Distant Reading
What is Distant Reading?
Distant reading has to do with how you analyze and see a text. It has to do with what information you look for specifically, and what it means. Distant reading was created by a professor named Franco Moretti.
Distant reading is the opposite of close reading. Instead of carefully reading and analyzing a single text, distant reading takes thousands of pieces of literature and feeds them into a computer for analysis.
(A visual graph)
Why is this useful?
The purpose of it is to uncover the patterns and unspoken rules behind certain texts with the use of technology. While close reading relies on subjective analysis of what a single piece of text means, distant reading compiles objective data about several works. This idea Moretti had came from the fact that there are too many books for anyone to read and study seriously.
(A program that can help you pick out your most frequent words used)
( A visual Table)
(A ven diagram describing how digital and humanities are related)
How does it work?
With the help of other academics and data specialists, Moretti developed a system of using computers to analyze novels as basic data. While computers can't read and understand a novel in the same way people can, computers do a good job at searching for specific information you give them and finding patterns. They can measure sentence length, structure, and lexicon, and they can give a scholar patterns of data to analyze. In this way, distant reading is more of a practice than a literary theory.
With just a small piece of literature distant reading can count the words of each title, compare the averages, show visual graphs, and many more!
Example Reading
Example text:
FOR AT LEAST THE PAST DECADE, the term “digital humanities” (DH) has captured the imagination and the ire of scholars across American universities. Supporters of the field, which melds computer science with hermeneutics, champion it as the much needed means to shake up and expand methods of traditional literary interpretation; for most outspoken critics, it is a new fad that symbolizes the neoliberal bean-counting destroying American higher education. Somewhere in the middle of these two extremes lies a vast and varied body of work that utilizes and critically examines digital tools in the pursuit of humanistic study. This field is large and increasingly indefinable even by those in its midst. In fact, “digital humanities” seems astoundingly inappropriate for an area of study that includes, on the one hand, computational research, digital reading and writing platforms, digital pedagogy, open-access publishing, augmented texts, and literary databases, and, on the other, media archeology and theories of networks, gaming, and wares both hard and soft. As Franco Moretti said to me early in my conversation with him: “‘digital humanities’ means nothing.”
Picture
(Picture of Moretti)