Distant Reading: Difference between revisions
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'''Distant Reading''' advocates that analyzing novels as raw data - as opposed to reading them - can yield interesting results. [https://english.stanford.edu/bookshelf/distant-reading] | '''Distant Reading''' advocates that analyzing novels as raw data - as opposed to reading them - can yield interesting results. [https://english.stanford.edu/bookshelf/distant-reading] | ||
== Franco Moretti == | |||
Franco Moretti, an Italian literary scholar who worked as Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford and is now senior advisor at EPFL, is a pioneer of distant reading and published several books and many more articles about it.[https://thepointmag.com/2014/criticism/distant-reading] | |||
As he argues, we need distant reading because close reading does not allow the researcher to uncover the true scope and nature of literature. For example, he holds that a specialist of Victorian fiction litterature might hardly study more than 200 books in depth, whereas 60'000 more novels were published in 19th-century England. The fraction of which would not account for any meaningful study, as the sample size is too small. | |||
[http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-what-is-distant-reading.html] | |||
Some of his more radical stances, such as "To understand literature, we must stop reading books", and his general choices in methodology, also brought him a consequent number of criticism from the humanities world. | |||
Revision as of 09:53, 22 September 2017
Distant Reading is a data-centered paradigm of literal analysis which develops as the opposite of close reading, the classical approach to literal analysis. [1]
Distant Reading advocates that analyzing novels as raw data - as opposed to reading them - can yield interesting results. [2]
Franco Moretti
Franco Moretti, an Italian literary scholar who worked as Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford and is now senior advisor at EPFL, is a pioneer of distant reading and published several books and many more articles about it.[3]
As he argues, we need distant reading because close reading does not allow the researcher to uncover the true scope and nature of literature. For example, he holds that a specialist of Victorian fiction litterature might hardly study more than 200 books in depth, whereas 60'000 more novels were published in 19th-century England. The fraction of which would not account for any meaningful study, as the sample size is too small. [4]
Some of his more radical stances, such as "To understand literature, we must stop reading books", and his general choices in methodology, also brought him a consequent number of criticism from the humanities world.