Literature from a distance
For readers today, there is a wealth of information available about any given work they read, from its date of publication, its author’s biographical information, its genre, details about any previous editions or formats, and the like. On top of that, it seems as though nearly any book is available through online retailers like Amazon, public or university libraries, or as an e-book. With all this information about recent works at our fingertips, it was surprising to learn how much there still is to know about collections of written works that span only the past few centuries. On Friday, September 20, Ted Underwood, professor of English Literature and Information Science at the University of Illinois, addressed the participants of the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, answering questions about how data and the absence of data relate to his work. Underwood’s area of expertise is distant reading — drawing conclusions about large collections of written work through an analysis of metadata and other less-subjective characteristics. As Underwood described in Digital Humanities Quarterly, distant reading was a technique in literature long before computers became equipped to help with it. When researchers first had access to computational methods like optical character recognition, which make the full text of a piece searchable, they applied them to a variety of problems, soon realizing what kinds of questions computers are suited to answer. People, rather than computers, are much better at closely reading a single text or the works of one author to characterize them, as well as answering “why” questions, such as “why did Read More