Using the Google Book Ngram Viewer for 18th Century Literary StudiesLIT/ 235 Digital Practicum: Distance Reading Using the Google Book Ngram Viewer Note: The idea for this Digital Practicum was adapted from Franco Moretti, Stanford University (https://english.stanford.edu/people/franco-moretti). See also Moretti, Franco. Distant reading. Verso Books, 2013. Print. Engaging is Distance Reading Franco Moretti, an Italian literary theorist and scholar who currently teaches at Stanford University, (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco_Moretti) challenges how literary scholars accept just a handful of possible texts as representative of cultural eras. In other words, Moretti questions the literary canon. Moretti wants to change our sense of literary history by enlarging it; he wants us to rethink broad generalizations about literary periods, such as 18th century British literature by reading noncanical texts along with the traditional canon. Moretti named his approach to reading and analyzing literature distant reading. (See https://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/books/review/the-mechanic-muse-what-is-distant-reading.html.) Just how does one go about engaging in this distance reading? Distant reading uses other modes of analysis and models of interpretation than the close reading we are familiar with. In his own work, Moretti compiles textual information from many novels into maps, graphs, and logical trees. Seen this way, texts can reveal new patterns and language trends than we could otherwise discover close up. (Moretti) A variety of digital visualization and text analysis tools, such as the Google Ngram Reader, now make Morettis methods more accessible. ISBN-13: 978-1781680841 URL source for image: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51WXp8MTtfL.SX325_BO1,204,203,200.jpg Our assignment in Week V will be an experiment with the Ngram Reader. We will consider distance not only as the subject of our investigation but also as a potential mode of reading and interpretation. What does literary criticism and analysis look like if we accept distance as a condition of knowledge? (Moretti) For our class, distance is a good approach to 18th century English literature, considering that hundreds of books of prose fiction were published. When poetry and short fiction are added, the opus is into the thousands. We, however, are reading only a small fraction of the literary texts in our class. So how do we approach the ocean of 18th century British literary texts? We cannot read them all. But perhaps we can learn how to not read them. (I hope you are intrigued.) Heres how well be engaging in the kinds of experimentation, computational analysis, and play. I. Select a Novel Select an 18th century British novel for this assignment. It should be a novel you have never readand you still are not going to read it. You can find its full text on a site like Project Gutenberg. See: https://www.gutenberg.org/ So, there is no need to buy a book or go to the library. I provide a partial list of novels below: Selected List of Novels (There are plenty more, though. Select your own!) Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, (British, 1719) – considered by many the first novel in English Eliza Haywood, Love in Excess, (British, 1719) Samuel Richardson, Pamela, (British, 1740) Henry Fielding, Tom Jones, (British, 1749) Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, (British, 17591767) Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, (Scottish, 1771) 2. Make some predictions Once you select your novel and locate it on Project Gutenberg, ponder a bit. What do you think this work is about? You have never read it, but if it is a well-known book, you probably have some idea what it is about. What do you think the major themes of the book are? Jot down your ideas and thoughts. 3. Explore Ngrams and Select Search Terms and Date Googles Ngram Viewer displays the frequency of worlds over time by drawing on the massive Google Books corpus, which includes the text of more than 15 million books. For more on Ngrams see the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ngram_Viewer Choose several of the words youve concentrated on in your previous analyses in Step 2, and enter them into the Ngram viewer. Be sure to set the date perimeter. Look at the frequency of those words through time, paying particular attention to their frequency when your chosen novel was published. Do any of them stand out? Try a few more words, if you like. Experiment and play. The big question here: Can a tool like the Ngrams viewer, which analyzes so many texts, help you understand anything about the historical and intellectual place of a book you have never read? (Moretti) 4. Read the First Few Pages Now that you have not read the entire work, go back and actually read some of its first pages. How accurate were you predictions? Describe what the books seems to be about, based on the few pages you did read. 5. Write a Short Reflection Finally, write a short essay describing what you did and what you learned. Please keep the emphasis on what you learned and what questions regarding literary scholarship come to mind. The goal of this assignment is to ruminate on what kinds of knowledge a distant reading can or cannot produce. Have fun! A sample reflective essay is posted in the Week V Digital Practicum unit. Moretti, Franco. Distant reading. Verso Books, 2013. Print