Analyse textométrique et interprétation littéraire – Hyperbase, Rousseau et les Lumières

The purpose of this paper is to examine under which conditions we can establish the value and relevance of quantitative analyses, with a view to interpreting literary textual data. The quantitative analysis was carried out on the empirical corpus of the works of Rousseau, within the group of The Enlightenment Philosophers. The hypertextual software Hyperbase was used for this purpose. The output of the software supplies a tabular presentation of the corpus deconstructed into paradigmatic groups and produces a reticular display by projecting associative networks onto the page. The hermeneutic approach, which leads from quantitative to qualitative data, relies on linking and differentiation operations, which are liable to bring to light significant contrasts. A central issue of this study is to test the functions of the software allowing the extraction of cooccurrences. These functions are assessed at different levels of increasing size fitted into each other, from the sentence to the whole corpus, relying on an automatic contextualisation of the data.