English Literature

"In 2000, Franco Moretti coined the term “distant reading” to refer to the process of “understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.” The concept has been at the center of data conversations in the humanities." (The Data Notebook)

• Distant reading does not have a set methodology similar to close reading
• Distant reading allows scholars to measure sentence length, structure, and lexicon
• Distant reading gives a scholar patterns of data to analyze.
• Distant reading allows scholars to recognize patterns among several texts before focusing on a targeted group

Distant Reading Labs and Projects

• The Standford Literary Lab - a research collective that applies computational criticism, in all its forms, to the study of literature. 

• A Digital Humanities Primer for English Students - an MA students' project to introduce English students and academics to the ways in which DH can benefit research and pedagogy.

Text Analysis Tools

• Ngram Viewers - an n-gram is a sequence of n adjacent symbols in a particular order.
  • Google Ngram Viewer
  • Hathi Trust: bookworm
  • Media Cloud
• Voyant - a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts.
• Open Refine

What is close reading?  "In literary criticism, close reading is the careful, sustained interpretation of a brief passage of a text. A close reading emphasizes the single and the particular over the general, via close attention to individual words, the syntax, the order in which the sentences unfold ideas, as well as formal structures." (Wikipedia entry on Close Reading)

Close Reading Labs and Projects

• Close Reading Archive - "a free online archive, which gathers over 2,500 statements on the practice" 

Close Reading Text Analysis Tools

• Voyant - a web-based reading and analysis environment for digital texts.
• Concordle - Creates word clouds based on the user's corpus
• AntConc -  A freeware corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis