Forum: Canon versus "The Great Unread"

Introduction: The Interactive Relations Between Science and Technology and Literary Studies

In recent times marked by the offensive and largescale advancement of computer technol-ogy numerous libraries, scientific and educational centers in the world are creating their own extensive databases of literary and bibliographic texts. Facing such databases the close reading method designed to work with specific texts would seem to lose its meaning. The Italian sociolo-gist and literary critic Franco Moretti became the main critic of the close reading. He presented his ideas in the book «Distant Reading». This book can be viewed as a program to update the methodology of studying world literature. Moretti believes that the world literature should be studied not by looking at the details, but by examining it from a long distance: studying hudreds and thousands of texts. He suggest to use the Digital Humanities (DH) methods, i.e. to ap-ply digital (computer) methods in the humanities. To show the reasons for the survival of certain types of texts, Moretti compares literary processes with biological ones and draws an anology between natural selection and reader selection. Moretti’s predecessor, who first used quantitative methods in literary studies and saw common ground between literary and biological processes, was the author of the fundamental monograph “Methodology of an exact study of literature” B. I. Yarkho (18891942).Moretti’s book “Distant Reading” shatters stereotypes of the bibliographic environment. It is directed no to the study of close (slow) reading, but to the study of the entire world docmentary flow. This approach opens the way to the use of quantitative methods in the study of world bibliography. A new research strategy “exact study of bibliography” will be formed as part of digital and automated text processing.

Digital search and visualisation technologies are combined into one methodological approach for structural public debate analysis of digital print and audiovisual media data archives called the “leveled approach”. This approach is conceptualised, developed and used for research into drug discourse in Dutch news media debates in this thesis, which consists ... read more of four studies into the reputation of drugs in post-war Dutch newspaper and radio debates. As each study contributes to digital method development in Digital Humanities and to the field of drug history, a section describing the digital search and analysis trajectory in the digitised media archive (distant reading) precedes each historical narrative (close reading). The four studies explore how the reputation of amphetamine (in chapter 1) and ecstasy (in chapters 2, 3 and 4) developed in a context of national drug regulation in the Netherlands. In this way, the hypothesis that Dutch drug regulation has been subject to an increasingly strong imperative to regulate in the post-war period is studied in the media domain. The findings of the four studies lead to three main conclusions about the development of the reputation of drugs in a context of discursive dynamics specific to the newspaper and radio debates. First, the discursive formation of drugs developed at a pace that was to some degree independent from developments in drug regulation: public unrest in the newspapers preceded amphetamine regulation, while ecstasy was commonly treated as a soft drug on the radio for many years after being classified as a hard drug. Second, the reputation of these drugs developed in a cross-media landscape in which international issues and local issues also had significant effects. Third, the discursive formation of ecstasy is best understood as multifaceted and contested, revolving around contrasting discursive strands defined by meaning constellations of 1) descriptions of the substance; 2) commonly connected actors; and 3) settings. In newspaper articles these discursive strands appeared mostly independently from each other, whereas they were most obvious in clashes between disagreeing stakeholders in discussions on the radio. This shows that analysing radio and newspaper archives enables an enriched perspective on historical cross-media debates. I suggest two leads for further structural research of digitised media debates. First, the leveled approach can be used as a structural framework for combining distant and close reading in OCR- and/or ASR metadata-enriched archives. This makes possible cross-media public debate research across print and audiovisual media archives. Second, this thesis’ consistent explication of the search and visualisation trajectory - the explication of the iterative space between distant and close reading - shows how to achieve a level of transparency that fosters improved opportunities for self reflection and peer review for cross-media public debate analysis based on distant and close reading. Moreover, this practice makes it possible to answer historical research questions using analysis of digital media data archives that face challenges related to (meta)data scarcity, uneven/changing (meta)data availability and continuous technological change. show less

