from Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees

My first encounter with “distant reading,” beyond Roberto Busa and his famous concordance, occurred last summer in a digital humanities seminar I took as a Masters student. For the course, we divided up Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, and focused individually on different sections of the book. As an initial exposure to distant reading, I must admit I found the visualizations in the book to be lackluster, and therefore was not convinced that distant reading was a useful analytical tool. I suppose I’m not convinced that taking a quantitative approach to literature is a “good thing”?

I am, nonetheless, excited to see what happens in our workshop tomorrow. I ran a query through the JStor DFR portal and downloaded a substantial CSV file. My query, “coffee,” yielded 1,000 results from a variety of journals. The usefulness of the results, of course, is not clear from the data aggregated in the CSV file as very few of the relevant hits are accompanied by an abstract, but I’m intrigued by the prospect of doing more with this…