Addie - Information visualization & distant reading

What I found most interesting about distant reading is that it changes what it means to “read” something. Instead of paying close attention to one passage or text, distant reading lets us look for patterns across a much larger amount of material. At first, that felt a little strange to me because I normally think of reading as actually working through the words on a page. The readings and the Coursebook chapters made me realize that looking at patterns, connections, and visualizations can reveal things that would be difficult to notice through close reading alone. At the same time, there’s a tradeoff. The larger the scale becomes, the easier it is to lose some of the individual details and context that give the material meaning. 

Six Degrees of Francis Bacon helped me understand this idea more clearly. Instead of learning about early modern people one biography at a time, we can see people and their relationships as a network. Looking at the information this way makes certain connections stand out almost immediately. But I also don’t think the visualization speaks for itself. Seeing that two people are connected doesn’t necessarily tell us what that relationship meant or why it was important. We still have to go back to the historical information and interpret what we’re seeing. That seems like one of the main challenges of distant reading because it can point us toward an interesting pattern, but it doesn’t automatically explain that pattern.

I thought about this while using Voyant too. Seeing repeated words and relationships between terms was useful because it gave me a different view of a text than I would get from reading it normally. Some of the visualizations were harder for me to make sense of at first. Just because a word appears frequently doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the most important idea in the text. I still had to think about why the pattern mattered and what was happening around those words.

These ideas also made me think differently about the DH project I’m currently analyzing. My analysis focuses on how the MFA brings together ancient objects, photographs, descriptions, and audio to help visitors understand the stories represented in ancient art. It isn’t really a distant-reading project in the same way as Six Degrees of Francis Bacon, but both projects show that the way information is organized and presented affects what we notice. For me, that’s probably the most useful connection between distant reading and information visualization.