Moretti’s assertion of the notion of distant reading as a reaction to the flaws in the close reading process spoke to all the concerns of my 20-year-old undergraduate literature major heart (may she rest in peace). As quoted in the Ramsay text, he notes, “[T]he trouble with close reading (in all of its incarnations, from the new criticism to deconstruction) is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon.” Oftentimes, I found myself getting so close to a particular text that I could no longer even convince myself of the arguments I was making. I mean, I could only disregard author’s intent to a certain extent. Maybe they chose to use “azure” rather than “blue” because they were a pretentious fuck and not, in fact, to conjure up images of Arabia…I digress. This method seems like it could be useful for identifying broader trends within and across certain historical moments. For instance, if I could see a wide range of accounts of the word “azure” being used in conjuncture with references to the Middle East during the literature of a certain time, I might be convinced. (Not sure if this is exactly the point of distant reading, but I’m still grappling with it a bit.)

The JStor project could definitely be useful for some of the stickier terms I’m looking at in my studies. I submitted a “queer world making” query (or should I say “queer-y”…that joke has literally never been made before). Because this is a tricky concept to nail down, I’m interested in seeing the approaches taken to it across a variety of fields. In fact, I was quite surprised by the number of results the search turned up. Furthermore, I think that a method similar to this would probably be quite useful outside the range of peer-reviewed journals. I would love to examine digital rhetoric through this lens, for instance. Just a few points of interest might include which words appear most frequently in certain digital spaces, which sites are arguably more friendly toward (or perpetuate more rhetorical activity regarding) the interests of certain communities, what the ideal message length is for a successful online dating interaction, etc. As I stated before, I’m still wrapping my mind around the notion of analyzing texts from this cold and distant approach, but I’m sure I’ll muster a few more uses for this method after some practical experience.