In their book, Hermeneutica, Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell argue for more responsive and accessible methods of digital analyses in the humanities. Combining aspects of agile programming with web-based text processing tools, they propose that humanities scholars explore their texts to find new questions as well as uncover evidence to support (or draw into question) existing literary theories.
Although the CMCP is built on this model, it extends Hermeneutica in three ways:
- The CMCP offers structure to support scholarly play with Voyant Tools, the analyses environtment developed by Sinclair and Rockwell. This website organizes McCarthy’s work into several corpora and pre-loads each corpus into a customized version of Voyant. The purpose of this organization is to make these tools more accessible for all scholars.
- Besides Voyant Tools, the CMCP offers a Sentence Structure Search tool, and we plan to include other tools preloaded with the text of McCarthy’s work.
- The CMCP facilitates scholarly citation of analyses completed in Voyant Tools and other resources. The corpora in the CMCP are versioned, so if errors are discovered in a current corpus, the corpus will not be deleted or altered; rather, the corrected corpus will be posted as a new version, preserving the documentation of previous corpora. Also, each corpus-tool combination includes an MLA-style citation.