Distant Reading Research Articles

Notas sobre o romance generativo “If on a winter's night a library cardholder”

Realizamos no presente artigo uma análise de If on a Winter's Night a Library Cardholder, romance generativo desenvolvido por Robin Camille Davis para a edição de 2016 do NaNoGenMo – National Novel Generation Month. Considerando que o projeto de Davis envolvia uma releitura computacional de Se um viajante numa noite de inverno, discutimos aqui, à luz de escritos de Italo Calvino sobre o tema da combinatória, os sentidos advindos dos recursos técnicos mobilizados para a constituição de uma obra generativa de forte cariz metaliterário. Face aos desafios impostos à leitura de um romance produzido por uma máquina, procedemos também a um exercício de distant reading contrastivo entre If on a Winter's Night a Library Cardholder e a tradução para o inglês de Se um viajante numa noite de inverno, utilizando a aplicação web Voyant Tools. De tal modo, mapeamos números absolutos e relativos de palavras, bem como as relações que algumas delas contraem com as de sua adjacência, sobretudo termos do campo lexical do livro e da leitura, central nas obras de Calvino e Davis. Como contribuições à área de Estudos Literários, indicamos apontamentos relativos If on a Winter's Night a Library Cardholder e possíveis abordagens metodológicas para o estudo de romances generativos.

Cum iubim? Coduri de gen în romanul de dragoste românesc

My paper aims to present how the Romanian romance novel written between late 19th century and the Second World War fictionalized some of the gender codes active in that particular timeframe in social and familial contexts. A very popular subgenre amid the unprofessional readers, romance fiction rises a new kind of responsibility for literary critics and historians, that traditionally gave little to no attention to the matter of toxic gender codes found in these novels. This article attempts to analyse, by means of both close and distant reading tools, a few narrative aspects that encoded gender inequality.

Novel and Anti-Novel. Moretti Before Distant Reading

The paper discusses an intermediary phase in Franco Moretti’s intellectual journey, namely the years 1990s. This is a period of transition in Moretti’s thinking, in which he is working simultaneously on two fronts: on the one hand, he is refining evermore and bringing to completion his specific brand of close reading analysis developed in the previous decade – namely the combination of evolutionary theory, formal-rhetorical analysis, and eclectic Marxism (with its highly unstable mix of Lukács, Wallerstein, and Della Volpe); on the other, he is forging for the first time the new tools and concepts of what will become, after 2000, his defining intellectual signature – the method of distant reading. The two undertakings correspond to two opposed literary objects: on the one hand, the novel – with its regularity of form, reproduction in large scale, centripetal movement, bourgeois imaginary, and national horizon; on the other, what we call the ‘anti-novel’, which is the modern epic in Moretti’s understanding – the few dozen ‘world-texts’, highly polymorphous and reproducible only in few and select occurrences, centrifugal in their movement, and transcending the national and bourgeois horizon, rooted as they are in the critical, semi-peripheral junctures of the capitalist world-system. The paper dwells on some of the oppositions and similarities, overlaps and contradictions, theoretical problems and practical solutions, raised or offered by the two methodological approaches and their corresponding literary objects.

The Affective Geography of Paris in the 19th Century Romanian Novel: Between Admiration and Aversion

Based on “The Emotions of London”, a research project initiated at the Stanford Literary Lab, my article focuses on two relevant issues. First of all, I aim to demonstrate, as the “geography of emotions” experiment has already proved, that distant reading approaches and big data interpretation do not necessarily have to replace traditional methods of analysis. In other words, by using a corpus of 157 texts, I intend to outline the affective image of Paris as presented in the nineteenth century Romanian novel. Secondly, the aspect that makes my article different from “The Emotions of London” is that my purpose does not lie in analysing emotions associated with certain place-names in Paris, but with the overall image of the city, because Paris is an “abstract”, rather than a “concrete”, presence in the Romanian novel of this period. Another hypothesis that I will address is the interpretation of the emotions towards Paris, taking into account the two tendencies characteristic for the Romanian culture of the nineteenth century, namely the self-colonial tendency and the anti-colonial one.

