Jockers 2013

Jockers, Matthew. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013.

Revolution

"The questions we may now ask were previously inconceivable, and to answer these questions requires a new methodology, a new way of thinking about our object of study." (4)

Evidence

"Science has welcomed big data and scaled its methods accordingly. With a huge amount of digital-textual data, we must do the same. Close reading is not only impractical as a means of evidence gathering in the digital library, but big data render it totally inappropriate as a method of studying literary history." (7)

"The literary scholar of the twenty-first century can no longer be content with anecdotal evidence, with random 'things' gathered from a few, even 'representative,' texts. We must strive to understand these things we find interesting in the context of everything else, including a mass of possibly 'uninteresting' texts." (8)

"Like it or not, today, today's literary-historical scholar can no longer risk being just a close reader: the sheer quantity of available data makes the traditional practice of close reading untenable as an exhaustive or definitive method of evidence gathering. Something important will inevitably be missed." (9)

"More interesting, more exciting, than panning for nuggets in digital archives is the ability to go beyond the pan and exploit the trommel of computation to process, condense, deform, and analyze the deeper strata from which these nuggets were born, to unearth, for the first time, what these corpora really contain.' (9-10)

Tradition

computational text analysis as "by all accounts the foundation of digital humanities and its deepest root" (15)

digital humanities tends to prefer web-based applications; but "the web is not yet a great platform upon which to build or deliver tools for doing text analysis 'at scale'" (18)

Macroanalysis

distant reading --> microanalysis; "places the emphasis on the systematic examination of data" (25)

"This is no longer reading that we are talking about -- even if programmers have come to use the term read as a way of naming functions that load a text file into computer memory. Broad attempts to generalize about a period or about a genre by reading and synthesizing a series of texts are just another sort of microanalysis. This is simply close reading, selective sampling, of multiple 'cases'; individual texts are digested, and then generalizations drawn. It remains a largely qualitative approach." (25)

"I am suggesting a blended approach." (26)

"the macroscale perspective should inform our close readings of the individual texts by providing, if nothing else, a fuller sense of the literary-historical milieu in which a given book exists." (28)

"The larger argument I wish to make is that the study of literature should be approached not simply as an examination of seminal works but as an examination of an aggregated ecosystem or 'economy' of texts." (32)