Testing Computer Programs’ Potentialities in Stylistic and Translational Comparative Text Analysis

Abstract
Traditionally, text and literature abstracts analysis is associated with the individual perception and creative interpretation of the researcher. Though many software applications are being created for multidimensional text analysis from the point of view of verification of authorship, identifying the compatibility of words and emotional coloring of the text, etc., the conservative approach prevails. No matter how many different types of software for the Humanities (such as sociology, psychology and management) there exist, they are still rarely used in philological research while interpreting a text. The current article provides a critical review of technology enhanced philological analysis. Various computer programs were successfully tested on the material of Russian and foreign literature, and later on used to train future specialists from the Humanities department (National Research University “Higher School of Economics”, Nizhny Novgorod). The accumulated experience allowed us to obtain a reliable data and perform a comparative analysis of computer programs, such as AntConc concordancer, LEKTA, LF Alighner, TextAnalyst SDK, a multifunctional content analyzer. The article describes a survey conducted at NRU HSE to address the need to move from traditional collection of authentic materials and analysis of various discourses to the widespread use of web-based tools designed to accelerate this process and follow the contemporary requirements of the Digital Humanities. Brief prefaces of the term papers and the theses devoted to various methods of text analysis based on software tools are considered and described in detail. Specific examples emphasize the need for a selective approach to publicly available linguistic corpora and highly specialized concordance programs, as well as to tools for aligning translated texts and frequency analyzers. However, the use of computer tools in text analysis should be combined and completed with traditional methods of linguistic and stylistic interpretation. The purpose is to achieve the necessary balance in the use of software resources which can mean optimizing the comparative analysis of original or translated texts, along with the definition of new criteria for assessing the representativeness and validity of the results of literary or linguistic studies. Though the proposed gap filling between the traditional and innovative techniques of text interpretation is rather novice, computer assisted text analysis is promising and tends to be in the mainstream of comparative linguistic and stylistic research.

Keywords
multimodal text analysis, computer tools in philological education, comparative analysis, text translation, Digital Humanities