Distant Reading

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.