In his essay “Sur la Lecture,” Roland Barthes (1984) expresses his doubts regarding what he calls “Méta-lecture,” or the reading of reading. It is nothing but “un éclat d’idées, de craintes, de ...désirs, de jouissances, d’oppressions.” My essay proposes that the ideas, fears, desires, jouissances and opressions evoked when discussing reading deserve a closer examination. There should be a systematic discussion about the problems of “Méta-lecture.” The discourse about reading has its own problems, tropes, and ways of expression. Regardless of where or in what context a text about reading is written, it faces the same fundamental problems in regarding its subject: reading is a black box. Some may even doubt the existence of a common conceptual intersection in the spectrum of practices referred to as reading (Honold/Parr 2018). This highlights the essential indefinability of the concept of reading. What reading is in each case can hardly be reduced to a general concept. This indeterminacy is complicated by the difficulties of observation: reading cannot be isolated as such, but can only be observed as it is performed within specific contexts. Furthermore, this act of observation itself involves reading and is thus always self-reflective. In my essay, I demonstrate the strategies employed by texts on reading from different periods (Ickelsamer 1527, Keyn 1803, Moretti 2013, Wolf 2018) to compensate for the indeterminancy of reading.
This article analyses rubrics in Middle High German miscellany manuscripts of short texts in rhyming couplets (Reimpaargedichte). A corpus consisting of 1433 rubrics from 68 manuscripts was created ...to be able to perform this study. As rubrics in medieval manuscripts were not authorial, but composed by scribes, they offer insights into the reception of the texts. This paper analyses their features and functions as a proxy to interrogate the standing and status of Reimpaargedichte between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. The main methodology is distant reading, i.e. the application and interpretation of statistical methods on a textual corpus. The features analyzed include the length of the rubrics, their level of variation, the presence of author names, and vocabulary. Although no general patterns regarding length nor level of variation were detected, some important conclusions can be drawn: 1. there were no clear markers of literary genre in rubrics; 2. authorship was mostly absent, except for some specific cases of famous authors; 3. relatively stable keywords were used to identify particular texts, but they were more common in manuscripts with narrative texts (Erzählungen) and less common in later manuscripts dominated by the genre known as Minnereden. Furthermore, the analysis revealed that rubrics used a series of linguistic procedures to show that they participated in a different speech act than the main text – they embodied an interaction between scribes and readers, in which the former framed the reception of the work.
Recent research into architectural form analysis using deep learning (DL) methods has shown potential to identify features from large collections of building data, shedding new light into formal ...aspects of our built environment. As these methods begin to enter architectural, urban, and policy design contexts, it becomes important to develop critical approaches to employing them. In this paper, we document and reflect upon our efforts to create a custom dataset of 3-D models of 331 wooden churches located within the Carpathian Mountains of Eastern Europe, and to use DL methods to explore this dataset with the goal of revealing unexpected formal traits and advancing architectural scholarship on this subject. While existing scholarship groups them into four distinct stylistic categories, our analysis reveals stylistic overlaps, previously undetected micro styles, and shared architectural features. We posit the resulting analyses as an example of an 'architectural distant reading' that enriches our understanding of this architectural typology through an unprecedentedly detailed portrait of its formal characteristics based on a large architectural dataset. Crucially, drawing on recent developments in critical data and algorithm studies, we show how the dataset construction and subsequent analyses, and their results, were shaped by slow, manual data curation processes, methodological constraints, subjective decisions, and engagements with archives, domain experts. We thus illustrate how DL techniques might be contextualized for architectural studies in relation to other modes of knowledge and labour, and offer a detailed case study of state-of-the-art computational methods enriching established approaches to architectural form and historical analysis.
Why Distant Reading Isn’t DRUCKER, JOHANNA
PMLA : Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
05/2017, Letnik:
132, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Language is easy to capture, but hard to read.
