Distant Reading
Matt Price
Recap
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
Plan for the day
History in the age of scarcity
The members of prehistoric societies did not think they lived in prehistoric times. They merely lacked a good preservation medium. (Auerbach, quoted in Rosenzweig)
Scarcity
Implications
Age of Abundance
Tentative efforts are afoot to preserve our digital cultural heritage. If they succeed, historians will face a second, profound challenge–what would it be like to write history when faced by an essentially complete historical record? (Rosenzweig)
Abundance
Mechanical Speech
Problems of Preservation
What big data means for old documents
digitization does provide scale (or quantity) but does so at the price of rich, largely manual encoding. Visualization, customization, personalization, and similar analytical services increasingly familiar to us depend upon born-digital objects in which a great deal of structural and semantic knowledge has been encoded. The information captured on page images is, by contrast, implicit and often not directly accessible to the machines that will be always their first, often their only, and arguably their most important readers. (CILR)
Can we tell stories? Can we do research?
Abundance: Summary
No Clothes, no body
It's not that the emperor has no clothes(that would be fine); it's that no one knows what the emperor looks like. (Ramsey 2010)
Distant Reading: Abstract Models
…distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models.
The opposite of close?
Dorothea, endowed with the extraordinary capacity for attentiveness that is "ardor," is given to the strongest denunciations of the trivial, the most overwhelming anxieties of admitting the trivial into her life of any character in the novel. She is blind to the possibility that attention has the capacity to reveal that what seems trivial is in fact significant. She fears instead that the attention is wasted by devoting itself to those common objects which really are trivial, which have no redeeming significance:
"…I should learn everything then," she said to herself, still walking quickly along the bridle road through the wood. "It would be my duty to study that I might help him the better in his great works. There would be nothing trivial about our lives. Everyday-things with us would mean the greatest things."
To the point of deconstruction
If the pharmakon is ambivalent, it is because it constitutes the medium in which opposites are opposed, the movement and the play that links them among themselves, reverses them or makes one side cross over into the other (soul/ body, good/ evil, inside/ outside, memory/ forgetfulness, speech/ writing, etc.). The pharmakon is the movement, the locus, and the play: (the production of) difference. It is the différance of difference. It holds in reserve, in its undecided shadow and vigil, the opposites and the differends that the process of discrimination will come to carve out. Contradictions and pairs of opposites are lifted from the bottom of this diacritical, differing, deferring, reserve. Already inhabited by différance, this reserve, even though it precedes the opposition between different effects, even though it preexists differences as effects, does not have the punctual simplicity of a coincidentia oppositorum. It is from this fund that dialectics draws its reserves.
Closeness
Questioning Close Reading
Some Numbers
New forms of Understanding?
Questions to consider
Graphs
Moretti's Graphs
Quantitative research provides a type of data which is ideally independent of interpretations. (p.9)
A History of Readers
Cycles
Event, cycle, longue durée: three time frames which have fared very unevenly in literary studies.
… cycles constitute temporary structures within the historical flow. (p.14)
Cycles in Literature
A genre exhausts its potentialities… when its inner form is no longer capable of representing the most significant aspects of contemporary reality. (p. 17, fn 7)
Genre & Generation
… some kind of generational mechanism seems the best way to account for the regularity of the novelistic cycle… (p. 22)
From "the shift" to "a shift"
…the point is not who prevails in this or that skirmish, but exactly the opposite: no victory is ever definitive… the form keeps oscillating back and forth between the two groups. (p.29)
Moretti's method
…the real point here… is the total heterogeneity of problem and solution: to make sense of quantitative data, I had to abandon the quantitative universe, and turn to morphology: evoke form, in order to explain figures.
Maps
There is a very simple question about literary maps: what exactly do they do?
What is a map?
What is a map?
Moretti's method
The form of an object is a 'diagram of forces', in this sense, at least that from it we can… deduce the forces that … have acted upon it. (p.57)
Our Village
In the 1824 volume… the vilage was the undisputed centre of the surrounding countryside: the centripetal effects of the force "from within" were omnipresent, while the force "from without" was nowhere to be seen. (p. 57)
Two collections later, in 1828, the village's gravitation field is already weaker… Something is wrong with the force from within, but as no counter-force challenges it yet, the basic pattern… remains in place. But by 1832… the village's centripetal force is reduced to nothing, and the bulk of the book moves away… (p. 58-59)
Our Village – Extremes
Modelling the text
Trees
Moretti's Evolutionism
Plots
Clues as evolved phenomenon
Styles
Free Indirect Style
A peculiar mix of indirect and direct discourse, which draws the verbal tenses and pronouns from the former, and the tone and the order of the sentence from the latter:
It was the abode of noise, disorder, and impropriety. Nobody was in their right place, nothing was done as it ought to be. She could not respect her parents, as she had hoped.