Rachel Buurma DH Seminar

Questions

• what training do we need? My sense is some coding but more stats.

readings

Underwood

• In fact, as Katherine Bode has noted, the questions posed by distant readers are often continuous with the older tradition of book history (Reading); as Jim English has noted, they are also continuous with the sociology of literature (“Everywhere”).
• Distant reading is better understood as part of a broad intellectual shift that has also been transforming the social sciences. The
• In the twentieth century, the difficulty of representing unstructured text divided the quantitative social sciences from the humanities. Sociologists
• But much of the momentum it acquired over the last decade came from the same representational strategies that are transforming social science. Instead of simply counting words or volumes, distant readers increasingly treat writing as a field of relations to be modeled, using equations that connect linguistic variables to social ones
• Conversation of this kind amounts to an empty contest of slogans between the humanities and social sciences, and I think Thomas Piketty spends the right amount of time on those contests: “Disciplinary disputes and turf wars are of little or no importance” (Capital, 33).
• A grad student could do a lot of damage to received ideas with a thousand novels, manually gathered metadata, and logistic regression.
• What really matter, I think, are not new tools but three general principles. First, a negative principle: there’s simply a lot we don’t know about literary history above the scale of (say) a hundred volumes. We’ve become so used to ignorance at this scale, and so good at bluffing our way around it, that we tend to overestimate our actual knowledge.6 Second, the theoretical foundation for macroscopic research isn’t something we have to invent from scratch; we can learn a lot from computational social science. (The notion of a statistical model, for instance, is a good place to start.) The third thing that matters, of course, is getting at the texts themselves, on a scale that can generate new perspectives. This is probably where our collaborative energies could most fruitfully be focused. The tools we’re going to need are not usually specific to the humanities. But the corpora often are.