The Sickle and the Piano. A Distant Reading of Work in the Nineteenth Century Romanian Novel

This article conducts a semantic search of The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel: The 19th Century (MDRR), through which the authors attempt to identify the occurrences of several key concepts for class and labour imagery in the nineteenth-century Romanian novel, such as “muncă” [labour/work], “muncitor” [labourer/worker], “țăran” [peasant], “funcționar” [civil servant], alongside two main words that strikingly point out to a dissemblance of representation of work: “seceră” [sickle] and “pian” [piano]. The authors show that physical work is underrepresented in the Romanian novel between 1844 and 1900, and that novelists prefer to participate to the rise of the novel through representing the bourgeois intimate space.

Style at the Scale of the Canon. A Stylometric Analysis of 100 Romanian Novels Published between 1920 and 1940

The present study proposes an experimental exploration of the Romanian novel written between 1920 and 1940 through the use of stylometry, a method of distant reading employed for the statistical analysis of style. Drawing from the most recent advances in the field of computational stylistics, we select a formal standpoint from which we seek to investigate the relation between the Romanian novelistic canon and minor, tertiary novels published in the same. In our test cases, we will attempt to establish some of the more promising aspects of stylometric analysis, as well as single out the experiments that yield no relevant result. Because of the relative novelty of the method, the purpose of our investigations is to offer a kind of pilot experiment that can illustrate the benefits of using computational methods on Romanian literary corpora.

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

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

A Study in Distant Reading: Genre and the Longue Durée in the Age of AI

Abstract This essay explores “distant reading,” first, as a project of studying genre at supratextual scales of analysis (from early conceptions to computationalist successors) and, second, through the prescient late Victorian literary persona with which the latter practices intersect. A Study in Scarlet, the novella that introduced Sherlock Holmes, offers the first meditation on distant reading. A split double plot that anticipates generic fissures within crime fiction broadly conceived, A Study in Scarlet creates a data-centric detective intelligence in dialogue with late Victorian statistical innovations that remain central to machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) today. Doyle’s generically split novella shows that the charismatic detective who dominates its first part is the merely partial virtuoso of a limited form. As such, A Study in Scarlet invites us to contemplate and clarify the humanistic stakes of machine “reading” during what some AI commentators conceive as a fourth industrial revolution.

Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence: New Centenary Essays

Edith Wharton's <i>The Age of Innocence:</i> New Centenary Essays

Trade and Missionary Work: A Word Frequency Analysis of Dialogues and Detached Sentences in the Chinese Language (1816) and the Pedagogy of Robert Morrison

Abstract This paper analyzes how pedagogy is a means through which different political, economic, and cultural forces interact. I focus on one form of pedagogy—teaching Chinese as a foreign language, and use one textbook—Dialogues and Detached Sentences in the Chinese Language (1816) compiled by Robert Morrison (1782–1834)—as a case study to examine a convergence of factors that influenced the material for learning Chinese in the early nineteenth century. I combine the word frequency analysis of Dialogues and Detached Sentences in the Chinese Language and the close examination of certain translations from the textbook, and contend that this textbook reflects the diverse interests such as the urge to trade with China and the mission to spread Christianity. My paper concludes that pedagogical material is deeply rooted in its economic, political, and cultural conditions and that a synthesis of distant reading and close reading can reveal new aspects of the connection between Morrison's textbook and its historical context.

Romance in &lt;i&gt;Woman’s Weekly&lt;/i&gt; and &lt;i&gt;Woman’s Weekly&lt;/i&gt; as Romance, 1918–39

This article examines romance and social aspiration in British domestic magazine Woman’s Weekly during the interwar period. Between 1918 and 1939, Cinderella romance was the dominant fictional genre in Woman’s Weekly, which featured at least one complete story and one serial instalment in each weekly issue. These romances work through the social ambitions of the magazine’s target readers: lower-middle-class housewives on low incomes, who aspire towards class promotion. Assuming a social framework within which a woman’s status is determined by the status of her husband, and assuming a reading experience in which the heroine functions as the reader’s avatar, the social aspirations of Woman’s Weekly’s target readers emerge in the socio-economic status of the magazine’s fictional romance heroes. Surveyed using the ‘distant reading’ process pioneered by Franco Moretti, a sample of Woman’s Weekly Cinderella romances issued during 1918–19, 1928, and 1938–39 reveals shifts and complexities in these aspirations across the interwar period. Notably, these shifts and complexities reflect changes within Britain’s class system, and the assumed position of Woman’s Weekly’s target readers within it. Whilst Woman’s Weekly’s Cinderella romance fiction fulfils its target readers’ social aspirations in fantasy, the magazine’s lifestyle content promises to realize them in actuality, by supplying the products and behaviours associated with aspirational lifestyles. Showing how the anticipation and fulfilment of narrative resolution that underpins Cinderella romance narratives might shape one imaginary reader’s experience of reading Woman’s Weekly, I argue that it is the romantic promise of social elevation that attracts readers to the magazine, and ensures their long-term loyalty. The extent to which the magazine can fulfil this promise for real is, however, questionable.

