Week 8
Distant Reading: Topic Modeling and Text Mining
In 2014, Stanford professor Franco Moretti won a National Book Critics Circle Award for his collection of essays titled Distant Reading. As Joshua Rothman from The New Yorker explained here:The basic idea in Moretti’s work is that, if you really want to understand literature, you can’t just read a few books or poems over and over (“Hamlet,” “Anna Karenina,” “The Waste Land”). Instead, you have to work with hundreds or even thousands of texts at a time. By turning those books into data, and analyzing that data, you can discover facts about literature in general—facts that are true not just about a small number of canonized works but about what the critic Margaret Cohen has called the “Great Unread.”
Keeping this premise in mind, read and collaboratively annotate:
1. Ted Underwood, "Distant Reading and Recent Intellectual History,"in Mathew Gold and Lauren Klein eds., Debates in Digital Humanities 2016. Open access edition, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/. Hypothes.is link.2. Michael Hancher, "Re: Search and Close Reading," in Mathew Gold and Lauren Klein eds., Debates in Digital Humanities 2016. Open access edition, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/. Hypothes.is link.
3. Franco Moretti, “Patterns and Interpretation,” Pamphlets of the Stanford Literary Lab, 2017, https://litlab.stanford.edu/pamphlets/. Hypothes.is link.
4. Franco Moretti and Dominque Pestre, “Bankspeak: The Language of World Bank Reports,” Pamphlets of the Stanford Literary Lab, 2015, https://litlab.stanford.edu/pamphlets. Hypothes.is link.
Tools: Voyant and Lexos.
