Method as tautology in the digital humanities

This article explores a concept of method in computer-assisted literary criticism, using a current digital humanities project as a case study. The project is investigating aspects of intertextuality between English poetry and the Oxford English Dictionary, second edition (OED2). In the course of adopting, applying, and adapting methods to guide computer-assisted comparisons between OED2 and poetry corpora, questions have arisen about the desired relations among research question, method, result, and outcome. Arguing that additional deliberation on what method means to us is now both appropriate and essential to the maturing discipline of digital humanities, in this article I discuss what digital methods have shown us about OED2 and Geoffrey Hill’s notoriously intertextual long poem The Triumph of Love (1998), both as an example and an illustration of one way of reflecting on these questions: a concept of digital method as tautology.