Overview

Just as a traveler crossing a continent won’t sense the curvature of the earth, one lifetime of reading can’t grasp the largest patterns organizing literary history. This is the guiding premise behind Distant Horizons, which uses the scope of data newly available to us through digital libraries to tackle previously elusive questions about literature. Ted Underwood shows how digital archives and statistical tools, rather than reducing words to numbers (as is often feared), can deepen our understanding of issues that have always been central to humanistic inquiry.  Without denying the usefulness of time-honored approaches like close reading, narratology, or genre studies, Underwood argues that we also need to read the larger arcs of literary change that have remained hidden from us by their sheer scale. Using both close and distant reading to trace the differentiation of genres, transformation of gender roles, and surprising persistence of aesthetic judgment, Underwood shows how digital methods can bring into focus the larger landscape of literary history and add to the beauty and complexity we value in literature.  

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9780226612836

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Reviews

"""Distant Horizons not only proves that Ted Underwood is defining the field of cultural analytics as it emerges; it shows us why. Combining literary theory with a deep understanding of computational methods, this volume demonstrates and effectively argues that quantitative analysis is best used not to find objective truths but to explore perspectives, both historically local and theoretical. It is at once a primer for quantitative literacy and a historically sensitive exploration of gender, genre, character, and audience, putting paid once and for all to the notion that statistical methods have no place in hermeneutics.""--Laura Mandell, author of Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age ""Distant Horizons is of compelling interest to digital humanists. But its true audience is a wider society of literary and other humanities scholars spanning across fields, periods, approaches, and levels. For this larger audience, Ted Underwood goes out of his way to make distant reading accessible, inviting, and persuasive. This innovative book is the breakout work digital humanists have been waiting for, and it is positioned to be a landmark work in literary scholarship at large.""--Alan Liu, author of Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age"

Distant Horizons is of compelling interest to digital humanists. But its true audience is a wider society of literary and other humanities scholars spanning across fields, periods, approaches, and levels. For this larger audience, Ted Underwood goes out of his way to make distant reading accessible, inviting, and persuasive. This innovative book is the breakout work digital humanists have been waiting for, and it is positioned to be a landmark work in literary scholarship at large. --Alan Liu, author of Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age Distant Horizons not only proves that Ted Underwood is defining the field of cultural analytics as it emerges; it shows us why. Combining literary theory with a deep understanding of computational methods, this volume demonstrates and effectively argues that quantitative analysis is best used not to find objective truths but to explore perspectives, both historically local and theoretical. It is at once a primer for quantitative literacy and a historically sensitive exploration of gender, genre, character, and audience, putting paid once and for all to the notion that statistical methods have no place in hermeneutics. --Laura Mandell, author of Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age

Author Information

Ted Underwood is professor of information sciences and English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is also the author, most recently, of Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies.

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