Comment by pxc
1 day ago
I read a book maybe a decade ago on the "digital humanities". I wish now I could remember the title and author. :(
Anyway, it introduced me to the idea of using computational methods in the humanities, including literature. I found it really interesting at the time!
One of the the terms it introduced me to is "distant reading", whose name mirrors that of a technique you may have studied in your gen eds if you went to university ('close reading"). The idea is that rather than zooming in on some tiny piece of text to examine very subtle or nuanced meanings, you zoom out to hundreds or thousands of texts, using computers to search them for insights that only emerge from large bodies of work as wholes. The book argued that there are likely some questions that it is only feasible to ask this way.
An old friend of mine used techniques like this for dissertation in rhetoric, learning enough Python along the way to write the code needed for the analyses she wanted to do. I thought it was pretty cool!
I imagine LLMs are probably positioned now to push distant reading forward in an number of ways: enabling new techniques, allowing old techniques to be used without writing code, and helping novices get started with writing some code. (A lot of the maintainability issues that come with LLM code generation happily don't apply to research projects like this.)
Anyway, if you're interested in other computational techniques you can use to enrich this kind of reading, you might enjoy looking into "distant reading": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_reading
> I wish now I could remember the title and author.
LLMs are great at finding media by vague descriptions. ;)
According to Claude (easy guess from the wikipedia link?):
The book is almost certainly by *Franco Moretti*, who coined the term "distant reading." Given the timeframe ("maybe a decade ago") and the description, it's most likely one of these two:
1. *"Distant Reading"* (2013) — A collection of Moretti's essays that directly takes the concept as its title. This would fit well with "about a decade ago."
2. *"Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History"* (2005) — His earlier and very influential work that laid out the quantitative, computational approach to literary analysis, even if it didn't use "distant reading" as prominently in the title.
Moretti, who founded the Stanford Literary Lab, was the major proponent of the idea that we should analyze literature not just through careful reading of individual canonical texts, but through large-scale computational analysis of hundreds or thousands of works—looking at trends in genre evolution, plot structures, title lengths, and other patterns that only emerge at scale.
Given that the commenter specifically remembers learning the term "distant reading" from the book, my best guess is *"Distant Reading" (2013)*, though "Graphs, Maps, Trees" is also a strong possibility if their memory of "a decade" is approximate.
After some digging, I think it was likely this one: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5346/Digital-Humanities