Comments on Mark Alfano's Nietzsche's Moral Psychology

ABSTRACT This article, invited for presentation to the North American Nietzsche Society at the 2020 Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association, is a commentary on Mark Alfano's 2019 monograph, Nietzsche's Moral Psychology. It focuses, first, on the method adopted in the book (a particular combination of “distant reading” through the use of digital tools with close reading) and, second, on two key substantive issues: the analysis of the Nietzschean concepts of drive and virtue respectively.

What’s in a text? Bridging the gap between quality and quantity in the digital era

The digital era has not only given us the world of big data, but the tools to deal with this mostly unstructured, mostly textual data: Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools. Yet, most humanists and social scientists do not work with big data. They do not deal with millions of documents. Literary critics’ corpora are the handful of works produced by an author. The historians’ primary source documents number in the tens, perhaps hundreds. Social scientists deal with tens or hundreds of transcripts of focus groups and in-depth interviews, or at most a few thousand media articles. And they analyze these data either qualitatively or quantitatively with a variety of manual or computer-assisted methodologies, from content analysis to frame analysis, discourse analysis, quantitative narrative analysis. But, once developed, at least some of the NLP tools of automatic textual analysis and the data analytics visualization tools, can be applied not just to big data but to small data as well. This paper illustrates how some of these tools can be used by focusing on a short first-person narrative. And the NLP tools reveal patterns of language use perhaps not immediately discernible, thus proving useful in the analysis of even small data. But understanding and interpreting these patterns requires knowledge way beyond the NLP tools themselves. Humanists and social scientists need not fear computer scientists; rather, they need to learn to take advantage of them. NLP tools lay a bridge between quality and quantity, with much to be gained from a constant interaction between distant and close reading.

О создании Межведомственной библиографической лаборатории для исследования дальнего чтения

The concept of distant reading developed by Professor Franco Moretti (Stanford University, USA) is vital in publications on digital humanities (DH). The present article considers the possibility, based on distant reading methodology, to study large amount of bibliographical data using formal method, quantitative and bibliographical methods of analysis. To coordinate and plan the work of specialists in humanitarian and technical fields it is necessary to establish the Interagency bibliographical lab. It can be established in the Russian Academy of Sciences institutions with participation of the Russian largest libraries where there is a concentration of various information resources.

Bridging the gap between culture studies and computational linguistics

Since 2015, the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences at Tilburg University has provided yearly funding for two student assistants in a Research Traineeship Program. The aim of this program is to provide the student assistants with practical research experience by allowing them to work together with two experienced researchers in a practical research project. The researchers who apply for funding in this program have to work at different departments within the school, effectively encouraging cross-departmental collaborations. Within this interdisciplinary research project, the student assistants build practical research experience by following the full research process from developing research questions to presenting and publishing results. Also, due to the interdisciplinary nature, the student assistants (as well as the supervising researchers) are confronted with different research methodologies and cross-disciplinary problems. Here, we describe one of the research traineeship projects, the problem tackled, approaches used, and results. The project proposal contained ideas on how to bridge the gap between close (focused on detail, small amounts of text) and distant reading (focused on the larger picture, large amounts of text). However, specific research questions still needed to be designed. Research questions and corresponding methodologies that combine the fields of culture studies and computational linguistics were selected after extensive discussions. As the discussions demonstrated points of terminological ambivalence, we decided to subdivide the project along disciplinary lines. This resulted in a culture studies and a computational linguistics sub-project; these were constantly aligned during the project. This led to new insights into both the culture studies and computational linguistics methodologies. Here, we focus on the problems that were encountered during the project, which can mostly be attributed to difficulties related to (discipline-specific) terminology. Based on these experiences, we also provide suggestions for future work and recommendations for similar interdisciplinary collaborations.

