Literary Criticism and the Digital Humanities

Canberra.
It’s a rainy morning in Canberra, and I’ve made it to the inaugural conference of the Australasian Association for the Digital Humanities. The opening keynote is by Alan Liu, who begins by noting the rise of the ‘digital humanities’ concept, and its attendant controversies (what do we mean by the term, in the first place?).

Alan’s specific interest is in literary studies, and in the debate between ‘close’ and ‘distant’ reading. New critical close reading first forged the professional identity of the humanities, especially in literary studies, but distant reading has now emerged as a conscious agenda of the digital humanities, and is shaping new perspectives on academic literacies.

So what is close reading, then? It emerged from the southern US, through the literary scholars Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren and their Understanding Poetry, and spread from there; its focus was squarely on the literary text, with other contextual information (the author’s biography, sociocultural contexts, etc.) seen as useful but clearly ancillary information. Texts were supposed to be approached afresh, with open eyes, as concrete ‘things’. The question is not what they mean, but what they are. This approach was also aligned with the new agrarianism of the ‘middle south’ in the US, which sought to distance itself from the prevailing worldviews both of the old south and of the progressive north.

By contrast, distant reading takes a more abstract approach to literary theory, and was kickstarted by Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees. This approach combines older reading methods with the new sociology of literature, and incorporates a digital humanities element into its work; for it, literature is not a thing, but a model to be examined at scale. This scale relies on distributed and aggregated approaches: a delegation of reading across a large number of researchers (or to digital technologies), and an abstraction from full texts to their core constituent elements (titles, authors, keywords, etc.). Such analysis can then also be represented graphically, and those graphs take the place of in-depth block quotes from from individual words.

What’s lost is any sense of individual texts, authors, and value; what’s gained is a more comprehensive sense of ‘the great unread’, of the wider world of literature. A sense of the collective system of literature emerges. The approach is sparked further by the contribution of the digital humanities; distant reading at scale is fundamentally enabled by digital technologies, and text analysis is a core function in this process.

But the opposition between close and distant reading is not as clean as it might seem – really, both connect and combine in a single paradigm of critical literary analysis. Close reading did not remain a separate approach for long, but subsumed (or was subsumed into) other approaches; indeed, its very closeness of reading had surprising links to a more algorithmic processing of the structure of the texts it examined.

‘Close reading’ may be a phantom term, then – its definition depends on what kind of ‘distant reading’ we’re talking about. Ultimately, both close and distant reading are intimately linked, and there is always an interconnection of textual data and patterns through analysis. Close reading moves through analysis, interpretation, and argument; distant reading through text analysis, modelling, and visualisation, but these steps are roughly equivalent and aligned. Distant reading is developing by modelling close reading paradigms, and in doing so is not yet exploring the full potential of the digital humanities, much as early photography continued to model the paradigms of contemporary painting.