In these criticisms, I find a laudable impulse to protect language from being captured by formal analysis, with an ethical impulse something like not wanting to see an elephant caged at a zoo.
But in outcome, I always seem to see so much more detail in the positive efforts to analyze than I do in the defenses of language as being beyond analysis. Effort at making analysis comes with deep engagement on the different dimensions upon which language can be expressive, and the gist of challenges to these analyses are "it's subjective. You just can't do it!"
And without even commenting on the substance of these respective arguments, the types of output they tend to produce makes me more sympathetic to those making the effort to analyze.
I don't think this is about "protect[ing] language from being captured by formal analysis", it's about calling out bogus analysis when you see it.
This "vividness" analysis is bogus for two reasons: (1) The idea that individual words have objectively different levels of "vividness" completely divorced from context (when and where the novel was written, which character is speaking, etc.) is extremely debatable; (2) The idea that the "vividness" of individual words makes the novel as a whole "vivid" is a logical fallacy (compositional fallacy).
I'm 100% behind the use of "formal analysis" to extract new insights into literature and language – there are examples where it has been done very well [1] – but analysis has to be robust, which I don't think it is here.
I don't fear machine analysis draining the life of literature. Its limit would simply be a functioning similar to a human's. Rather than algorithmic analysis, we'd lump it with literary criticism. Here the computer's personal context rules on how 'vivid' or 'good' a text is.
This aside, I am as decidedly pro-analysis as your comment. My claim that OP's method may as well be subjective was a criticism of his process' insubstantial description.
But in outcome, I always seem to see so much more detail in the positive efforts to analyze than I do in the defenses of language as being beyond analysis. Effort at making analysis comes with deep engagement on the different dimensions upon which language can be expressive, and the gist of challenges to these analyses are "it's subjective. You just can't do it!"
And without even commenting on the substance of these respective arguments, the types of output they tend to produce makes me more sympathetic to those making the effort to analyze.