Like many of you, I, too, am excited for today’s workshop and I’m interested to see how we can make use of the data we’ve gathered–well, we’ve asked JSTOR to gather for us, I guess. I’ve been interested in distant reading for a while now, and I’m excited to see how we can make use of it.

I suppose I should start by mentioning that I decided to do a query on something somewhat unrelated to this class. Perhaps I might have found more interesting patterns if I’d run a search for “social media” and “computation” and “literacy,” or something to that effect which would more closely relate to my final project. However, I’m working independently on the way the conventions of the novel construct the subject and how queer literature resists or complicates that construction. Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to see how “queer” and “subjectivity” related to each other, so those are the primary key terms in my search. In retrospect, I probably should have chosen some different key words to complicate the search and get some more interesting data, but really I just wanted a sample that I could use in today’s workshop and play around some more with later. Besides, I don’t know how to make heads or tails of what I just got back from that query anyway–but I’m sure this workshop will help!

Downloading my query data was fairly easy, though the first time I downloaded “citations only” and got a big list of citations which seems pretty useless. It didn’t take me very long to realize my mistake, though, and now I have a much more useful and seemingly informative file. I, too, found that my second query with the n-grams etc. took much longer than my first query, but I suppose that’s to be expected.

Here’s my theory on distant reading: I think it can be really useful and cool as a tool for further research inquiry–you use google’s distant reading tool to analyze searches/occurrences in Google Books of the word “marriage,” for example, and notice peaks and valleys. You try a second term, like “heterosexual,” and see correlation. Eureka! There’s something to investigate there! But sometimes, I think distant reading just leaves you at a dead end. Maybe you were hoping to find some cool pattern in keyword use, but it turns out that no such pattern exists. Maybe you were hoping to find a correlation between the rise in popularity of two terms in classical literature, but actually they don’t relate to each other at all. While finding patterns can lead to interesting questions for further research, I don’t know how useful distant reading is when it doesn’t reveal any pattern at all. Maybe that’s obvious but it’s what I tend to think about when I consider distant reading.