44. Textual analysis

Textual analysis comes in many forms, and is at work whenever anyone tries to make sense of the world. Accordingly, the chapter introduces an expansive understanding of texts, the vast majority of which are not authored by humans (such as the climate history archived in ice cores and lake sediments), and also an expansive understanding of textual analysis (from the literary to the palaeoenvironmental), which is nevertheless at risk of becoming dominated by the computational analysis of machine-readable texts (since everything can be digested by the binary code). The chapter also emphasises the embedment of texts within innumerable and illimitable contexts, and the ethical challenge of doing justice to that (con)textual embedment.