I decided to do some searches on JStor that were more directly related to the final project that I have planned for this class, dealing with the work of John Keats.  Regarding this, I did (or think I did, at least), a simple search for John Keats.  This was after doing a couple of searches just to get used to the system, both of which yielded almost instant results.  My search for John Keats, however, has been on the burner for about 15-20 minutes now and has yet to yield any results, which is confusing to me.  I am still not entirely sure how the DFR works, but my assumption is that I did not place enough constraints on the search and, getting excited and searching for word-count and quadrams as well, I might be taxing the search process more than I intended to.  There is also a chance that my understanding of this is wrong, or that I haven’t even made a real query, so I will keep playing around with it to see what I can return.

I’ll admit, I had heard of distant reading before, but I never really knew what it was, or looked into it too deeply for that matter.  I am torn on the subject, and I look forward to discussing it more in class.  On one hand I have (consistently, I think) some type of ingrained opposition to machines doing work for us, whether logical or not.  I don’t like the detachment.  On the other hand, I love large amounts of data easily interpreted and analyzed without myself having to do a large amount of reading.