Digital Humanities Working Group

Laura Mandell: Distant Reading, Surface Reading, Close Reading: How Digital Archives can Bridge the Gap; Feb. 2, 2017 11:30am-1pm, UF Informatics Institute

This presentation extracts the basic analytic methods visible in text mining or cultural analytics and in the long-form argument. Key to the three different methods examined in this paper are “samples” and “case histories”: distant readers aspire to work with larger and larger sample sizes of literary and historical documents; surface and close readers work with individual cases, specific texts or sets of texts written in the past, either describing them (surface) or analyzing them deeply. I present three readings of work by Jane Austen: distant, surface, and depth. I then describe results of my own analyses using The Jane Austen Fiction Archive of carefully encoded documents, a state-of-the-art digital edition (http://www.janeausten.ac.uk/index.html). Careful encoding using TEI guidelines, I argue, helps bridge the gap between “samples” and “case histories,” offering scholars the opportunity to perform the best scholarship at scale.

This event is sponsored by the UF Informatics Institute, George A. Smathers Libraries, Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, Department of English, and Albert Brick President’s Professorship in English.

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