FROM LINGUISTIC FEATURES TO CULTURAL PATTERNS

Abstract

This article discusses the concept of reading and presents a method thatcombines distant and close reading, while drawing on insights fromcomputational humanities. Focusing on basic features in language, distantreading allows for the construction of new types of text. By close reading thesetexts, it is possible to analyse cultural patterns across individual texts. Thismethod of reading is illustrated by two cases stemming from a project basedon a corpus of 11,955 Danish sermons. The first case begins with a distantreading of gendered pronouns in the corpus. The second case begins with adistant reading of named agents.*