Abstract:
The digital transformation has affected literary studies in a variety of ways. First, by making more materials available and second, by opening new avenues of doing research. Many digital approaches to text analysis developed in computer science, computational linguistics, and natural language processing however have primarily been applied to large collections of texts and literary corpora. While these forms of “distant reading” have already produced novel insights and have helped to ask entirely new research questions, methods of distant reading are not the only way of using computers to better understand the works of a single author. My talk will showcase some computational close readings of the American writer Herman Melville and will illustrate that categories of closeness and distance are in fact scalable and not necessarily oppositional. With such a “scalable reading” (Weitin), I will argue that the humanities may find a stance of continuity within the monumental infrastructural change we call digitization.
Short bio:
Dr. Dennis Mischke is the scientific coordinator and head of the office of the "Ada Lovelace Center for Digital Humanities (ADA)" at FU Berlin. His areas of expertise include Digital Literary Studies, Critical Infrastructure Studies, Data and Digital Cultures, as well as Digital Higher Education Didactics. After studying English/American Studies, Media Studies, and Cognitive Science in Potsdam and Sydney, he earned his doctorate in American Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Following various post-doc positions in Germany, the USA, and Australia, he was most recently the founding coordinator of the "Network for Digital Humanities" at the University of Potsdam.