TOWARDS THE IMPLEMENTATION OF TEXT AND DISCOURSE THEORY IN COMPUTER-ASSISTED TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

Humanities computing (HC) has failed to integrate into its practices m any of the key theoretical elements of contemporary text and discourse theory. This has in turn contributed to the marginalization of HC in research and teaching. Outdated theoretical models must be abandoned i n order to develop a critical discourse based on the insights of HC. H C projects remain far too attached to micro-analyses and have not deve loped the theoretical and methodological tools necessary to undertake systemic macro-analyses on the level of discourse. Given that texts ar e a mixture of determinate and dynamic systems, recent developments in chaos theory may be of help in modelling the interrelationship of the se elements at discourse level.