What is textual excavation?
I derive the term, of course, from the field of archaeology (though this metaphor for textual study is hardly my own invention). An excavation is a dig, and the purpose is to find artifacts, or items of historical interest. But the archaeologist never stops at the finding of an artifact. He or she also presents the findings of the expedition to the rest of the archaeological world. Similarly, the purpose of textual excavation is twofold: • Discover the phenomena latent in the text. • Publish these phenomena in easily accessible form. The web is, in my judgment, an ideal medium for both of these steps. There is a number of sites and applications that can help with the second step, presenting textual data on the web, and there are even more sites and applications that can help with the first step, searching the texts.
