to uncertainty, impermanence, and the unknowable are centrally located at the emergence of cultural and social practice. Discomfort tied to the fluctuating state of the knowable can lead to an outsized cultural emphasis on rigid systems of dissecting, parsing, naming and sorting—be that at the level of culturally defined gender roles or linguistic analysis. Digital text analysis, despite its rootedness in concepts of precision, empirical process and logic, offers outcomes akin to a blurry photograph of a subject in motion. It does provide evidence of materiality, but the details, origin, trajectory, and ongoing development of its subject fail to manifest under its lens. Feminism does not ask us to disregard digital text analysis because of its limitations, it asks us to consider its process and outcomes as circumscribed evidence of an iteration of ongoing knowledge creation, impacted by the interventions of researchers, authors, and editors. 

As exemplified by Standpoint Theory, which asks us to recognize knowledge as stemming from social position and therefore unfixed and subjective, and the practice of acknowledging what is not named, not performed, and not visible in representations of information and experience—Feminism pushes back against the concept of a finite and universally experienced perception of the world. This work argues that these feminist practices, inherently linked to Barthe’s discussion of a “work” as an iteration or “fragment of substance,” in relation to a “text,” as an evolving formulation or “methodological field,” are critical in examining the limitations digital text analysis in documenting the complex, transient and embedded knowledge referenced in literary works it seeks to investigate. Although text analysis may capture evidence of subjectivity and social performance, unearthing the depth of the underlying “methodological field” from which the work was derived requires a complex contextual framework outside the purview of current digital textual analysis tools. 

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• Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. Language and Gender. 2nd Edition. Cambridge UP: Cambridge, 2013. pp 1-36 
• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein. “ChapterTwo: On Rational, Scientific, Objective Viewpoints from Mythical, Imaginary, Impossible Standpoints.”; Chapter 6: “The Numbers Don’t Speak for Themselves.”Data
  Feminism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020.
• Barthes, Roland. “The Rustle of Language.” (R. Howard., Trans.).  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, Inc., 1986.
• Jerome McGann “Introduction: Texts and Textualities” “The Textual Condition” and “How to Read a Book” McGann, Jerome J. The Textual Condition. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton UP, 1991. Print. Princeton Studies in Culture/power/history.  

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