And—?Using Digital Tools to Reread The Canterbury Tales Patrick J. McMahon and Allen J. Frantzen Teachers and scholars of medieval literature have long championed close reading. Some teachers lament the influence of literary theories that, once reduced to ideological criticism, seem to replace close reading and to encourage students to impose meaning on texts rather than discover ways in which meaning is created by language. Our aim is to show how newly developed digital technologies promote close reading and help to reinvigorate the study of language as a component of literary meaning. These technologies, explored within the new discipline of Digital Humanities, show that both the text and the classroom can be seen as laboratories for the exploration and discovery of meaning and the processes that shape it. Our example involves Chaucer's most frequently-used (if not his favorite) word, and. Digital Humanities (DH) has been defined by Matthew Kirschenbaum as "a field of study, research, teaching, and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities." DH "involves investigation, analysis, synthesis and presentation of information in electronic form," including the study of "how these media affect the disciplines in which they are used."1 DH embraces some new and expensive kinds of software, but one DH tool, the concordance, has long been a staple of medieval literary study. Many concordances are now available online, and like some other powerful tools, including The Middle English Dictionary, are free.2 Such tools enable what is, in DH, called "distant reading," and distant reading, as we will show, is an important way to assist close reading. Distant reading is a term used to describe the work of Franco Moretti, a scholar more famous for counting novels than reading them. Critical of "the minimal fraction of the literary field we work on," Moretti and his followers use statistical trends (involving length of novels, for example, and their sales) to illuminate the history of publishing and the history of public taste.3 Their idea is not to broaden the canon of works that [End Page 133] are interpreted but rather to count works published and to analyze the distribution of works instead of their content. Our application of distant reading is different. We use the term as a way to approach words in texts rather than books on the shelf, although we too are concerned with distribution and patterns rather than interpretation. We think of distant reading as the use of computational resources to identify language patterns that human readers either overlook or cannot see without the help of machines. A concordance offers a perspective on an author's corpus that would take any reader a long time to create. Users of such tools for vernacular languages need to know many things, especially that orthographical variants have to be accommodated, including i for y spellings, inflections, and vowel changes. Such matters, of course, are not obstacles. Rather, they are important components of learning how medieval languages work. Ordinary DH tools go far beyond the concordance in reassembling texts into new units. They can list sentences according to their length, their use of prepositional phrases, their density as measured by nouns, and countless other criteria. Although this sounds like something new, David L. Hoover has shown that modern quantitative studies date from the 1850s, when attempts were made to answer questions concerning the attribution of anonymous works by analyzing vocabulary and other aspects of textual composition.4 Medievalists interested in DH and distant reading can see impressive results in the research of Michael Witmore and Jonathan Hope.5 In "The Hundredth Psalm to the Tune of 'Green Sleeves': Digital Approaches to Shakespeare's Language of Genre," the authors address the linguistic makeup of Shakespeare's genres. Using a program called DocuScope, they "offer a portrait of Shakespearean genre at the level of the sentence, showing how an identification of frequently iterated combinations of words (either in their presence or absence) can allow us to appreciate the integrity and fluidity of Shakespeare's genres."6 Witmore and Hope see texts as two different types of objects: first, as historical objects and theatrical performances once acted out by real people on...

