Quantitative Text Analysis:  Intersections with Feminism, Postcolonialism, Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory

1. Abstract

This forum brings insights from bodies of theory attentive to the material effects of hierarchies and difference - including but not limited to feminism, critical race theory, queer theory, and postcolonialism - to bear on quantitative text analysis. It seeks to bring into view the power relations that inform processes of corpus construction and that underlie the computational models, analytical frameworks and platform architectures through which born-digital texts are obtained. Questions the forum will open up include how the positivistic claims of objectivity associated with quantitative text analysis might be resisted and subverted, how quantitative text analysis might interrogate and dismantle hierarchies rather than reinforcing them, and the kinds of infrastructural, institutional or systemic changes that are needed to instantiate alternative modes of text analysis.