Close And Distant Reading In The Digital Humanities
Central to the categorization of methods in the digital humanities are the concepts of close reading and distant reading. Close reading of a text refers to the fundamental method of literary criticism. First emerging in British literary studies in the 1920s, it has been defined as follows: “Essentially, close reading means reading to uncover layers of meaning that lead to deep comprehension” (Boyles & Scherer, 2012). The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers clarifies this definition by emphasizing its usefulness in education: “Close, analytic reading stresses engaging with a text of sufficient complexity directly and examining meaning thoroughly and methodically, encouraging students to read and reread deliberately” (Boyles & Scherer, 2012).
Close reading emphasizes interpretation, or hermeneutics of a text, often passage-by-passage, by identifying its central themes and development. In close reading, important areas of analysis include: the interaction of people, events, and ideas; the specific words and phrases that are used; the style and structure of the text; and patterns of argumentation (Jänicke et al., 2015). Close reading is not dependent upon digital tools and techniques. However, it can benefit from visualization approaches, for example, to annotate various features of the source text with different colours and underlining styles (straight or wavy lines, circles). Additional annotations can be easily placed next to the corresponding text to which they refer. In this case, digitized texts, digital editions, accessibility of web portals, and computational tools complement the traditional approach of close reading with which most humanities fields work. In this way, close reading is enriched with new possibilities, such as collaborative annotation (Jänicke et al., 2015).
Distant reading focuses on the analysis of large collections of texts, such as digital archives. The concept is relatively new, and was introduced and developed by Italian literary theorist Franco Moretti, who co-founded the Stanford Literary Lab. His work in this area began in the early 2000s and was fully treated in his 2013 book Distant Reading (Moretti, 2013). Although distant reading is generally associated with the work of Moretti in the early 21st century, a genealogy of distant reading can be traced back to the middle of the twentieth century, before the widespread availability of computers and the Internet. This precursor to distant learning was particularly influenced by social science and employing an experimental approach to literary criticism wherein hypotheses were formulated, and based on textual or social evidence or samples, conclusions were drawn (Underwood, 2017).