When Victorian critics like Margaret Oliphant and Henry Mansel reacted negatively to the popular “sensation novel” in the 1860s, chief among their concerns was that these novels “preach[ed] to the nerves” instead of engaging readers’ cultivated reflective judgment (Mansel 483). Scholarship on sensation novels has sought to identify the unique features that allowed these texts to directly engage readers’ bodies and do certain kinds of cultural or ideological work. In a brief but significant moment in chapter 3 of his ambitious book The Outward Mind, Benjamin Morgan asks us to rethink both the nature of Mansel's critique and the singularity of sensation novels. A lifelong idealist invested in metaphysics, Mansel bewailed specific features of these “morbid” fictions: their melodramatic subject matter, their emphasis on plot over character, their responsiveness to market demand. But Morgan reads Mansel's review as a reaction against a much broader set of developments in the nineteenth century through which the Kantian understanding of aesthetic experience as disinterested reflective judgment was replaced with a materialist theory of aesthetic response as a corporeal reaction of matter (bodies and nerves) to matter (aesthetic objects). In the compelling story Morgan tells, sensation novels come to look less like unique sites of physiological stimulation and more like popular literary instances of a new aesthetic theory that was reimagining the relationship between humans and objects in their environment. Rather than focusing on the specificity of particular aesthetic objects (artworks, music, literary texts), Morgan turns our attention to how multiple discursive fields in the nineteenth century intersected as they rethought the nature of looking, hearing, reading, or otherwise engaging with objects in the world.With thoughtful, nuanced explication of scientific, philosophical, and literary texts, Morgan advances two interconnected claims, both supplemented by encyclopedic notes and references (which comprise a quarter of the book). His first argument is that the aesthetic experience we tend to value as the “highest” human capacity—because it appears to be a spiritual or transcendental property of autonomous, deliberative, inward-turning selves—was instead imagined within a range of nineteenth-century discourses (physiology, psychology, evolutionary biology, art history, literature, even interior design and color theory) as a function of bodies and the matter that comprised them. The book's second contention is that this “materialist strain” in Victorian aesthetics displaced the agency of aesthetic response from individual human persons to nonhuman matter, resulting not only in the expansion of aesthetic experience to nonhuman animals (think of Darwin's discerning birds) but also in conferring consciousness to inanimate physical objects. Whereas scholarship by Amanda Anderson (The Powers of Distance) and David Wayne Thomas (Cultivating Victorians) associates aesthetic experience with the cultivation of critical detachment and self-reflective individuality, Morgan reads such liberal ideals as reactionary responses to an increasingly materialist account of the self. His argument thus resonates with and broadens the scope of Nicholas Dames's approach in The Physiology of the Novel. Taking a cue from other scholars who have charted a nineteenth-century erosion of mind-body dualism (Allan Richardson, Rick Rylance, Sally Shuttleworth), Morgan shows how this erosion took on radical forms, not just by affording material properties to minds but also by identifying the “enminded” properties of matter. The “outward turn” of Morgan's title refers to the “active and animating” properties of mind that extend to other material substances: matter itself can have properties of consciousness (19).Morgan divides his book into two sections, the first of which traces a mid-nineteenth-century empirical science of beauty that runs counter (but also parallel) to the kind of anti-industrialist and socially attuned aesthetic theories we associate with John Ruskin, who serves as the implicit antihero of Morgan's story. Chapter 1 charts a shift from natural theology to scientific materialism in accounts of beauty and harmony by examining a network of intellectuals associated with the Edinburgh Aesthetic Club in the 1850s, including interior decorator David Ramsay Hay, physician John Addington Symonds, physiologists Thomas Laycock and William Carpenter, and critic E. S. Dallas. At the center of this chapter is a pair of linked paradoxes in the science of aesthetics. Aesthetic form was conceived of as both geometric (ordered, harmonious, and identifiable) and ambient (experienced by non-conscious corporeal processes). And so, while beauty and taste could supposedly be explained with mathematical precision, those thinkers who were invested in such explanations increasingly found that aestheticism's physiological mechanisms evaded rational modes of thought brought to bear upon them. Morgan's method in The Outward Mind is to take up a series of such paradoxes, oppositions between seemingly contradictory modes of thought: humanistic inquiry and scientific positivism, abstraction and materiality, phenomenology and epistemology, aesthetics and politics. He insightfully reads these as dialectics animating new Victorian ways of thinking about aesthetic experience at a time when various humanist and scientific inquiries were only just beginning to distinguish themselves as separate disciplines.Having established how medical writers and literary critics developed a neurophysiological account of aesthetic experience, Morgan turns in chapter 2 to texts by five writers—Alexander Bain, Herbert Spencer, Grant Allen, Walter Pater, and Thomas Hardy—all of whom, despite their different idioms, “rescaled and physicalized the primary units of analysis of aesthetic thought” (88). This rescaling happens in two seemingly contradictory directions: by narrowing in on the immediate moment of response as something that disaggregates both art objects and experiencing selves into their component parts (nerve fibers, organs, colors, shapes, words) and by expanding the register of aesthetic response to encompass the deep time of evolution. In both directions this rescaling “tends to suspend or sideline the human as a unit of analysis” (124). Responses to aesthetic objects are not located within discrete human selves but in the local actions of nerves or the evolutionary development of the species. Hardy's novels feature here as literary manifestations of scientific theories. Where Pater and Allen describe scales of aesthetic response, Hardy “adapts” these theories for use in fiction: he expands moments of physiological intensity with almost lyric detail (Henry Knight clinging to the cliff in Desperate Remedies); disintegrates characters into neurological responses (brains and nerves); and locates aesthetic experience in an expanded time of evolutionary adaptation.While section 1 considers how aesthetic response spreads out across the material properties of the body and the scale of the species, section 2 (“The Outward Turn”) considers how nineteenth-century intellectuals expanded consciousness even further, beyond human observers to the objects in their environment. Environments themselves became sentient. In chapter 3 Morgan examines a cluster of writers who coalesce around Walter Pater and developed Lucretian theories of atomic agency. In a somewhat surprising association of Pater's fiction with sensation novels, Morgan argues that both produce somatic responses in readers. In his imaginary portraits and in Marius the Epicurean Pater applies the materialist theories of psychologist James Sully and Allen by imagining reading itself as a physical experience. Reading Pater's literary texts as enactments of materialist aesthetic theories, Morgan argues that Pater's writing makes language tactile and sensuous; his sentences “imprison” readers (164); his “densely accretive style returns language to bodies” (157).Scholars of the novel might wish here, and elsewhere, that Morgan would expand his literary analysis: Just how, for instance, does the accretive quality or the “semantic density” of Pater's literary language operate (157)? Morgan reads literary texts as applications of material aesthetic theories that he locates first in scientific texts. Building upon Gillian Beer and George Levine's “shared discourse” and one-culture approaches, he reads science and literature “not as domains or fields but as rhetorics that might be flexibly and widely called on” (17). His method is therefore to explicate both scientific and literary texts. While his expositions and claims are compelling and clearly articulated, I found myself wanting more extensive close readings of just how novels by Hardy, Pater, William Morris, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, and Oscar Wilde anticipate and direct readers’ physiological responses. The lack of space afforded to close readings in The Outward Mind perhaps makes sense given that Morgan focuses his energy on drawing together an astonishingly diverse array of intellectual fields from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. He offers novel scholars provocative new ways of thinking about both the physiological responses referenced within nineteenth-century novels and how novels might themselves act as agents of affect and somatic response. The latter point might lead us to wonder whether the relationship between science and literature is as simple as Morgan's framework of parallel “rhetorics” would suggest. When he turns to E. S. Dallas, William Morris, and Vernon Lee, he shows that these writers made literary language inherently somatic. He thus paints a picture in which literature does much more than apply or extend scientific aesthetic theories; it enacts material aesthetics. What sort of critical method is appropriate to such enactment? Morgan points out that literary texts are complicated aesthetic objects, because “[o]ne cannot see a poetic image in the same unmediated way that one sees a color or hears a sound; novels and poems are therefore less immediately or obviously available to empirical analysis” (253–54). He admits that the way literary texts prompt effects in readers’ bodies—for instance the “somatic forces” conveyed by Pater's prose—are “difficult to talk about” (157). In the case of Pater this is because his prose combines philosophical concepts with a style that is “resistan[t] to thought.” But the difficulty here is also that formalist textual analysis does not have a history of playing well with reader response or cognitive criticism.In his chapters on Pater, Morris, and Lee, Morgan poses the question, What happens to social life when empirical theories root aesthetics in universal physiological responses, making aesthetics the work of nerves and evolutionary adaptation rather than the products of specific social and political circumstances? He answers by assessing how writers imagined matter itself to have social properties. In chapter 4 Morgan takes up the case of William Morris, whose physicalist aesthetics at first glance seem at odds with his socialist politics. But unlike Herbert Spencer, for whom evolutionary theory leads to a competitive individualism, for Morris the same theory makes possible a shared corporeality. Reading Morris's essays, lectures, romances, and News from Nowhere, Morgan explores how Morris aligns aesthetic experience with the pleasure of production, self-expression, and use, experienced by laborers who engage in shared embodied practices. The antithesis of the fin de siècle decadent aesthete, Morris rejects the category of “art” as a privileged, refined domain and locates it in the everyday. When Morgan turns to News from Nowhere, he traces in Morris's construction of character an alternative to realism's reliance on introspection and individualistic sympathy. Morris renders characters physically, promoting an ethics of shared corporeal practices; his characters are distinguished by “their external markers and preferred modes of activity” (207).This expanded notion of sociality—one not based on a community of sympathetic individuals but on sensory reactions to corporeally rendered characters or even to books as material objects—has important implications for how we read. In his fifth chapter Morgan shows how Vernon Lee's theories of empathy describe readerly affect as a feeling with or feeling into objects. Indeed Morgan finds in Lee a precursor to Brian Massumi's affect theory. Empathy was not synonymous with interpersonal sympathy until the mid-twentieth century; instead it meant “unconscious physiological reaction to an object” (220). For Lee and her lover Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, literary language itself is based on this physiological, object-oriented empathy. When we speak of a mountain as “rising,” for instance, the metaphor is not just an act of imagination; we feel our eyes moving upward and our bodies rising. Empathy, Morgan notes, “is rooted in experiences that precede the social domain” (222). I find myself wondering whether Morgan hopes to hold on to a separate, individuated notion of the social domain even as he sees material aesthetics radically expanding sociality to include all types of responsiveness between material things. What are the ethical and political functions of literature—especially in relation to gender, race, or class—in a system of universal corporeality?Despite his statement to the contrary, in many ways Morgan's book is an “intellectual history”—a complex, revisionist, sometimes presentist, and often recuperative one—of an overlooked Victorian mode of thinking (and reading, and looking) (16). His book unearths intricate intersections between a surprising range of scientific, philosophical, aesthetic, and literary thought. His premise is that a reassessment of the material turn in Victorian aesthetic theory might help us overcome our own entrenchment in methodological and disciplinary divisions between humanistic interpretation on the one hand and scientism, empiricism, and positivism on the other. Victorian aesthetic theory might, he says, “reveal some of the ways in which the humanities have long been ‘scientific’” (15). It is in this gesture toward the present, along with steady alignment of Victorian theories with later philosophies and approaches (affect theory, thing theory, distant reading, poststructuralism, neuroscience), that Morgan refuses to engage in a mere intellectual history. He is interested in what his epilogue calls a “nonlinear” method of engagement with the past, one that casts Victorian theories not as merely anticipatory of modern ideas but as sources of alternative, potentially invigorating, less disciplinarily entrenched modes of thinking about aesthetics, reading, and interpretation (261). This is especially apparent in his final chapter, in which he challenges a story we tell of literary critical history: that New Criticism's analytic modes of close reading made a clean break with Victorian modes of “moral-aesthetic evaluative criticism,” and that distant reading's quantitative approach was made possible by digital technologies (244). Not only is distant reading not new, he shows us; twentieth-century New Critics (following I. A. Richards) were “haunted by” the quantifiable methods of reading that preceded them, methods they sought to caricature as scientifically reductionist and naive (237). Morgan uncovers in Lee's empathetic literary criticism a distant reading avant la lettre (Lee was invested in statistical linguistic analysis as well as in the affects of aesthetic experience). More important, Morgan suggests Lee's objective aesthetic theory may inspire ways of marrying phenomenological accounts of aesthetic experience (the feeling of reading, the affects of art) with quantifiable, objective methods of literary formalism. In one of his most provocative moments Morgan asks what literary studies might have looked like if, instead of rejecting the phenomenology and physiology of reading, New Criticism had followed Lee's lead and “embraced corporeality rather than cognition” (253). The critical investment of The Outward Mind is that we might benefit from revisiting nineteenth-century materialist theories of aesthetics at a time when we face our own methodological questions about how to read, how disciplines can intersect, and whether “scientific” approaches to literary analysis (cognitive criticism, digital humanities) impinge upon or invigorate traditional hermeneutic methods of inquiry. As Morgan puts it, Lee's brand of scientific humanistic inquiry, in its refusal to pit the affects of reading against statistical analysis, might help us reunite the phenomenological and the quantitative, the humanistic and the scientific.

