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.
Kurzbio:
Dr. Dennis Mischke ist wissenschaftlicher Koordinator und Leiter der Geschäftsstelle des »Ada Lovelace Center for Digital Humanities (ADA)« der FU Berlin. Seine Arbeitsgebiete sind Digitale Literaturwissenschaft, Critical Infrastructure Studies, Daten- und Digitalkulturen sowie Digitale Hochschuldidaktik. Dem Studium der Anglistik / Amerikanistik, Medienwissenschaft und Kognitionswissenschaft in Potsdam und Sydney folgte die Promotion im Fach Amerikanistik an der Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Nach verschiedenen Post-Doc Stationen in Deutschland, USA und Australien, war er zuletzt Gründungskoordinator des »Netzwerk für Digitale Geisteswissenschaften« an der Universität Potsdam.