Mixed Methods
Within the humanities, there is an undercurrent of hesitation regarding its “digital humanities” subfields. The application of digital techniques to literary studies, for instance, has been sometimes depicted as turning the field into a “‘counting’ discipline”, prompting the “hoary binarism of quantitative versus qualitative” (James English, quoted in de Sá Pereira, 2019). Continuing with literary studies, other scholars advocate for the field to ally itself to the social science by becoming more quantitatively oriented (de Sá Pereira, 2019).
Overcoming the qualitative vs. quantitative dichotomy includes the use of mixed methods, widely accepted in the social and health sciences. Mixing of methods is sometimes an iterative process wherein both qualitative and quantitative methods are applied in a single study. It is iterative because different paradigms – qualitative or quantitative – may be applied at different stages of the research. For instance, geography has integrated the use of computationally intensive geographic information systems (GIS) and satellite imagery with a critical theory, combining the approaches of GIS researchers and human geographers in a field of study known as Critical GIS. Such an approach is proposed for the humanities. Methods specific to the digital humanities, spatial analysis enabled by GIS, can be combined with close reading.
Literary pattern recognition fuses digital techniques with more traditional humanistic approaches. This approach was demonstrated on the study of English language Haiku poetry as representative of Modernist text. The goal is to identify the haiku as a distinct literary pattern. Three different techniques were applied to the poems:
- traditional close reading;
- analyzing the poems through a socio-historical lens; investigating how this originally Japanese literary form was historically adopted into an English-language environment as well the social context of this adoption; and
- applying machine learning techniques to them.
Each critical method produced different conceptions of the haiku, with different patterns being recognized. However, a synthesis can emerge when these varied patterns are viewed as complementary instead of mutually exclusive, wherein the limitations inherent in each method is supplemented by the other methods. The different “discrete ontological visions of the haiku”, when synthesized, “…produce a more comprehensive picture of the English haiku as a social or cultural milieu—part of a broader Orientalist style that circulated in the early twentieth century” (Long & So, 2016) (238).
As an illustration of the iterative nature of mixed methods, an investigation employing mixed methods was conducted on the 1940 Ernest Hemingway novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. Specifically, qualitative GIS, incorporating non-quantitative data into a geographic information system, was used to analyze toponyms (place names, usually referring to specific topography) and to visualize p