Distant Reading and Information Visualization
Distant reading also makes extensive use of information visualization. While standard graphing techniques, such as line graphs, bar graphs, pie charts, and heat maps represent numerical data, information visualization represents qualitative, or non-numerical data, in an addition to numerical data (Jänicke et al., 2015). Distant reading has inspired several innovations in information visualization. Moretti even introduced his concept of distant reading with references to graphs, maps, and trees, employing examples from fiction. Graphs are employed for the analysis of genre change of historical novels. Maps are used for illustrating geography. Trees are used to classify different types of stories (Jänicke et al., 2015). Each of these categories contain a multitude of variations and adaptations for specific investigations.
Graphs are one of the most popular methods in distant reading. Consisting of nodes (vertices, or points on the graph) and edges (links connecting the nodes), they have widespread usage in many areas of the digital humanities, including visualizing social networks. Applied to distant reading, they show structural features of a text corpus, such as relationships between texts the visualization of relationships between the texts of a corpus. Each text is represented by a node, and the corresponding links form a network. In addition to nodes and interconnections, network visualizations can display a large amount of other useful information. For instance, the distance between the nodes may indicate the similarity between the paragraphs of a text, or stylistic similarity (Jänicke et al., 2015).
Geographical information in texts is usually represented by maps , as they are intuitive and easily understood. The utility of maps highlights the importance of geographical information systems (GIS) to the digital humanities. In distant reading, it is often useful to display all placenames mentioned in a text, or even in an entire corpus, on a map (Jänicke et al., 2015).
Trees are special cases of graphs that denote a hierarchical structure, rather than a networked structure. Tree visualizations can be used to visualize structure of TEI documents. A specialized tree technique used in distant reading is the Word Tree, which organizes text in a hierarchical manner. It may be used for representing sentences that have the same beginning (Jänicke et al., 2015).
Distant reading, however, has not been without criticism. One of the main goals of the paradigm is objectivity within a strictly scientific framework, in which a scientific and democratizing approach is applied to the humanities. It was intended to free scholars from associating meaning “with the univocal nature of authorial intention rather than with the multiple encounters between a text and its readers” (Ascari, 2014). Although distant reading has become an important paradigm in the digital humanities, it has been criticized for oversimplifying texts, potentially diminishing the capacity for critical thinking. It may also lead scholars to inadvertently adopt biased literary viewpoints that are intended to be objective (Ascari, 2014).
Maurizio Ascari of the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at the University of Bologna, Italy, insists that the study of literary phenomena is not well-served with an exclusive emphasis on objectivity and quantitative analysis, and instead emphasizes the need for a “combined approach”, leveraging the usefulness of computational techniques in such a way that phenomena are “problematized” rather than simplified, and by accepting that complexity cannot be addressed through objective approaches. He comes to the following conclusion: “We should rather evolve new theories from a direct confrontation with texts and other cultural artifacts, for popular literature deserves the same amount of critical attention that was previously devoted only to the canon ” (Ascari, 2014).
