Diggable Data, Scalable Reading and New Humanities Scholarship

Abstract

Franco Moretti's call for “distant reading” of texts is being been taken up by scholars working in a digital milieu, though not without controversy. With mass digitization of print culture the potential for new types of investigation into the human condition is enormous. In this paper, we will present and contextualize work on Project Bamboo in light of new modes of humanities digital scholarship and reading, including text mining and corpora analysis. The paper will look at some approaches - including the Google Ngram viewer - as examples of the benefits and pitfalls of textual analysis at scale. It will then argue for a scalable approach to humanities research, both distant and close.