Our unit on Reading Machines and Matt’s presentation has me excited about digital humanities. I didn’t know much about digital humanities practices previously. My understanding was that Moretti could use computers to prove that Hamlet is the main character of Hamlet and other such nifty trivialities. It seemed like kind of a cool-tool for other people to play with but I never thought of identifying myself with it or using the practices myself. For some reason it never occurred to me that one might integrate digital humanities techniques into a larger project that combines close and distant reading.

I have been thinking a bit about how I might try to incorporate some of the potentials of digital humanities into my own work. It seems there might be a lot of potential in modelling grammatical structures to develop an initial hypothesis of how various texts are oriented towards various material objects and towards the future. I could then combine that with a close reading and standard critical analysis on materialism/realism and futurity. Moretti on the grammar of instrumental reason and temporal continuity, significantly likely in Robinson Crusoe: “Past gerund; past tense; infinitive: wonderful three part sequence.” Now just need to figure out similar constructions and let the computer search the universe for me.

Certainly it seems like a great skill to have in the toolbox. Now just to learn how to actually make it happen…