CESTA Seminar | M. Widner "The Future of Distant Reading? Models and Scholarly Editions"

Date
Tue November 7th 2017, 12:00 - 1:15pm
Event Sponsor
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA)
Location
Bldg. 160, Rm. 433A
CESTA Seminar | M. Widner "The Future of Distant Reading? Models and Scholarly Editions"

Recent scholarship has begun to address limitations and even potential methodological flaws in high-profile distant reading projects. Katherine Bode argues that, rather than opposed, close and distant reading are in many ways equivalent. As an antidote, she calls for the creation of scholarly editions of data that model the literary system under examination. In a similar vein, Richard Jean So argues that many distant reading projects describe rather than model their corpus, thereby missing out on the possibilities for more nuanced analysis. Bode and So thus both highlight the importance of understanding and making explicit the interpretive nature of data collection and analysis. In this discussion, we will consider the connections between the two essays, their implications for distant reading as a research method, and how digital humanities scholars can respond to these challenges.

Because this event will be a seminar-style discussion, not a lecture, it is strongly recommended that you read both articles before attending.

• Bode | http://mlq.dukejournals.org/content/78/1/77.abstract

• So | http://www.mlajournals.org/doi/abs/10.1632/pmla.2017.132.3.668

Michael Widner is the Academic Technology Specialist for the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages and a member of the Stanford Libraries' Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research. He collaborates with faculty on digital humanities and instructional technology projects. He also teaches courses and workshops on literature and the digital humanities. He received his Ph.D. in English from The University of Texas at Austin, where he studied late medieval English and French literature. His most recent publication, “Toward Text-Mining the Middle Ages: Digital Scriptoria and Networks of Labor,” is forthcoming in The Routledge Research Companion to Digital Medieval Literature.

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