| Summary: | Parallel to, and to some degree in reaction to French poststructuralist theorization (as championed by Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, among others) is a French neo-structuralism built directly on the achievements of structuralism using electronic means. This paper examines some exemplary approaches to text analysis in this neo-structuralist vein: SATOR's topoi dictionary, the WinBrill POS tagger and François Rastier's interpretative semantics. I consider how a computer-assisted ``Wissenschaft'' accumulation of expertise complements the neo-structuralist approach. Ultimately, electronic critical studies will be defined by their strategic position at the intersection of the two chief technologies shaping our society: the new information processing technology of computers and the representational techniques that have accumulated for centuries in texts. Understanding how these two information management paradigms complement each other is a key issue for the humanities, for computer science, and vital to industry, even beyond the narrow realm of the language industries. The direction of critical studies, a small planet long orbiting in only rarefied academic circles, will be radically altered by the sheer size of the economic stakes implied by a new kind of text, the industrial text, the technological heart of an information society.
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