What is the actual relation between close reading and non-close methods of textual analysis? Connecting Edward Lee Thorndike’s The Teacher’s Word Book (1921), C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards’s universal language (Basic English), and Richards’s inaugural theories of close reading, the essay demonstrates that the inception of close reading was shaped by its era’s statistical analyses or “distant reading,” particularly the genre of the word list. The second part of the essay tracks the subsequent divergence of close reading and statistical analysis by considering two exemplary developments: research into the measurement of “readability,” and Cleanth Brooks’s notion of “the heresy of paraphrase.” Ultimately, the essay aims to fine-tune discussions of close and distant reading that have been occasioned by the digital humanities and suggests that literary studies can once again learn from, and contribute to, the field of reading research.

In 2005, Franco Moretti introduced Distant Reading to analyse entire literary text collections. This was a rather revolutionary idea compared to the traditional Close Reading, which focuses on the thorough interpretation of an individual work. Both reading techniques are the prior means of Visual Text Analysis. We present an overview of the research conducted since 2005 on supporting text analysis tasks with close and distant reading visualizations in the digital humanities. Therefore, we classify the observed papers according to a taxonomy of text analysis tasks, categorize applied close and distant reading techniques to support the investigation of these tasks and illustrate approaches that combine both reading techniques in order to provide a multi‐faceted view of the textual data. In addition, we take a look at the used text sources and at the typical data transformation steps required for the proposed visualizations. Finally, we summarize collaboration experiences when developing visualizations for close and distant reading, and we give an outlook on future challenges in that research area.

Victorian Studies and the Digital Humanities (DH) are a natural fit; Victorian texts are in the public domain and thus available for full digitization and subjection to all kinds of applications. This essay focuses on arguably the most controversial: the use of statistical methodologies to analyze literary texts. Often aimed at the “distant reading” practices of Franco Moretti, the pros and cons of these methods have been widely debated among literary scholars, but with little reference to their historical roots. Historical accounts of DH have instead focused on technological developments, citing the massive, computerized concordance of the works of Thomas Aquinas, envisioned in 1949 by Father Roberto Busa and realized by IBM over the next 20 years, as the moment DH was born. Such accounts, as useful as they are, neglect important connections between the computational methodologies of DH and the emergence of modern statistical methodology during the nineteenth century. The advantage of seeing DH as part of the history of statistics is that it helps us understand and evaluate statistically based DH methodologies in their own terms and not simply as methodologies associated with particular neoliberal institutions in the present. This essay argues that understanding the history of statistics as well as examining current practice helps address the criticisms leveled at computational methodologies and the question of compatibility with traditional humanistic methodologies such as close reading. It begins with a brief history of the emergence of modern statistics in the nineteenth century and the impact on Victorian literature and popular culture and then examines recent DH scholarship that utilizes statistical methodologies to analyze Victorian texts.

Literary studies, whether digital or analog, have overemphasized the novel, itself an example of the problem of misrepresenting a more complex system through favored individuals or reductive samples. Digitized access to more of the published English-language texts over centuries enables research on overlooked forms beyond boundaries of genre, nation, and period, and yet "distant reading" or algorithmic textual analysis continues to favor the portion of novels that have been digitized—not a representative proxy for literature. The essay reflects on changing methods experienced in the author's career in light of persistent misconstructions of digital humanities (DH); illustrates difficulties of identifying and representing networks and typologies of individual people through an online database, Collective Biographies of Women; and discusses other digital projects working at mid-range with book history as well as cultural and material contexts. Citing colleagues in this issue and a range of advocates for uniting "theory," close reading, and social-justice and engagement initiatives with new media and methods, the essay advocates for varieties of digital scholarship that serve humanities inquiry without privileging the novel as data.

