To stay up to date I will talk today about our different perception and process of reading. My intention is especially to explain you special concept of reading. While it is nothing new of digital humanists it still is sadly quite unknown to the big crowd, which in terms of digital humanities should change rapidly.
So, to begin – how do or did we usually gather knowledge? As far as I can say I would rely to the scholarly traditional way of reading – which is by now called close reading. Jumping back in time maybe two or three decades, close reading was the only possibility to get knowledge. In order to research you had to go to libraries and study individually information of single records, books. Without digital and connected databases it was really difficult and costly in terms of times. A single scholar never could read enough books, to have a supply sufficient for a objective interpretation. Further it was not easy to even get more sources, because libraries where closed data bases. The danger of researching with more sources was losing the actual quality to a quantity of outcome.
But thanks to the internet, through the digitization of print-source and digital-born data the future of researching could be glorious. (Comparable also to the last blogpost about crowdsourcing) Nowadays we are flooded with an offer of information from print but especially from digital media, which we can’t overlook anymore. That’s why in my opinion, the grave for just using and relying on close reading has already been dug. Now, it’s the time to switch, and adapt to the new chances which the digital world wide web offers. Let’s go with the time.
The future (for now) of scholarly research is called Distant Reading!
When I talk about distant reading, I have to refer to Franco Moretti. He suggests a simple but brilliant solution for all these books out there. He says: Don’t read them! You must understand that he is not joking. Moretti, is an Italian literary scholar and founder the Stanford Literary Lab which deals with topics like: can computers recognize literary genres or not.
Ars longa vita brevis – Art is long, life is short
Exactly here is where distant reading starts. Close reading can be seen as art – the study of your interests. To read from distant, digital humanists use their digitalized and digital-born data collections. Reading turns to science. Programmers developed algorithms and special software to analyse data patterns and schemata. The produced outcome of knowledge is of high value in terms of quality and scientific, intellectual matter. With the software helping you to quickly analyse thousands of sources, every outcome is much higher than a single human could ever produce – because art is long, life is short. That’s the simple truth. With this, digital humanists took already great benefits.
To explain it a bit clearer I quote the New York Times “What Is Distant Reading”
Let’s say you pick up a copy of “Jude the Obscure,” become obsessed with Victorian fiction and somehow manage to make your way through all 200-odd books generally considered part of that canon. Moretti would say: So what? As many as 60,000 other novels were published in 19th-century England — to mention nothing of other times and places. You might know your George Eliot from your George Meredith, but you won’t have learned anything meaningful about literature, because your sample size is absurdly small. Since no feasible amount of reading can fix that, what’s called for is a change not in scale but in strategy. To understand literature, Moretti argues, we must stop reading books.
As you can see, even research in the traditional meaning with an apparently big amount of information (book series f.e.) of a topic, are turned into ridiculous approaches compared to distance reading. Here has to be said, that between scholars is a serious debate if Morettis idea of distant reading isn’t just statistical data mining. So to avoid this, Matthew L. Jockers is argueing in his book: “Macroanalysis: digital methods and literary history” for a combination of both reading types. In other words – in order to achieve the best result, you have to combine the two methods in the right way.
After all the talk and explanation – I have to clarify how distant reading can be translated and brought into reality. For example, it is totally obvious, that it’s much more likely to read macroanalysed fragments and material of a British novels from the whole nineteen century, then reading them all the traditional way.
The question may asked now is – Are the fruits of macroanalysis (distant reading, graphs etc.) more precise and evident than subjective interpretations of books and text?
While computers can analyse data much faster and more precise than humans, they still lack the human intuition and out ability to connect things abstract. This is in fact more than a softwares code-logical. But still, considering the computer and distant reading as just one tool, we should use it as that. With better coding, and better software, the quantitative results become more and more qualitative. Considering this, and knowing how to use this software, distant reading has the ability to turn in a close reading 2.0 – By that I mean, using as in traditional way, your own intuition and abstractly combine the output. So yes, I think, macroanalysis has more evitend results – if combined with human intuition and supported by distant reading.
Morettis analysis
The Stanfort lit lab is anaylising books and the interactions and relationships between their characters. Many studies are made and you can find the graphical output here .
One important book analysis made is Shakespear’s “Hamlet”. The result is represented in a graphic, which shows the significance of the relations. He created many maps, which after drwing the connections, look like spiderwebs like the following map demonstrates.
A really interesting conclusion of the meaning and the impact of the project you can find on Humdigi’s Blog.
Thanks for reading, and stay tuned.
Sources
laws of literatur
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/an-attempt-to-discover-the-laws-of-literature
distant reading
Moretti hamlett
think thick 