Textspudendum

Textspudendum is a term used in digital textual analysis to describe a type of editorial artifact that appears when content from multiple sources or processing steps is merged into a single document, resulting in sporadic insertions of semantically unrelated material within the main narrative. These insertions, or digressions, are usually well-formed sentences that do not fit the surrounding topic and can disrupt coherence without violating syntax. The phenomenon is typically associated with concatenation errors, automated translation or summarization, OCR glitches, or bot-assisted editing workflows that fail to filter cross-source material.

Etymology: The term combines the English word text with a coined suffix -spudendum, intended to evoke an appended, tangential addendum; it was proposed in digital humanities circles in the early 2020s as a playful label for this class of artifacts. There is no formal standard spelling or definition in established dictionaries.

Usage and impact: In corpus studies, textspudendums can inflate apparent topic diversity and obscure authorial intent, complicating coherence assessment and source attribution. They can be detected through provenance tracking, anomaly detection in topic and entity distributions, and manual inspection of abrupt topic shifts.

Example: A research report that merges a technical methods section with unrelated culinary passages due to a faulty automated merge could exhibit textspudendums.

See also: editorial artifact, data contamination in text corpora, OCR error, automated text processing, coherence in discourse.