I’m excited about this workshop later, but I plan on doing a distant reading project for this class, so, yeah. I have my .csv file, and even figured out how to combine the 1000 .csv files into a single file. I had to use the command prompt, which is a big deal for me that I used it well (even if it took me way longer than it should). Now, I have to just figure out something to do with all of this information.

I have never done a distant reading before, though I took Steve Carr’s class and learned a bunch about it. I’m glad I’m going to actually try to do something this time around. So, I guess I’ve sort of gotten to know distant reading in a way that I know Marxist criticism or something like that. Yet, I do think distant reading is kind of a hybrid of a method and a sort of a theoretical lens. Sort of like it’s a school of theory but also kind of a nuts and bolts approach to reading at the same time. A weird sort of hybrid. But maybe all theories are sorts of hybrids like this? I guess there could be a case for that. Maybe it is a matter of degree or kind.

Anyway, Ramsay’s take on algorithmic criticism is, for me, a convincing reason why it is kind of both a method and a theoretical lens—which I find directly relatable to many of the conversations we’ve had as far as what computers do as well as how they might make us see the world differently: “If algorithmic criticism is to have a central hermeneutical tenet, it is this: that the narrowing constraints of computational logic…is fully compatible with the goals of criticism set forth above….such procedures can be made to conform to the methodological project of inventio without transforming the nature of computation or limiting the rhetorical range of critical inquiry. This is possible because critical reading practices already contain elements of the algorithmic” (16). These constraints are methodological, but the claim that critical reading practices “already contain elements of the algorithmic,” I think is a claim of how to view reality similar to how we have discussed previously that programming is world-making or how customer service was procedural for Bogost. I like this approach, and it feels like many of these readings we’ve done have had these sorts of tennis matches between computers as tools and as aesthetic or theoretical objects in themselves.