What is Distant Reading?
Franco Moretti is an Italian literary scholar and founder of the Stanford Literary Lab who uses computers to help link and recognize literary genres using network theory to create the necessary plots. The Lit Lab tackles literary problems by scientific means: hypothesis-testing, computational modeling, and quantitative analysis. Moretti advocates “distant reading”: understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data. Compared to a reading study/analysis done by a single reader, distant reading allows massive analysis over a large sample size that a single reader could never dream to accomplish.
In one instance, the team fed 30 novels identified by genre into two computer programs, which were then asked to recognize the genre of six additional works. Both programs succeeded – one using grammatical and semantic signals, the other using word frequency. It turns out, that people and computers identify genres via different features. People for example, can recognize Gothic literature based on castles, revenants, brooding atmospheres, and the greater frequency of words like “tremble” and “ruin.” Computers recognize Gothic literature based on the greater frequency of words like “the.” This suggests that genres possess distinctive features at every possible scale of analysis.
In relation to this course, Moretti transforms books into networks. For instance, he turns characters into nodes and their verbal exchanges into edges. The networks make visible specific regions within the plot and enable experimentation. The interactions between characters can be followed through the web of the network to theorize changes in the plot based on changing the edges. What would happen if you removed a minor character? What would happen if one character met a different character first? Deeper analysis can be achieved through analyzing the network of connections among characters. The protagonist for example is the character “that minimize[s] the sum of the distances to all other vertices.” Visually you can see that the protagonist is connected to the most characters within the story. The network can simplify what we already know in a visual way. Analyses in any scientific field should be done from multiple angles. This network philosophy being applied to books may aid us in a more thorough analysis of the author’s original intent.
Source: What is Distant Reading? – NYTimes