Contents Introduction: The Digital Humanities Moment Matthew K. Gold Part I. Defining the Digital Humanities 1. What Is Digital Humanities and What's It Doing in English Departments? Matthew Kirschenbaum 2. The Humanities, Done Digitally Kathleen Fitzpatrick 3. This Is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities Lisa Spiro 4. Beyond the Big Tent Patrik Svensson Blog Posts The Digital Humanities Situation Rafael Alvarado Where's the Beef? Does Digital Humanities Have to Answer Questions? Tom Scheinfeldt Why Digital Humanities Is Nice Tom Scheinfeldt An Interview with Brett Bobley Michael Gavin and Kathleen Marie Smith Day of DH: Defining the Digital Humanities Part II. Theorizing the Digital Humanities 5. Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities Stephen Ramsay and Geoffrey Rockwell 6. Humanistic Theory and Digital Scholarship Johanna Drucker 7. This Digital Humanities which Is Not One Jamie Skye Bianco 8. A Telescope for the Mind? Willard McCarty Blog Posts Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology? Tom Scheinfeldt Has Critical Theory Run Out of Time for Data-Driven Scholarship? Gary Hall There Are No Digital Humanities Gary Hall Part III. Critiquing the Digital Humanities 9. Why Are the Digital Humanities So White?, or, Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation Tara McPherson 10. Hacktivism and the Humanities: Programming Protest in the Era of the Digital University Elizabeth Losh 11. Unseen and Unremarked On: Don DeLillo and the Failure of the Digital Humanities Mark L. Sample 12. Disability, Universal Design, and the Digital Humanities George H. Williams 13. The Digital Humanities and Its Users Charlie Edwards Blog Posts Digital Humanities Triumphant? William Pannapacker What Do Girls Dig? Bethany Nowviskie The Turtlenecked Hairshirt Ian Bogost Eternal September of the Digital Humanities Bethany Nowviskie Part IV. Practicing the Digital Humanities 14. Canons, Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method Matthew Wilkens 15. Electronic Errata: Digital Publishing, Open Review, and the Futures of Correction Paul Fyfe 16. The Function of Digital Humanities Centers at the Present Time Neil Fraistat 17. Time, Labor, and Alternate Careers in Digital Humanities Knowledge Work Julia Flanders 18. Can Information Be Unfettered?: Race and the New Digital Humanities Canon Amy E. Earhart Blog Posts The Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing Daniel J. Cohen Introducing Digital Humanities Now Daniel J. Cohen Text: A Massively Addressable Object Michael Witmore The Ancestral Text Michael Witmore Part V. Teaching the Digital Humanities 19. Digital Humanities and the Ugly-Stepchildren of American Higher Education Luke Waltzer 20. Graduate Education and the Ethics of the Digital Humanities Alexander Reid 21. Should Liberal Arts Campuses Do Digital Humanities?: Process and Products in the Small College World Bryan Alexander and Rebecca Frost Davis 22. Where's the Pedagogy?: The Role of Teaching and Learning in the Digital Humanities Stephen Brier Blog Posts Visualizing Millions of Words Mills Kelly What's Wrong with Writing Essays Mark L. Sample Looking for Whitman: A Grand, Aggregated Experiment Matthew K. Gold and Jim

This paper begins with the so-called spatial turn and goes on to examine one of its most recent offshoots: the cartographic turn. After analysing the implications that this turn, particularly its digital aspect, may have on a possible mappability of literature and on the definition of an emerging field like spatial humanities, the paper will discuss the broad disciplinary spectrum of digital humanities and its possible convergences with this cartographic and spatialising trend through the changes experienced by the contemporary textual condition (from the large-scale digitation of texts to the spread of multimedia). The paper also explores the split between an eminently quantitative approach and a qualitative one, within both digital and spatial humanities, when tackling the study of texts, whether they be literary or otherwise. This duality leads to the current debate between defenders and detractors of what Franco Moretti dubbed distant reading, a critical practice that opposes the traditional method of close reading. As the paper attempts to argue, that distant perspective is closely linked to the cartographic turn and does not necessarily involve using exclusively quantitative tools and giving up close reading as a means of accessing texts. In this sense, through the underlying concept of some literary GIS and of the emerging notion of deep or thick mapping, the paper argues for the possibility of a telescopic reading which, as part of the approaches and interests of spatial and digital humanities, combines quantitative and qualitative methods and makes a distant focus (that is, cartographic) compatible with a close reading of texts.

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

Area studies can suffer simultaneously from a “tautology of identity” and an “anxiety of specificity” (Móricz et al., “Colloquy: Jewish Studies and Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 2 [2012]: 560, 581). On the one hand we find scholars who are invested in a particular sliver of the world's population, whether by ethnic affiliation or chosen affinity, who assume the uniqueness of that sliver, and whose focus on that sliver, according to the editors of the present volume, has led to a scholarship “filled with lacunae, because of [a] self-referential perspective as well as an implicit or explicit perspective of exclusion” (1). On the other hand, many outside this invested group may assume, explicitly or implicitly, that insiders are incapable of dispassionate scholarship, particularly in the humanities, that can speak to a broad audience. Such insiders and outsiders may find themselves talking at cross-purposes and dismissing one another's work before actually seeing it.Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise Vasvári's introduction and opening essay in their edited volume Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies act as an answer both to the tautology of identity and the anxiety of specificity. They push for comparative cultural studies as “a global and inclusive discipline of global humanities [that] acts against the paradox of globalization versus localization” (17). The inclusiveness of the volume is apparent at a glance: it contains twenty-seven essays on a wide array of topics and from a broad range of disciplines, including anthropology, American studies, architecture, art history, communication and media studies, cultural studies, film studies, ethnology and folklore, gender studies, history, linguistics, various branches of literary criticism, Jewish studies, minority studies, political science, psychology, and sociology. Some contributors are of Hungarian background, others are not; most are members of university faculties, whether in Hungary, Germany, Israel, or the United States. The essays deal various with periods from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and are arranged under five headings: “History, Theory, and Methodology for Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies”; “Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies of Literature and Culture”; “Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and the Other Arts”; “Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Gender Studies”; and “Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies of Contemporary Hungary.” A sixth part consists of a selected bibliography of works in English on Hungarian culture, chiefly those published since 1989.The question provoked by the volume's title, given the contents, is where the “comparative” is in Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies. In their very name, comparative literature departments and associations emphasize comparison; they study cultural expression “across linguistic and cultural boundaries” (http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Comparative_Literature/). The volume is the latest in a series of works written or edited by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek on what he terms comparative cultural studies, “the theoretical as well as methodological postulate to move and dialogue between cultures, languages, literatures, and disciplines” (Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies [West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2003], 259). Sometimes “comparison” is interpreted strictly, as faculty members find themselves told they may not teach courses designed around one country, no matter how multicultural the country, in a department of comparative literature. What does it mean to write on the comparative cultural studies of a single country?Within the present volume, certain essays in fact position Hungarian topics explicitly in a comparative international context, drawing as they do on issues of translation, migration, postcolonial theory, and comparative political, artistic, media, and gender discourses, among others. For example, Peter Sherwood's comparison of versions of Sándor Márai's A gyertyák csonkig égnek, a German translation from the Hungarian original (Die Glut) and an English translation from the German translation (Embers), not only illustrates ways that certain “key mannerisms” of the author are diminished in its successive translations, but argues persuasively how those changes allowed “the conventional but undoubtedly well-crafted architecture of the original to emerge uncluttered for its new readers” (113). David Mandler provides a brief biography of Arminius Vámbéry, a Hungarian-born scholar of central Asia who became well known in Victorian England as a public intellectual, points out references to Vámbéry in Bram Stoker's Dracula, and makes a persuasive case for the parallels between this now-forgotten figure and the title character of Stoker's novel. Louise Vasvári places Asszony a fronton (Woman on the front), the memoir of a Hungarian woman survivor of an abusive marriage and wartime sexual violence, in the context of genres of women's life writing and memoirs of trauma, concluding that the author's “fragmented self-representation of her private versus public body … speak[s] only the inherited language of female victimhood and not of agency,” and thus that the work fits better “in the tradition of spiritual autobiography … rather than as an example of feminist life writing” (82). Tötösy de Zepetnek himself compares and contrasts the uses of ethnic essentialisms in neighboring countries in his essay “The Anti-Other in Post-1989 Austria and Hungary,” as well as reporting on the xenophobia and violent acts that emerge from such ideologies.Two of the essays examine dialogues between cultures by placing the Hungarian capital city in the context of “transcultural flows of popular culture” that “inspire new forms of global consciousness and cultural competency” (Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture [New York: NYU Press, 2006], 156). Lajos Császi and Mary Gluck's “The Budapest Cow Parade and the Construction of Cultural Citizenship” investigates how a playful public-art exhibit known as the “cow parade” based on a model that had started in Switzerland “ultimately represented a challenge to the self-esteem” of both nationalists and intellectuals, by “us[ing] the vocabulary of [global] popular, rather than high, culture” (313), while Agata Anna Lisiak's “Urbanities of Budapest and Prague as Communicated in New Municipal Media” analyzes the way municipal governments in those cities use the World Wide Web to develop their “brands,” highlighting interesting parallels not only in the cities' aspirations for international prominence but also in their view of their own history—in particular their near-erasure of the state socialist period.A handful of essays explore the cultural role of Hungary's Others. Looking at the key artistic role of Hungarian Jews in the past are Ivan Sanders's “Jewish (Over)tones in Viennese and Budapest Operetta,” on the roles of Jewish composers, librettists, and sensibilities in this international theatrical genre; Debra Pfister's “Lost Dreams and Sacred Visions in the Art of [Imre] Ámos,” on the gifted expressionist/surrealist painter who perished in the Holocaust; and Catherine Portuges's “Curtiz, Hungarian Cinema, and Hollywood,” on the Hungarian-born director not only of Hollywood hits like Casablanca but also of what is considered the first Hungarian feature film in 1912. Kata Zsófia Vincze's takes present-day Hungarian–Jewish culture as her subject in “About the Jewish Renaissance in Post-1989 Hungary.” Some of these essays are more straightforward biography than “comparative,” but even in those cases, they illustrate the too-often-ignored ethnic diversity of Hungarian culture, “high” and “low.” These contributions on Hungarian–Jewish topics are particularly important, as the editors are correct in their assessment that “there has traditionally been an inadequate overlap between Jewish studies and studies on Hungarian culture and history, with the latter failing to take into consideration issues relating to Hungarian Jews and the Holocaust” (22). There has traditionally been even less overlap between Romani studies and Hungarian studies. The absence of more work on Hungarian Roma topics is unfortunate, but the number of scholars working in that area is exceedingly small; Kürti's critique of the problematics of racial stereotyping, both in fictional and “reality” television, in his “Images of Roma in Post-1989 Hungarian Media” is thus also particularly appreciated. Meanwhile, Éva Federmayer's “Nation, Gender, and Race in the Ragtime Culture of Millennial Budapest,” excavating the significance of “African American inflections … in various interrelated arenas of mass entertainment” at the turn of the twentieth century (139), reveals a fascinating and almost entirely unknown aspect of intercultural contact in Hungary.This reviewer is not entirely sure of the need for the justification for comparative cultural studies that Tötösy de Zepetnek and Vasvári put forward in this volume. The catholicity of its contents seems not entirely unlike what the journal Critical Inquiry set out as its mission in 1974; as Sheldon Sacks, one of its founding editors, wrote (in “A Chimera for a Breakfast,” Critical Inquiry 1, no. 1 [1974]), the journal “value[s] examination of the assumptions underlying particular discriminations” and is “interested in criticism that aspires to be a special kind of ‘learning’—not in any sense dispassionate or impersonal but something akin to that fusion of human commitment with objectivity that [Hungarian polymath] Michael Polanyi characterizes as ‘personal knowledge’” (iii). Sacks and his colleagues formulated “an editorial policy that insists on the widest diversity of subject made generally interesting to advocates of disciplined criticism by our authors' concern for theory, method, and the exploration of critical principles,” while specifically “eschew[ing] terms like ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘comparative’” (idem.). Tötösy de Zepetnek and Vasvári are right to call for an expansion of the narrow boundaries that some (though certainly not all) have constructed around Hungarian studies topics, and are to be commended for assembling a wide diversity of contributions on interesting topics relating to Hungary and Hungarians, broadly construed. Beneath the elaborate rubric of comparative cultural studies that Tötösy de Zepetnek and Vasvári propose, the reader may find here (again quoting Sacks) “those who formulate fruitful and exciting questions” “and who attempt to find the best possible answers to those questions” (idem.). Despite their brevity, the individual essays found in Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies do just that.

