Reading Ricoeur with the Methods of the Digital Humanities

We are all aware of how large and sprawling Ricoeur’s corpus is. Even in its publication in any one language, it can often be difficult to track common themes or vocabulary, or conversely, changes in themes or vocabulary across Ricoeur’s many publications. Newly developed methods in the digital humanities offer some significant ways to address this problem of “distant” reading, that is, reading across multiple texts. The digital humanities uses the tools of computational analysis to locate and analyze material across a corpus that would be very time-consuming and demanding to investigate text by text. Illustrations of digital analysis of Ricoeur might include the following kinds of inquiries:

• ·   Ascertaining where across his corpus Ricoeur discusses particular individuals or themes: for example, “Enrique Dussel,” “culture,” the “practical concept,” “Kierkegaard,” “figuration,” “recognition,” and so on;
• ·     Ascertaining Ricoeur’s themes or changes in his understanding of themes: for example, the rise and possible fall of his atttention to hermeneutics; his differing presentations of the relationship between understanding and explanation;
• ·         The conjunction between themes: for example, the connection between his reference to hermeneutics and to his usage of phenomenology;
• ·         Ricoeur’s “social network”: what references to secondary figures does he make over time and how do those references change over his career.

Using some of the examples listed, our presentation will offer some concrete illustrations of our employment of computational analysis to discover new insights into Ricoeur’s corpus. Our own use of the digital humanities benefitted from our joint participation this summer in a week-long workshop on the digital humanities sponsored by the U.S. National Humanities Center in North Carolina. Our larger goal is to share these methods of the digital humanities with other Ricoeur scholars to enhance their ability to use these methods also.

During our presentation we will situate this digital analysis within a broader project, on which we are coordinating with the Fonds Ricoeur, to make more available digitally online as much of Ricoeur’s corpus as possible.  The availability and analysis of Ricoeur’s texts through digital means should further enhance the possibilities and growth of Ricoeur scholarship internationally.