Distant Reading Two Decades On: Reflections on the Digital Turn in the Study of Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the ways in which distant reading, as a facet of the digital turn in the humanities, has affected the study of literature, with particular attention to the ways the digital turn has impacted the examination of authorship, genre, and style. In the process, it reflects on the ways in which distant reading developed both as a concept in the history of world literature and as a methodological approach that contributed to the evolution of computer-assisted study of literature.Cet article examine les façons dont la lecture à distance, en tant que facette du virage numérique dans les sciences humaines, a affecté l’étude de la littérature, avec une attention particulière aux façons dont le virage numérique a influencé l’examen de la paternité, le genre et le style. Dans le processus, il réfléchit sur les façons dont la lecture à distance a développé à la fois comme un concept dans l’histoire de la littérature mondiale et comme une approche méthodologique qui a contribué à l’évolution de l’étude assistée par ordinateur de la littérature.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.019 | 0.034 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.028 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.018 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.015 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".