Industrial Text and French Neo-structuralism

Parallel to, and to some degree inreaction to French poststructuralisttheorization (as championed by Derrida,Foucault, and Lacan, among others) is a Frenchneo-structuralism built directly on theachievements of structuralism using electronicmeans. This paper examines some exemplaryapproaches to text analysis in thisneo-structuralist vein: SATOR's topoidictionary, the WinBrill POS tagger andFrançois Rastier's interpretativesemantics. I consider how a computer-assisted``Wissenschaft' accumulation of expertisecomplements the neo-structuralist approach.Ultimately, electronic critical studies will bedefined by their strategic position at theintersection of the two chief technologiesshaping our society: the new informationprocessing technology of computers and therepresentational techniques that haveaccumulated for centuries in texts.Understanding how these two informationmanagement paradigms complement each other is akey issue for the humanities, for computerscience, and vital to industry, even beyond thenarrow realm of the language industries. Thedirection of critical studies, a small planetlong orbiting in only rarefied academiccircles, will be radically altered by the sheersize of the economic stakes implied by a newkind of text, the industrial text, thetechnological heart of an information society.