Distant Reading
1 2017-12-25T08:27:46-08:00 Andrea Davis e50475e163fb87bc8bd10c6c0244468fd91e8da5 27471 4 Distant reading example shows the structure of and the themes in Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” from http://www.stefanieposavec.com/writing-without-words plain 2017-12-31T13:55:48-08:00 Andrea Davis e50475e163fb87bc8bd10c6c0244468fd91e8da5This page is referenced by:
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2017-12-06T06:17:25-08:00
Week 8
50
Distant Reading: Topic Modeling and Text Mining
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2018-01-28T02:21:06-08:00
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.Assignment
Drawing on the insights you have gained from the assigned readings, use Voyant and/or Lexos to analyze text(s) from our group Zotero library or shared Evernote notebook. If you would like to select new text(s) related to our research, add it to one or both of our shared collections. After you have explored how to prepare and analyze texts using these tool, save and/or capture the visualizations you generate and embed them in a new page of our workbook titled "Student's Name + Text Analysis." Be sure to provide a narrative interpretation of the results. Follow the instructions on the "Assignment" page of our workbook to make sure that it shows up in the contents of your "Portfolio"and the "Text Analysis" page.