—John Cayley, “Terms of Reference and Vectoralist Transgressions,”
Amodern 2: Network Archaeology
If
Reading
were used exclusively to designate human ...engagement with symbolic codes, then it would be relatively easy to dismiss
distant reading
as an oxymoron—unless it were referring to mystical scrying from dizzying heights or deciphering printed matter from across a room. Debates about what constitutes human reading are as varied as the many hermeneutic traditions and pedagogical or cognitive approaches on which they draw (Bruns). But
reading
has been used to describe many mechanical processes and sorting techniques. Punch-card rods, slotted light triggers, Jacquard looms, and many other devices were reading encoded information long before the standard MARC (machine-readable cataloguing) records became ubiquitous in library systems in the 1970s. Outmoded mechanical reading devices have a seductive, steampunk fascination. Many mimicked human actions and behaviors. In addition, these older technologies were embedded in human social systems and exchanges whose processes the machines' operators could partly read. The machines' actions were encoded and decoded by individuals' cognitive intelligence even if the machines functioned automatically.
Abstract In his article “A Distant View of Close Reading: On Irony and Terrorism around 1977,” György Fogarasi investigates the contemporary critical potentials of close reading in the light of ...recent developments in computation assisted analysis. While rhetorical reading has come to appear outdated in a “digital” era equipped with widgets for massive archival analysis (an era, namely, more keen on “distant,” rather than “close,” reading), Paul de Man’s insights concerning irony might prove useful in trying to account for the difficulties we must face in a world increasingly permeated with dissimulative forms of threat and violence. The article draws on three major texts from 1977: de Man’s draft on “Literature Z,” his lecture on “The Concept of Irony,” and the first and second Geneva Protocols. The reading of these texts purports to demonstrate the relevance of de Man’s theory of irony with respect to the epistemology of “terrorism,” but it also serves as an occasion to reflect upon questions of distance, speed, range, scale, or frequency, and the chances of “rhythmanalysis.”
Esta reseña evalúa el trabajo más reciente de Ted Underwood: “Distant Horizons. Digital evidence and literary change”, publicado en 2019 por la Universidad de Chicago. El autor aborda en él ...diferentes cuestiones de la historia de la literatura a partir de la aplicación de métodos cuantitativos.
This article examines the ways in which distant reading, as a facet of the digital turn in the humanities, has affected the study of literature, with particular attention to the ways the digital turn ...has impacted the examination of authorship, genre, and style. In the process, it reflects on the ways in which distant reading developed both as a concept in the history of world literature and as a methodological approach that contributed to the evolution of computer-assisted study of literature.Cet article examine les façons dont la lecture à distance, en tant que facette du virage numérique dans les sciences humaines, a affecté l’étude de la littérature, avec une attention particulière aux façons dont le virage numérique a influencé l’examen de la paternité, le genre et le style. Dans le processus, il réfléchit sur les façons dont la lecture à distance a développé à la fois comme un concept dans l’histoire de la littérature mondiale et comme une approche méthodologique qui a contribué à l’évolution de l’étude assistée par ordinateur de la littérature.
The paper focuses on the role of operationalization (i.e., the building of models and the setting down of rules of annotation) in quantitative research in the humanities, and especially in the ...history of ideas. On the one hand, the presence of fully explicit annotation rules and fully operationalized concepts allows one to formulate claims that are clearly verifiable, or falsifiable, or in any case testable. On the other hand, full operationalization seems to have some controversial aspects: is it practically feasible? Is verifiability what we always want to achieve in the humanities? Are operationalized concepts semantically “well-anchored”?
The relationship of F.M Dostoevsky with Jews attracted the attention of numerous scholars throughout the years, many of whom attempted to grapple with the views of the great writer and their origin. ...In this article we will attempt to show this relationship by analyzing six of Dostoevsky’s greatest novels, written through the entirety of his career. We are analyzing these novels using Distant Reading in conjunction with Close Reading, tools that are commonly used in the field of digital humanities, which enabled us to show visually the extent of F.M. Dostoevsky’s engagement with this topic. The study poses two research questions: 1. To what extent did the writer use the more denigrating term “Zhid”? 2. Can we see a correlation between the writer’s portrayal of Jews with the definition of Anti-Semitism as it was known during his era? The obtained results show that there is clearly a correlation between the definition of anti-Semitism as it was understood at the time of Dostoevsky and the “Jew” as depicted in his novels, as the financial motif is paramount in the depiction of Jews as this is the central topic in 49% of the negative sentences in which the word “Jew” appears, with 59% of these sentences classified as stereotypes. The negative financial stereotype constitutes 32% of the entire corpus. In addition, we found the term “Zhid” is commonly used by the writer, a variation of which constitutes 75% of the total terms used to depict Jews.
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