Leitura distante em português: resumo do Primeiro Encontro

Este artigo pretende refletir sobre o Primeiro Encontro sobre Leitura Distante em Português que aconteceu na Universidade de Oslo a 27 e 28 de outubro de 2019. Elaboramos este texto com o intuito de disseminar os assuntos e ideias discutidos nesses dois dias de encontro. Após uma descrição abreviada de todas as intervenções, destacamos os principais pontos de discussão, assim como algumas sugestões avançadas pelos participantes, na esperança de alargar o debate sobre leitura distante dentro da comunidade de língua portuguesa.

Geografia romanului românesc (1901-1932): străinătatea

The Geography of the Romanian Novel (1901-1932): Spaces from Abroad This article charts the main cities mentioned in the Romanian novel published between 1901 and 1932 based on the corpus of novels created by the research project The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932 (around 370 digitized novels). The main discoveries that our distant reading of the geography in these novels revealed are that the planet is covered in the Romanian novel during the period in genre fiction (that has mentions of cities from Africa, Asia and South America), not in modernist highbrow literature, and that the dominance of Paris and Rome as spaces where the action takes place is atomized during this period by smaller cities in France and Italy. The article also describes the relation between social mobility and geographical coverage in the epoch. Keywords: Romanian literature, distant reading, geocriticism, literary geography, planetarity.

Situating the Method Debates

What we might call the literary method debates have taken on a life of their own over the past few decades. These debates in no way reflect the full scope of new methods in the literary field, however, and have tended to focus on generalized discussions of ways to read, both formally and affectively. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's essay on paranoid and reparative reading, “Paranoid Reading,” is often seen as the starting point for these debates, especially given their central concern with the limitations of suspicion as both method and mood, reading posture and affect (Best and Marcus; Felski,Limits). Other key contributors to the discussion about method have been less interested in the mood or ethos of the practitioner than in the object of study and the techniques required to capture it, as in the case of arguments for distant reading (Moretti), descriptive or “thin” reading (Love), and the new formalism (Levine; Kramnick and Nersessian). There are problems, of course, with assuming that these debates over method capture the energies and commitments of the field, especially given new work on race and ethnicity, queer and trans theory, the environmental humanities, and disability studies, all of which have transformed method and stance in their own right. And yet the method debates are generating a wide discussion over the conditions and direction of the field, for reasons that don't all concern questions of method.

Reading Distance: Port Louis, Cairo, Beijing

This essay uses a case study of Lin Shu (1852-1924) and(1876-1924) to argue for an approach to world literature called “reading distance.” Through a close reading of Lin Shu's andtranslations of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre'sPaul et Virginie (Paul and Virginia)into Chinese and Arabic and a consideration of their work as translators and intellectuals, the essay reads between peripheries—places like Cairo and Beijing—to understand how intellectuals in those places grappled with difficult questions concerning translation, language reform, and changes in reading publics. By thinking with models of distant reading but also engaging with materials that are usually excluded from those models, the essay examines an important point of overlap in the intellectual and cultural histories of the Arab and Chinese enlightenments of the early twentieth century.

The Aesthetics of Distance: Space, Ideology, and Critique in the Study of World Literature

Although its pedigree is frequently traced back to the nineteenth century, world literature as an institution is a much more recent phenomenon, emerging along with the spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences in the era of globalization. During roughly this same period, we have witnessed the rise of the postcritical approaches to literature that would abandon critique in favor of mere description. One of the most innovative forms of this, Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” project developed out of his attempts to reckon with the scope of world literature, but the project also implicates a political program. As a concept, genre, or field, world literature presents serious problems to readers in the twenty-first century; translation, cultural literacy, commodification, the book industry, and a sort of literary imperialism underlie the global market for world literature, and the reader is confronted with sometimes invisible obstacles to understanding. In a moment when so-called surface reading or postcritical approaches have been increasingly championed, Tally asserts that this sort of ideology-critique is needed more than ever, and that the spatially oriented critique made possible by geocriticism is particularly well suited to the crises and mystifications facing culture workers in the twenty-first century.