Distant Reading

Hi everyone, I want to tell you all about another podcast I think you'll enjoy. College Matters from the Chronicle. College Matters is a weekly show from the Chronicle of Higher Education, and it's a great resource for news and analysis about colleges and universities. You'll hear sharp discussions with Chronicle journalists, offering fresh perspectives on the latest salvos from the Trump administration, and keen insights about how faculty and students are adapting to technological changes. College Matters also features incisive interviews with newsmakers, including recent conversations with Chris Eisgruber, Princeton University's president, and Rick Singer, who is best known as the mastermind of the varsity blues admission scandal. Check out College Matters, wherever you get your podcasts. Hi. Hi. Welcome to High Theory. In this podcast we get high on the Substance of Theory. I am Sharonik Gosu, and I am Kim Adams. We are two tired academics trying to save critique from itself. Today I'm speaking with Amabima, I'm Dr. Tuave LeDou. We are talking about distant reading. So Amabima, can I ask you to introduce yourself to our listeners? Definitely. So my name is Amabima. I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. I research Post 1960s literary networks, particularly the relationships formed between poets from around the world. Awesome. So tell us what the hack is distant reading. Maybe one of the ways I can begin to answer that question is to talk about distant reading and relationship to a term that all of us know a bit more, which is close reading. Distant reading we can say is a deliberate play and inversion of the term. Close reading can be defined as the sort of careful, slow, fine-grained examination of a text or a particular set of text. It's also characterized by the close and attentive readings of a novel or poem that many people are used to sing in college classrooms or in a high school literature class. But distant reading on the other hand enables the development of critical insights by aggregating a large body of text together as opposed to relying on close reading from a restricted canon of text. So very often this process of distant reading enables a large scale examination of literary history. One of the ways to get at this is to tease apart the term a little bit more in relationship to the person that coined it, which would be Francho Mareti. So Francho Mareti is an Italian literary scholar and retired Stanford professor who advocates for this concept of distant reading as a way to understand literature quantitatively with a broad corpus of text. The attribution of this term is usually applied to Mareti because of his landmark essay in book "Distant Reading." And he states in the book that reading more is always a good thing but not the solution end quote. We might actually want to wonder what does that mean in reality? Like we can read more but it's not working what does that mean, especially since it's coming from a literary scholar. Many people read many things all the time. But even as we're talking about all of these books we're also having to talk about the multiple languages. These texts are written in, the multiple forms and genres of literature that exist in the world. And there's really kind of no way for one single person to actually sit down slowly and work through all of those. You did many, many lifetimes and many pairs of eyes to do that. So what Mareti is getting at there is that reading more really isn't the solution to thinking about issues of the literatures in the world. So instead when we're trying to think about how do we actually engage with all of these literatures it's not by me picking up a book and just reading it slowly at one time. It's really about trying to collect many texts. Cool. And so when you talk about dissent reading you're talking about a lot of texts. How do you get at those texts? If I wanted to do dissent reading like how would I use it? One example I might give is a project of mine that I've been working on for the past few years called the Global Poetics Project. And in that project we really have a backlog of 20,000 poets that we're trying to catalog. So what we're trying to do is to pinpoint all of these poets on a map. And then once we finish doing that we're trying to see okay where are the locations of poets and what are their migrations on a mass scale. So when we're talking about dissent reading it can be about a text but it could also be about the social lives of writers. It can be about the movements of writers, the migration of a text or of the person that writes that text. So what we're doing in the Global Poetics Project is what we would call web scraping where we go through a bunch of websites and try to get a lot of names all at once. And we have folks that help to use Python to try and automate that process because there's one way that I can go through an anthology and write down each name one at a time. But then there are digital tools that can make that process a lot easier for us. So instead of having to sit down and write down 200 names from multiple different books and multiple different anthologies and essays I can actually set up a computer program to do that automatically and then give it to me in an Excel sheet or what we'd call a CSV file at the end of the day. So that's one way to try and accrue a large number of texts is through web scraping. Another thing that people do is that they might use something like Hathi Trust which already has a large corpus of texts on their website and then they might go through there and try to say, okay, we're going to use the text that are in this already made really self-contained archive but really expansive archive. Another place that people might go is Google Books actually has this thing called an N-gram viewer where you can chart out a term as it's used across many, many different years and many languages and traditions. So that's another way that you can try to bring together a large number of texts all at once. But one of the interesting things that occurs in this process and this is something that Mareti notes as well is that even in trying to qualitatively work through literary study, we actually have to sit down closely with the output of these digital tools and then we might have to then sit down and very closely work through a text to figure out how is this being used in the context of a poem or a novel or a play. Yeah, I was going to ask you, okay, great. I have a sense of how you get all those texts to do the district but what do you do with them once you got them? And so the answer is you might end up going back to close reading. Yeah, and it's really interesting because I think that many people when they think about, let's say, the digital humanity is broadly speaking or distant reading more specifically, is they think of it as really opposed to close reading. So in the beginning of our conversation, I was saying close reading is defined this way, and distant reading is defined this other way. But one thing that I really think in some of the digital humanities scholars I've been in conversation with also think is that