The terms, ‘distant reading’ and ‘digital humanities’ have become commonplace in the new media and publishing landscape. These terms have been popularized and put to practice by the Standford Literary Lab which pursues literary research through quantitative and digital analysis. The Lab opened last year with the hope of clarifying any confusion within certain literary works through the means of quantitative analysis and computational mapping and modeling.

Founder and Italian literary scholar, Franco Moretti, hopes to utilize ‘distant reading’, to better understand literature through data aggregation rather than focusing on a specific text. Moretti posits that close, concentrated reading results in a weaker understanding of the true text and that in order to understand the broader context of literature, “we must stop reading books.” A recent New York Times article explains how the Lit Lab team put their practice to work by feeding 30 novels of a specific genre into two computer programs. The computers were then asked to recognize the genre of six additional works and both programs succeeded, one using grammatical and semantic signals, the other by word frequency. The results of such tests indicate that there are some hidden formal aspects of literature which people are unable to detect.

The idea of ‘distant reading’ seems slightly too distant for the field of literature. The new phenomenon is far too preoccupied with the quantifiable properties of literature, that it fails to recognize that which is incalculable and beyond measure. Perhaps the idea of ‘distant reading’ could contribute to the field of literature as a supplementary force to close reading. After all, literature can only be quantified and categorized up to a certain extent. Ultimately, a book is more so an art form than a science, requiring a human being to decipher its individual chapters, themes and undertones.