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