The Equivalence of “Close” and “Distant” Reading; or, Toward a New Object for Data-Rich Literary History

Bode, Katherine

doi:10.1215/00267929-3699787

Cited by 80 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…The origins of data have also become a prominent concern in social science research with digital methods, especially with the use of “big data,” where the processes behind data collection are often opaque (boyd & Crawford, ; Helles & Jensen, ; Ruppert, Law, & Savage, ). Similar questions arise in the digital humanities, where critical examination addresses the construction of digitized texts and how they are transformed into datasets for analysis (Bode, ; Trettien, ). This shift toward new methods of text analysis, and approaches that take media as data, has led to the development of humanities‐focused data curation initiatives (Flanders & Muñoz, n.d.; Posner & Klein, ).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

If these crawls could talk: Studying and documenting web archives provenance

Maemura

Worby

Milligan

et al. 2018

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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The increasing use and prominence of web archives raises the urgency of establishing mechanisms for transparency in the making of web archives to facilitate the process of evaluating a web archive's provenance, scoping, and absences. Some choices and process events are captured automatically, but their interactions are not currently well understood or documented.This study examines the decision space of web archives and its role in shaping what is and what is not captured in the web archiving process. By comparing how three different web archives collections were created and documented, we investigate how curatorial decisions interact with technical and external factors and we compare commonalities and differences.The findings reveal the need to understand both the social and technical context that shapes those decisions and the ways in which these individual decisions interact. Based on the study, we propose a framework for documenting key dimensions of a collection that addresses the situated nature of the organizational context, technical specificities, and unique characteristics of web materials that are the focus of a collection. The framework enables future researchers to undertake empirical work studying the process of creating web archives collections in different contexts.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 96%

If these crawls could talk: Studying and documenting web archives provenance

Maemura

Worby

Milligan

et al. 2018

Asso for Info Science & Tech

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“…She instead recommends corpora that represent a specific context of literary circulation (such as nineteenth-century Australian newspaper fiction), and argues that such corpora should be accompanied with a "critical apparatus" that "details particular decisions and arguments made in data construction" in order to justify the dataset's claim to represent the social context in question. 20 The present report is a critical apparatus of a sort, and we have tried to follow Bode's example by paying close attention to the historical processes that construct data in digital libraries. Studying the history of genre categorization, for instance, led us to recognize a massive gap in library metadata (see figure 1).…”

Section: Comparing Subsetsmentioning

confidence: 99%

NovelTM Datasets for English-Language Fiction, 1700-2009

Underwood¹,

Kimutis

Witte

2020

Journal of Cultural Analytics

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This report accompanies a collection of 210,266 volumes, predicted to be fiction, that researchers are encouraged to borrow for their own work. We divide the collection into seven subsets with different emphases (for instance, one where books written by men and women are represented equally, and one composed of only the most prominent and widely-held books). Comparing the pictures produced by these different subsets allows us to assess the resilience or fragility of recent quantitative arguments about literary history. Readers can also simply browse the report as a description of English-language fiction in HathiTrust Digital Library. This report describes a collection of 210,266 volumes of fiction drawn from HathiTrust Digital Library. 1 Our aim is to provide researchers greater access to English-language fiction in the Hathi collection and to advance understanding of the nature of the collection. Intellectual property laws keep us from providing the texts themselves, but researchers can use the volume IDs in our metadata tables to locate volumes in HathiTrust, or download extracted feature files that are openly available on the web. 2 In this report, we define seven samples of Hathi's English-language fiction that can be freely used by scholars for a range of purposes. We have offered seven distinct subsets because we do not think any single dataset will be universally valuable for all research questions. Some scholars are interested in literary production; others are interested in reception, and care mainly about widelyread works. Some scholars need a large collection of books. Others would prefer a smaller, manually-groomed list. So we selected volumes using a range of different criteria, and invested time in manually labeling some of the smaller lists. Through the process of manual annotation, we were able to illuminate some of the broad demographic contours of fiction over the last two centuries as represented in academic libraries. Thus, we see this report as ideally benefitting both practitioners of

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“…Distant reading as advocated by Moretti (); (cf. Piper, ; Bode, ) looks at large‐scale movements such as the historical development of specific types of novels (Bode, ), the emergence of a “global science fiction field” (Milner, ), the systemic dynamics of literary fiction on climate change (Milner & Burgmann, ), and the development of the (post‐)apocalyptic genre (Määttä, ). Sometimes referred to as a “leading contemporary sociologist of literature” (Milner & Burgmann, , p. 1), Moretti became popular due to his ambition to see the “big picture.” However, his belief that distance “is a condition of knowledge” (Moretti, , p. 57) might lead to “naïve representationalism” (Frow, , p. 241), which “misleadingly construes the resulting quantifications as data that are independent of interpretation” (Bennett, , p. 290).…”

Section: Contemporary Debatementioning

confidence: 99%

More than just a product: Strengthening literature in sociological analysis

Váňa

2020

Sociology Compass

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Contemporary sociology of literature is predominantly shaped by the research of literary production, which approaches literary works as black boxes and subordinates them to social interactions and institutions. Even sociologists who recognize usefulness of literature for its inner quality often look at literary texts as mere passive objects to be translated into sociological discourse. In proposing a new sociology of literature, I first briefly outline the history of sociological studies of literature; second, I introduce “the state of the art” in the sociology of literature; third, I explore the relationship between sociology and literature in more general terms; and lastly, I discuss approaches and ideas with the potential to become components of a new research program, which would be a powerful alternative to the mainstream paradigms in sociological studies of literature. Such a program would make it clear that sociology can greatly benefit from cooperation with literature when sociologists are sensitive to the subtleties and (especially aesthetic) specificities of literary works.

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The Equivalence of “Close” and “Distant” Reading; or, Toward a New Object for Data-Rich Literary History

Cited by 80 publications

References 24 publications

If these crawls could talk: Studying and documenting web archives provenance

If these crawls could talk: Studying and documenting web archives provenance

NovelTM Datasets for English-Language Fiction, 1700-2009

More than just a product: Strengthening literature in sociological analysis

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