Industrial Memories is a digital humanities initiative to supplement close readings of a government report with new distant readings, using text analytics techniques. The Ryan Report (2009), the official report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (CICA), details the systematic abuse of thousands of children from 1936 to 1999 in residential institutions run by religious orders and funded and overseen by the Irish State. Arguably, the sheer size of the Ryan Report—over 1 million words—warrants a new approach that blends close readings to witness its findings, with distant readings that help surface system-wide findings embedded in the Report. Although CICA has been lauded internationally for its work, many have critiqued the narrative form of the Ryan Report, for obfuscating key findings and providing poor systemic, statistical summaries that are crucial to evaluating the political and cultural context in which the abuse took place (Keenan, 2013, Child Sexual Abuse and the Catholic Church: Gender, Power, and Organizational Culture. Oxford University Press). In this article, we concentrate on describing the distant reading methodology we adopted, using machine learning and text-analytic methods and report on what they surfaced from the Report. The contribution of this work is threefold: (i) it shows how text analytics can be used to surface new patterns, summaries and results that were not apparent via close reading, (ii) it demonstrates how machine learning can be used to annotate text by using word embedding to compile domain-specific semantic lexicons for feature extraction and (iii) it demonstrates how digital humanities methods can be applied to an official state inquiry with social justice impact.

The article is concerned with the history of “close reading,” understood as a practice crucial to the field of literary studies, vis-à-vis “distant reading,” a range of computational methods identified with the digital humanities. It looks at some early controversies regarding close reading and “the New Criticism,” the movement associated with it, and at how the practice has figured in Anglo-American literary studies over the course of the past century. It turns then to how a certain idea of “close reading” has come to figure in the discourses of the digital humanities. At the end, it offers some general reflections on methods, past and possibly future, in literary studies.