chapter 3

炸鱼饼

Reading Time:
50 minutes
Reading Task:
To understand "distant reading" as a digital humanities methodology, including its core concepts, operational processes, and how it challenges and complements traditional "close reading."
Summary of the Content:
This chapter systematically explains the concept of "distant reading." It is not simply reading from a distance but a research strategy that uses computational analysis on large collections of texts to discover macroscopic patterns, trends, and features.
The author contrasts "distant reading" with the dominant tradition of "close reading" in humanities research, pointing out that distant reading focuses on collective, trend-based questions rather than the deep interpretation of individual texts.
The chapter details the operational workflow of distant reading, including: corpus construction, data cleaning and standardization, feature extraction (e.g., word frequency, topic modeling, stylometry), and data visualization with pattern interpretation.
Finally, the author discusses the limitations of distant reading, particularly its shortcomings in explaining causality and understanding textual nuances, emphasizing that it should complement, not replace, close reading.
Case Analysis:
The Gerti Digital Humanities Project: By analyzing thousands of 19th-century British novels, this project used word frequency statistics and topic models to reveal the commonalities in vocabulary and narrative structure within specific literary genres (such as Gothic fiction), demonstrating the effectiveness of distant reading in identifying macro-characteristics of literary movements.
Reflection:
This chapter made me realize that digital humanities is not merely about digitizing texts but also about using computational methods to ask entirely new research questions. We no longer only ask, "What does this text mean?" but also start to ask, "What patterns emerge from this collection of thousands of texts?"
The author's reminder that "distant reading provides models, not truth" is crucial. The patterns derived from computation are a starting point for exploration, not the final conclusion, and ultimately still require interpretation grounded in the humanities.