Statistical Analysis at the Birth of Close Reading

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

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.

Forum:Canon versus "The Great Unread" Birgit Tautz and Patricia Anne Simpson When we embarked on editing the Goethe Yearbook, we brainstormed ideas about formats for disseminating research that would usefully complement the stellar articles that appear annually. Our interest turned to the forum, a robust format that has fostered lively debate elsewhere (e.g., Eighteenth Century Theory and Interpretation) and has recently been popularized by our colleagues at the German Quarterly. Naturally, we zeroed in on a topic that is still underrepresented in the Yearbook but that has begun to alter the ways in which we approach the study of Goethe and, more broadly, the eighteenth century—within our comparatively small field in North America, as well as in Germany and in adjacent disciplines invested in the period (e.g., comparative literature and comparative cultural studies, genre studies, English, Atlantic studies, and history). We are, of course, speaking of Digital Humanities (DH). In the process of identifying experts in the field, we discovered that a few years ago graduate programs in German (at Yale, the University of Chicago, and Konstanz) had devoted a short course to the topic that inspired the title of our inaugural forum. As we approached potential contributors, we posed a series of questions, intended to spark not direct answers, but to serve as an impulse for reflection: What is the canon? How do we define it and how has it been reenvisioned beyond DH? What is the relationship between "mining" thousands of texts through algorithms and scholarship "merely" based on the interpretation of select literary works? What are the consequences of digitizing primary materials? How do DH methodologies and analytical practices enhance and/or endanger the study of the canon? How does "close reading" versus "distant reading" affect the legacy of canonical authors and their impact on the construction of national literary historiography in the nineteenth century? What is at stake for the discipline of literary study—for the act of (close) reading—when we ask the question about the canon versus the "great unread"? Nine colleagues who are engaged in the theory and practice of DH scholarship responded to our call. The scope of their work is impressive, providing detailed yet suggestive overviews of DH methodologies, insights into the importance of DH and its ability to recuperate historically marginalized writers, case studies of temporary canonicity, and challenges to canonical approaches to the Goethezeit. In framing the debate, we kept in mind the larger context of German studies, while assuming an uncontested relevance of literature and textual studies, certainly among the readers of the Goethe Yearbook. And while we [End Page 187] recognized the pitfalls of posing canonical literature as "read" in opposition to a virtually boundless spectrum of texts that can be analyzed only as data, we hoped to prompt a less polarized discussion about the imagined impact of DH and "computational criticism" on our field. We wanted to create a section that allows scholars—whether they are newcomers or well-versed in DH, interested in or deeply skeptical about data—to glimpse the innovative field's rich opportunities, its first instances of obsolescence, even its evident shortfalls; our goal is to allow our readers to decide for themselves whether to read broadly, which directions to pursue further, or whether to disregard the field completely. We invite continuous engagement with the contributions, not to succumb to a trend, but to continue the dialogue. The following essays impressively show that our aim for open discussions was spot-on. The contributors not only address ways in which DH can broaden an understanding of our field, but they also identify new challenges that arise; quite a few returned to the original meaning of "the great unread" in Margaret Cohen's formulation, namely the fact that canon formation has always implied a curtailing of tradition (as opposed to the texts produced in any given period). Each contribution reveals, in unique ways, not only that possible definitions of and approaches to DH are about as manifold as its projects and practitioners, but that the field has begun what we may call its own historicization; it now encompasses digital preservation, humanistic inquiry about digital objects (text, image, space, networks...

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...

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

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.

Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

The rise of a new paradigm of literary studies: The challenge of digital humanities

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.

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.

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.

Since the work of Franco Moretti, 'distant reading' has become a research method in literature departments. But what is at stake in this kind of reading? Are 'close reading' and 'distant reading' really opposites or can both these approaches be employed at the same time?

In recent decades, the controversy over distant vs. close reading has revolved around the spatiotemporal question of scaling. Participants in the debate have either advocated distance (or speed) or have insisted on proximity (or slowness). On a meta-critical level, some have even argued for the need for any reading to be able to shift between, and thus to combine, different scales. Very little has been said, however, about the limitations of scaling as such, and the irreducibility of reading to the logic of scales. Starting out from a few intricate formulations by some proponents of close and distant reading, this paper attempts to investigate the potentials and limitations of scaling, first by references to “Stanford” (the university as well as its founder), then by looking into Walter Benjamin’s treatment of film, and finally, though most importantly, by re-reading some passages in Poe’s detective story “The Purloined Letter.” These three points of reference (Stanford, Benjamin, Poe) seem analogous in the way they lay mutual emphasis on both serialization and segmentation, fast and slow motion, or distance and proximity. On a closer (or more distant?) look, however, Poe’s text goes even beyond such a scheme of scaling. It testifies to a logic of detection which surpasses mere zooming-in or zooming-out strategies, and points to a notion of reading that is “escalated” not simply because of its extraordinary range in terms of velocity or distance, but more radically because, although it still binds reading to specific scales, it also has an aspect that remains utterly heterogeneous to any logic of scaling. The paper attempts to highlight this radically “escalated” (out-of-scale) aspect of reading.

As distinct from a ‘close reading’ that has long become a core value in literary studies, ‘distant reading’ has been proposed by Franco Moretti (2000) to overcome the obstacles faced by comparative literature, and to counterweigh the disadvantages of distant reading. Relying on my past work in Mediterranean and Black Sea Studies, I attempt an interpretive ‘distant reading’ of the two fiction works that were written from a meaningful distance, that is, approaching the Mediterranean and/or the Levant from the Black Sea point of view. In keeping with his literary style, Cartarescu himself referred to Istrati in his fiction. (The Levant 102, 136) This intertextuality invites a reconsideration of how he echoed his predecessor, just as the Levant in the title did the Mediterranean. I argue that the representation of the pre-World War I Mediterranean in Istrati’s Mediterranean (Sunrise) (1934) and (Sunset) (1935), posthumously available in a single volume (2018) is ‘impression-istic’ and informed by modern social and poetic realism. It differs from Cartarescu’s postmodern reworking of this geography as a film-set with a distinct background, by recourse to the repertoire of conventions and clichés constitutive of the Levant literature. I relate this basic difference to the writers’ space/time specifications, as well as the literary space, or alternatively literary geography, within which they positioned themselves. The present study is devoted to the evaluation of the intertextual connection between the two books and its overall representational consequences.

This chapter suggests the possibility of macroanalysis across versions. The focus on big data, distant reading and macroanalysis in Digital Humanities seems to have the immediate effect that close reading is forced into an antonymous position and non-digital literary studies orLiteraturwissenschaftsuddenly look provincial in comparison. But not all traditional forms of literary studies are microscopic or focused on close reading, and vice versa, not all digital forms of literary studies are macroscopic or panoramic. The suggested approach sees genetic editing as a negotiation between micro- and macroanalysis, paying attention to passages that never made it into the published texts.