Week 2: Distant Reading

Tuesday 9/1            

READ: “Reading by the Numbers: When Big Data Meets Literature

The video mini-lectures and flipgrid discussions for the week are below. Before you begin, please take this quick poll letting me know what you think of flipgrid. It’s a new tool for me, and I like its potential, but I’ll consider feedback from you as I plan the next class modules.

For your participation this week, complete two of the three flipgrids assigned.

This week will be the first of several that introduce Digital Humanities techniques, and explain them. My goal is to introduce you to the things digital humanists DO, so you can consider applying these techniques in your own final project.

This week, we discuss Distant Reading, which uses computers to count up features in texts and compare them to other texts. My video mini-lecture below explains more!

Follow this link to the discussion flipgrid to talk about your experiences with close reading and what, as a first guess, you think distant reading might be good for.

Then, check out this second video mini-lecture discussing how scholars use distant reading to compare texts from different genres or categories. (NOTE: I edited this down to compress it for time. It may seem jumpy.)

Then head over to this flipgrid and answer the prompt: what are some texts you might want to compare using distant reading? What are some features you might look for and count in those texts? (IT’S OK TO GUESS AT THIS POINT!!!)

Look for another video mini-lecture and flipgrid before Thursday! In the meantime, feel free to read the piece linked below!

Thursday 9/3       

READ: “Women better represented in Victorian novels than modern, finds study

After you read the piece above, check out my video mini-lecture on distant reading over time.

Then you can give your responses at the text-based D2L discussion forums to complete your participation for the week. First, post to the forum here about the idea of tracing change over time, as discussed in our video. What are some changes in language that happened over time you could investigate by counting words? Second post a question you have about distant reading to the discussion forum here. I’ll try to answer questions in my first video next week, so think carefully about what you’d like to know or what I could clarify!

If either of the links above don’t work (sometimes D2L doesn’t cooperate), head to the class D2L page, select “discussions” from the top navigation, and then look for “distant reading forums.” You will see the forums you need to post to there.

I’ll update the week 3 before class time Tuesday! See you (via video lecture) then!


Don’t forget that Blog Post Two is Due by 11:59pm Friday 9/4!! Remember that blog posts can expand on your responses to participation assignments if you want.

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