What Was Distant Reading? We tend to think of the quantitative analysis of literary texts as a very recent development, but literary critics – women in particular – have practiced distant reading for a long time. This lecture, which presents the collaborative work of Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, will introduce some examples of distant reading from the first half of the twentieth century drawn from the first half of the twentieth century and place them in the context of current work in distant reading. What could a current practice of distant reading that remembers this history look like?

Rachel Sagner Buurma works on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and print culture, the history of the novel, twentieth-century Anglo-American literary criticism, and literary informatics. Current projects are on the history and theory of literary research, especially practices of knowledge organization like indexing and note-taking, pasts and and presents of collaborative work, and the intersection of literary-critical inquiry and information science. With Laura Heffernan, she is at work on a project that retells the history of English literary study from the perspective of the classroom. She is currently teaching The Rise of the Novel (and the Rise of Social Media) and has recently taught a Victorian Novel Research Seminar. ​She co-directs the Aydelotte Foundation. For more information, see her personal website and cv.

After the lecture in the dining room of the A.D. White House, there will be a wine & cheese reception open to the public.