it's actually a process that goes hand in hand. One cannot do distant reading without also at some point having to do very close attentive reading. So distant reading can be seen as a tool that can then enable you to read in different sorts of ways, but it can also be seen as a process of reading in and of itself. There's no way that someone could just have this amazing output of data in information. And then just say, here it is. Here's the result of what I was looking for. I answered my hypothesis. No, some close reading, some careful reading. And one of the other things is that data in and of itself isn't this sort of neutral thing, either, right? It's something that has already gone through a process to even get that data for the global poetics project when I'm picking the poets that were putting into our map. There is a process that goes into it that doesn't make it a neutral process because I'm particularly looking at poets from the global south, more so than poets from the global north. So that even of itself is a process of having to be very specific and very detailed. And then the output that's there then has to be thought through. Can I ask you a question about your global poetics project? Yeah, definitely. So how do you decide who's a poet? That's a great question. So for me, it's anyone that would consider themselves to be a poet is really the sort of person that's included in the database. I have a friend that is an African literary studies scholar. And one of the things she told me is that in one of the markets in Tanzania, there are women that publish poems in the local newspaper. So as soon as they publish it in the newspaper, it's gone in the next week. So it's a very ephemeral sort of thing. So what that mean, I'm not going to include those women in the market because they don't have a book out. Of course not. I would include them in the database. And I think in many ways, that's one of the really great things about distant reading, as proposed by Maredi, is that we're not just going to be doing close readings of high brow texts or texts that are canon or texts that are going to be on every introductory survey to literature course in a college classroom. But it really allows you to engage with all sorts of different texts, minority literatures, texts that wouldn't end up on a syllabus usually, texts that, even if you did a Google search, you most likely wouldn't find them. So distant reading really allows for this holistic, well-rounded and really full engagement with the literatures of the world. Cool. And I think that's a really great way of thinking about distant reading, right? Because we often think it's going to allow us to read all the Victorian novels, right? Which like, not a project I really want to engage in myself, but I like this idea that it would allow us to expand the canon of poetry to include like Ephemeral verse and verse that's published in all these different forms and mediums that we don't usually consider when we're trying to think about what is poetry, what is literature. Definitely, there's another digital humanities scholar called Ted Underwood and he has this essay titled A Genealogy of Distant Reading. And one of the things he notes is that this concept of distant reading, although the term was coined by Franco Moretti, the concept of it existed much, much earlier. And one of the things that he says is that distant reading is a great phrase because in, I'm quoting here, it underlies the macro-scopic scale of recent literary historical experiments without narrowly specifying theoretical presuppissions, methods, or objects of analysis. End quote, right? So this idea of distant reading really allows for this macro approach to the literatures or cultures or societies of the world in a way that perhaps close reading can't do in one particular moment. Cool. Let me ask you our last question. How will distant reading save the world? I think that distant reading will be a tool that people can use or a way of reading that people can use that will enable them to think broadly about literature beyond the can and set we have right now. Distant reading will allow us to look at a larger corpus of text and then to examine more writers and more literary practitioners. But the other thing that would be really interesting, I didn't really talk about machines or machine learning when I was talking about distant reading. But when we think about distant reading in collaboration with something like machine learning, it allows us to look at a micro level in some ways. How are words arranged? What are the word patterns that are appearing? What sort of phrases or terms appear? And that can then give us really wonderful insights into how people thought about language, how people thought about the world around them in particular time periods and then how that changed over time as well. So I think it will give us really good data and information about how people thought, how people wrote. And then it will give us the chance to then hone in on specific time periods, specific moments and say why were people thinking like this? Why were people writing like this? Why were people using specific terms or phrases, which can give us greater insights to culture at any specific moment. So although it's a really macro approach, it enables us to zoom in on very micro moments. So it allows us to do literary history in a mode that's deeply embedded in cultural history. Definitely. I like that you just use the word culture because that's not a word that appears that often in the digital humanities essays and papers I read. There's a scholar named Alan Liu out in California who actually wrote in an essay and said at an MLA conference a couple of years ago that the great next project or problem for digital humanities more broadly is that it will have to think about culture. Right, you'll have to think about culture and language and people more specifically. And that's something that's always really stood out to me because in my work when I'm thinking about distant reading and when I'm thinking about the digital humanities, it's really allowing me to think more intimately about how people engage with one another, how they engage with the world around them. And that is really what interests me the most. I feel like we kind of slipped really easily from distant reading to digital humanities. I wonder if you could say a bit about their relationship. Definitely. And I think that's a really good question. One of the things that I've been noting in scholarship about the digital humanities more broadly is that a lot of these terms seem to slip into one another even though they're quite distinct. There's a website that actually when you type in what is digital humanities and you refresh the page, it gives you a different answer every time you refresh the page. Multiple answers. Yeah, I had a colleague ask me like, "Amma Bima, can you tell me what the digital humanities are?" I'm like, "I'm going to be a digital humanities. I'm going to be a digital humanities student." I'm going to be a digital humanities student. I'm going to be a digital humanities student. And Sharonik Bosu edit our audio.