Distant Reading

Analyzing cultural production poses problems related not only to the size and the scale of the corpus, but also to the distance of the analytical perspective from the text itself - or texts. To clarify different scopes for an analytical reading in digital humanities, in 1999, Franco Moretti proposed to differentiate between a “close reading”, which operates on a small canon of texts, and a “distant reading”, which approaches the study of literature and textual data at large. In op-position to traditional close reading, he outlines an “abstract model for literary history” (Moretti 2005), to put objects in perspective and create a form of knowledge based on distance.

It allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes - or genres and systems. […] If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something. We always pay a price for theoretical knowledge: reality is infinite-ly rich; concepts are abstract, are poor. But it’s preciseinfinite-ly this ‘poverty’ that makes it possible to handle them, and therefore to know.

(Moretti 2000: 57-58)

The level of abstraction, as Moretti himself notes, is directly proportional to the ambition of the analysis, and it comes with losses. However, if the aim is to account for macroscopic dynamics in literature, as well as in other humanistic disciplines, losses will be minimized by the possibility to marginalize biases and detect large-scale patterns in a more objective way, thanks to the level of abstraction granted by a distant reading. Distant reading can be described as a type of macro-ana-lysis (Jockers 2013), but instead of calling for quantitative methods, it rather appeals to the neces-sity of understanding cultural production through visual models.

The use of distant reading is to be intended as a response to the need for a new methodo-logy to approach large volumes of data in the humanities, together with the complex digital scape where culture circulates. To face the uncertainties of a traditional, uni-disciplinary methodology, as we find ourselves in front of a growing amount of information, the present research project blends together a qualitative analysis of cultural forms and media industries with the adoption of infographics and the creation of new visualizations at scales. While acknowledging the potentiali-ties of a uniquely distant, abstract view, I therefore position my research at an intermediate level, by adopting an integrative model and combining distant reading with close reading (Coles and Lein 2013). That is to say, we need to adopt visual methods that are able to overcome the risks of both a close reading, which cannot account for the complex ecological context, and a solely di-stant observation approach, which tend to remain on the surface level of the analysis, by

dismis-sing the specificity of dismis-single cases. From a survey on close and distant reading methodologies, Stefan Jänicke et al. notably identified in interactive visualizations the solution for providing

“distant reading visualizations that allow to interactively drill down to specific portions of the data.” (Jänicke et al. 2015), able to both “highlights potentially interesting patterns” and “drill down on these patterns for further exploration.” (ibidem)

In 2009, Monika Bednarek proposed a similar approach and reflected on a corpus-based methodology, taking into consideration a “three-pronged approach [that] involves a. large-scale computerized corpus analysis, b. semi-automated small-scale corpus analysis, and c. manual ana-lysis of individual texts. As such, this is an approach that incorporates macro- (large-scale quanti-tative analysis), meso- (small-scale quantiquanti-tative analysis), and micro- (individual text analysis) levels.” (Bednarek 2009: 19) These three levels of analysis allow to zoom in from a distant rea-ding overview (macro-analysis), to a more detailed close rearea-ding (micro-analysis), passing throu-gh an intermediate level of meso-analysis. In the application proposed here, I will focus precisely on this in-between meso-level of analysis, while observing and exposing a small-scale corpus with the aid of data visualization. Through this approach, information can be scaled-up and down, thus giving the possibility to pursue both distant and close reading.

Building upon Marta Boni’s work on distant reading in audiovisual studies (Boni 2016a), the purpose is to ultimately consider television series as non-discrete objects that are part of com-plex cultural, industrial, technological ecosystems in constant evolution. In this sense, abstraction and non-discretion will be the main guides for the selection of visual models able to give over-views of such a complexity. To quote Marta Boni, “non-discretion encourages analysts and re-searchers to take into account big chunks of data, which could contribute in building historical

operations able to substitute a work based on individual names.” (Boni 2016b, online) I therefore looked for a visual model that could grant the possibility of zooming in and out on the visualiza-tion, by allowing to easily switch from non-discretion to discretion. If distance, abstraction and non-discretion do have limits for an accurate interpretation of the corpus, closing in on specific details might help to avoid the biases of a macroscopic view. After all, as I observed, the antholo-gy form is a transhistorical model trapped into historically contingent uses that need to be obser-ved at different degrees. In the following paragraphs, I will first discuss visual models suggested by Moretti to facilitate the comprehension of large-scale dynamics in literary studies, by asses-sing their possible applications in media studies. In a second part, I will then propose an hybrid visual model of my corpus that both shows collective progression and the specificity of each case, in line with the methodology discussed.