Glenn Roe: Distant Readings
Channel: Digital Humanities @ Western Sydney University
Date: 2014-11-19

The challenge of ‘Big Data’ in the humanities has led in recent years to a host of innovative technological and algorithmic approaches to the growing digital human record. These techniques—from data mining to distant reading—can offer students and scholars new perspectives on the exploration and visualisation of increasingly intractable data sets in both the human and social sciences; perspectives that would have previously been unimaginable. The danger, however, in these kinds of ‘macro-analyses’, is that researchers find themselves ever more disconnected from the raw materials of their research, engaging with massive collections of texts in ways that are neither intuitive nor transparent, and that provide few opportunities to apply traditional modes of close reading to these new resources. In this talk, I will outline some of my previous work using data mining and machine learning techniques to explore large-scale data sets drawn primarily from the French Enlightenment period. And, building upon these past experiences, I will then present several of my current research projects, which use sequence alignment algorithms to identify intertextual relationships between authors and texts in the 18th-century ‘Republic of Letters’. By reintroducing the notion of (inter)textuality into algorithmic and data-driven methods of analysis we can move towards bridging the gap between distant and close readings, by way of an intermediary mode of scholarship I term ‘directed’ or ‘scalable’ reading.
Glenn's current research agenda is primarily located at the intersection of new computational approaches with traditional literary and historical research questions. Drawing from diverse domains such as intellectual history, the history of ideas, literary theory, book history, and digital humanities, Glenn is chiefly interested in the idea of ‘intertextuality’ as it pertains to various editorial, authorial, and critical practices over the longue durée.