Language Technologies and Digital Humanities

The term ‘distant reading’ was introduced more than two decades ago by Franco Moretti in the field of literary studies:

"‘Distant reading’, I have once called this type of approach; where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge: fewer elements, hence a sharper sense of their overall interconnection. Shapes, relations, structures. Forms. Models" (Moretti 2005, p. 1).

Since then, Moretti’s distant reading approach has provided a fresh under­standing of literature and its historical development not by studying in detail a few particular texts (as in the so-called ‘close reading’), but rather by aggregating and analyzing large amounts of information, so as to solve (or at least to face) the so-called problem of the Great Unread.

The course aims at introducing the application of distant reading methods and techniques not only to the history of literature, but also and especially to the history of thought, and in particular to the history of philosophy, broadly conceived.

The course will make a case for a results-driven (rather than a methods-driven) approach by presenting some case-studies in which various methods and techniques (such as for example serial reading, analysis of metadata, authomatic search, topic modeling, citation analysis, and so forth) are applied to a variety of textual data with the aim of answering questions raised within the humanities (above all, literary studies and the history of philosophy). 

At the end of the course students should:

have a clear view of Franco Moretti's distant reading approach in the history of literature;

have a clear understanding of several ways in which distant reading can be applied to the history of philosophy.

Lectures and discussion (36 hours).

At the end of the course students will be required to write a short essay, sketching a distant reading project on the model of the case-studies presented during the course.

Students who do not attend the course will take an oral exam, based on the study of a selection of texts, chosen and agreed upon with the teacher among those listed below in the Suggested readings and bibliography section.

 

Some texts and further material will be uploaded on the Moodle platform.

 

The course is divided into four main parts:

1. Introduction

Course Syllabus presentation

What is the problem of the Great Unread?

 

2. Moretti's distant reading

First case-study: Serial reading; investigating the presence and role of clues in detective stories (Moretti 2000)

Second case-study: Analysis of metadata; analysing titles of 7,000 British novels (Moretti 2009)

Third case-study: Computer-assisted distant reading; discovering and interpreting patterns in textual corpora (Moretti 2017)

Methodological focus 1: Moretti, Lukács, and 'reverse engineering'

Methodological focus 2: Similarities and differences between 'Doduscope' and 'Humanscope' (Moretti 2011)

 

3. Distant reading in the history of philosophy

Analysis of metadata: Wittgenstein and academic success in America (Bonino and Tripodi 2020)

Serial reading: Logic in analytic philosophy (Bonino, Maffezioli and Tripodi 2021)

Citation analysis: Specialization in recent analytic philosophy (Petrovich and Buonomo 2018)

Computational History of Ideas: The use of the term 'conceptual scheme' in philosophy and psychology during time  (Betti and van den Berg 2019)

Distributional Concept Analysis: The idea of liberty 1600-1800 (De Bolla et al. 2020)

Topic modeling: Philosophy of science 1934-2015 (Malaterre, Chartier and Pulizzotto 2019)

 

4. Open problems and questions

The problem of operationalization (Bonino and Tripodi 2021)

The problem of corpus building (Pasini 2021)

Results-driven versus methods-driven approaches

The quantitative turn in the humanities: an appraisal (Moretti 2022)

The course is expected to start in the second half of the first semester, i.e., on the 10^th of November 2022. 

Students (especially those who intend to attend the course) are kindly requested to register on the Campusnet page, so as to make communication easier.