Digital Text and

Data Processing

Distant Reading

□ Essays in collection “Distant Reading”

□ “Conjectures on World Literature”: study of the rise of the novel

□ “Style, Inc:”: length of novel titles□ “Network Analysis”: network theory

applied to Hamlet□ “The Slaughterhouse of Literature”:

evolution of literary genres, e.g. detective novel

□ “Distant reading” and the “algorithmic approach”

□ Literary research as "a patchwork of other people’s research, without a single direct textual reading”

□ Chronological and geographical developments in "devices, themes, tropes — or genres and systems"

□ Literary research which uses the analogy of science

□ Concepts and visual models from science□ Method which claims to expose the

“facts” of literary works

□ Distant reading “does not oppose close reading per se, but rather certain kinds of interpretation habitually associated with (but not inherent to) close reading”.

□ Moving back and forth between the microscopy of close reading and the wide-angle lens of distant reading enriches both methods

□ Distant reading needs to be conceived of as “selective reading” or as “mediated reading”

□ Digital humanities needs to focus on “the conditional and the subjunctive, rather than inside absolutes and interdictions”

Shawna Ross