Though I knew little to nothing about the concept of “distant reading” and the critical contexts from which it emerged, I spent much of my undergraduate career conducting what I now recognize as distant readings. I don’t recall how this preoccupation emerged — but I do remember obsessively scouring Chaucer concordances for all occurrences of “sigh” and “sick” (and its other Middle English iterations) to make arguments about Medieval lovesickness. I don’t recall the legitimacy of these arguments, or many specifics — but I do remember how refreshingly expansive the project was. I got to read widely and bring together scholarship in literature, writing, history, and medical anthropology. In some way, experimenting with this form of distant reading (even if I didn’t know it by name) gave me my first taste of cross-disciplinary research, which is something I am still invested in today.

I am slightly better informed in the way I conduct and represent research now — but despite my best efforts, I am often surprised by how many digital tools escape my knowledge. Not only do they present themselves to me in coursework (Agate? Help?), but also quite randomly in daily life. While avoiding work and chatting with an art history scholar at a Halloween party, I got an impromptu lesson on mapping technologies (which I should have taken notes on…). While sharing my latest research on the etymology of [ornithological] jizz with a non-academic interlocutor, he pulled up an n-gram for me and was surprised that I hadn’t already done so for my own research.

To that end, one of my Jstor DFR queries was “jizz ornithology” (I’m not sure why I chose that phrasing, and am curious as to what different versions of it would shore up — I am slightly afraid of just inputting “jizz,” but maybe I need to get over that fear for the sake of thorough research). Another bird-related single-word query I did enter was “alerion” (a footless mythological bird I have been able to find too little information on). Finally, I queried “infinite monkey theorem,” my best effort at a topic relevant to computation. (My current plan is to discuss it alongside the recently trending story of Betty, the Tweeting chicken.)

One of my enduring questions about distant reading is in how to keep up with the technology — knowing which digital tools will be most efficient, productive, and effective for the research I am trying to do.