Ways of not reading Gertrude Stein

I situate the controversial critical strategies of “distant reading” and “surface reading” in the reception history of Gertrude Stein, an author whose work was frequently declared “unreadable.” I argue that an early twentieth-century history of compromised forms of reading, including women’s reading and information work, subtends both the technology with which distant reading may be carried out and the ways in which an author’s work comes to be understood as a “corpus.

A fragmentising interface to a large corpus of digitized text: (Post)humanism and non-consumptive reading via features

While the idea of distant reading does not rule out the possibility of close reading of the individual components of the corpus of digitized text that is being distant-read, this ceases to be the case when parts of the corpus are, for reasons relating to intellectual property, not accessible for consumption through downloading followed by close reading. Copyright restrictions on material in collections of digitized text such as the HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) necessitates providing facilities for non-consumptive reading, one of the approaches to which consists of providing users with features from the text in the form of small fragments of text, instead of the text itself. We argue that, contrary to expectation, the fragmentary quality of the features generated by the reading interface does not necessarily imply that the mode of reading enabled and mediated by these features points in an anti-humanist direction. We pose the fragmentariness of the features as paradigmatic of the fragmentation with which digital techniques tend, more generally, to trouble the humanities. We then generalize our argument to put our work on feature-based non-consumptive reading in dialogue with contemporary debates that are currently taking place in philosophy and in cultural theory and criticism about posthumanism and agency. While the locus of agency in such a non-consumptive practice of reading does not coincide with the customary figure of the singular human subject as reader, it is possible to accommodate this fragmentising practice within the terms of an ampler notion of agency imagined as dispersed across an entire technosocial ensemble. When grasped in this way, such a practice of reading may be considered posthumanist but not necessarily antihumanist.Ope

The relationship between phonological and morphological deficits in Broca's aphasia: further evidence from errors in verb inflection

A previous study of 10 patients with Broca’s aphasia demonstrated that the advantage for producing the past tense of irregular over regular verbs exhibited by these patients was eliminated when the two sets of past-tense forms were matched for phonological complexity (Bird, Lambon Ralph, Seidenberg, McClelland, & Patterson, 2003). The interpretation given was that a generalised phonological impairment was central to the patients’ language deficits, including their poor performance on regular past tense verbs. The current paper provides further evidence in favour of this hypothesis, on the basis of a detailed analysis of the errors produced by these same 10 patients in reading, repetition, and sentence completion for a large number of regular, irregular, and nonce verbs. The patients’ predominant error types in all tasks and for all verb types were close and distant phonologically related responses. The balance between close and distant errors varied along three continua: the severity of the patient (more distant errors produced by the more severely impaired patients); the difficulty of the task (more distant errors in sentence completion > reading > repetition); the difficulty of the item (more distant errors for novel word forms than real verbs). A position analysis for these phonologically related errors revealed that vowels were most likely to be preserved and that consonant onsets and offsets were equally likely to be incorrect. Critically, the patients’ errors exhibited a strong tendency to simplify the phonological form of the target. These results are consistent with the notion that the patients’ relatively greater difficulty with regular past tenses reflects a phonological impairment that is sensitive to the complexity of spoken forms

A Bird’s-Eye View of the Past: Digital History, Distant Reading and Sport History

Advances in computer technologies have made it easier than ever before for historians to access a wealth of sources made available in the digital era. This article investigates one way that historians have engaged with the challenges and opportunities of this ‘infinite archive’: distant reading. We define distant reading as an umbrella term that embraces many practices, including data mining, aggregation, text analysis, and the visual representations of these practices. This paper investigates the utility of distant reading as a research tool via three newspaper case studies concerning Muhammad Ali, women’s surfing in Australia, and homophobic language and Australian sport. The research reveals that the usefulness, effectiveness, and success of distant reading is dependent on numerous factors. While valuable in many instances, distant reading is rarely an end in itself and can be most powerful when paired with the traditional historical skills of close reading

Rethinking inventories in the digital age: the case of the Old Bailey

This article builds on the digitized version of the Old Bailey Proceedings (www.oldbaileyonline.org) by first extracting the indictments from the surrounding text and then subjecting the words they include, and objects they describe, to analysis. This entails working with a corpus of over a million words. At this scale, close reading no longer serves the historian well. It would require far more time than is reasonable or feasible; and a strategy of ‘distant reading’ is adopted here to allow analysis to focus on larger units of text

Beyond Darwinian Distance: Situating Distant Reading in a Feminist Ut Pictura Poesis Tradition

Looking from a distance, as a condition of knowledge, participates within a long-standing Western tradition of power relations. This article considers the use of "distant reading" as theorized by Franco Moretti in his book by the same title and suggests that the method of literary analysis that uses such a metaphor should be aware and critical of that tradition. Moreover, this article suggests that we look to examples in literature, such as ekphrastic poetry by women for possible alternative approaches to reading at a distance as an approach to large corpora of text. Essentially, a feminist approach to distant reading is possible and necessary, and this paper calls for making such work more central to our discussions of distant reading by literary scholars

Distance and Depth

A talk on distant reading and close reading at the Thinking Big conference at the Institute of English Studies

Gower as Data: Exploring the Application of Machine Learning to Gower’s Middle English Corpus

Distant reading, a digital humanities method in wide use, involves processing and analyzing a large amount of text through computer programs. In treating texts as data, these methods can highlight trends in diction, themes, and linguistic patterns that individual readers may miss or critical traditions may obscure. Though several scholars have undertaken projects using topic models and text mining on Middle English texts, the nonstandard orthography of Middle English makes this process more challenging than for our counterparts in later literature. This collaborative project uses Gower’s Confessio Amantis as a small, fixed corpus for analysis. We employ natural language processing to reexamine the Confessio’s themes, adding data analysis to the more traditional close reading strategies of Gower scholarship. We use Gower’s work as a case study both to help reduce the potential variants across textual versions and to more deeply investigate the corpus than distant reading normally allows. Here, we share our initial findings as well as our methodologies. We hope to share resources that will allow other scholars to engage in similar types of projects