Distant Reading

Course goals

• Students gain insight in theoretical reflections on computational literary studies and consider the opportunities offered by these techniques in the practice of research as well as their limitations.
• Students develop basic skills necessary for the use of these techniques, focusing on basic programming skills for data-driven textual analysis.
• Students learn to formulate a research plan based on a question that can only be resolved, as a whole or in part, through the digital analysis of textual corpora.
• Students learn to compare between the goals and the results of research conducted along the traditional lines of textual analysis and the new line of computational analysis.

Content

In recent years new digital analytic techniques have generated much interest as well as discussions among literary scholars. The concept ‘Distant Reading’, introduced by Franco Moretti served as a catalyst of these discussions and his approach is the starting point of this course. By now, however, the field of computational literary studies has developed beyond these early positions, and the innovations in the fields of machine learning and large language models have opened up both new lines of enquiry and new concerns. What are the techniques that comprise computational literary studies, and what are the analytic powers ascribed to these techniques? These techniques have been applied in worldwide research, not only conducted by literary scholars but also by cultural historians and media scholars. These disciplines for instance intersect in research into conceptual shifts in textual cultures, or in research into shifts in stylistic trends in textual styles. 


 

Additional information

This course is equivalent to TLRMV16202 Tlc-Distant Reading (2.5 EC course).

This course is open to students in the RMA programmes Comparative Literary Studies and Nederlandse literatuur en cultuur, MA Literature Today, as well as students in other RMA programmes interested in new ways of analysing textual cultures. We will not only discuss these topics in theory, but enhance the students' learning by offering them training in relevant tools and techniques currently used in data and text analysis.