Erlin Matt, Tatlock Lynne (eds.). Distant Readings: Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century

Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2014. — 394 p. — (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture) — ISBN-10: 1571135391; ISBN-13: 978-1571135391.In nineteenth-century Germany, breakthroughs in printing technology and an increasingly literate populace led to an unprecedented print production boom that has long presented scholars with a challenge: how to read it all? This anthology seeks new answers to the scholarly quandary of the abundance of text. Responding to Franco Moretti's call for "distant reading" and modeling a range of innovative approaches to literary-historical analysis informed by the burgeoning field of digital humanities, it asks what happens when we shift our focus from the one to the many, from the work to the network. The thirteen essays in this volume explore the evolving concept of "distant reading" and its application to the analysis of German literature and culture in the long nineteenth century. The contributors consider how new digital technologies enable both the testing of hypotheses and the discovery of patterns and trends, as well as how "distant" and traditional "close" reading can complement each another in hybrid models of analysis that maintain careful attention to detail, but also make calculation, enumeration, and empirical description critical elements of interpretation.Introduction: “Distant Reading” and the Historiography of Nineteenth-Century German Literature. Matt Erlin and Lynne TatlockQuantificationBurrows’s Delta and Its Use in German Literary History. Fotis Jannidis and Gerhard Lauer
The Location of Literary History: Topic Modeling, Network Analysis, and the German Novel, 1731– 1864. Matt Erlin
How to Read 22,198 Journal Articles: Studying the History of German Studies with Topic Models. Allen Beye Riddell
Serial Individuality: Eighteenth- Century Case Study Collections and Nineteenth- Century Archival Fiction. Nicolas Pethes
The Case for Close Reading after the Descriptive Turn. Todd KontjeCirculationThe Werther Effect I: Goethe, Objecthood, and the Handling of Knowledge. Andrew Piper and Mark Algee- Hewitt
Rethinking Nonfiction: Distant Reading the Nineteenth-Century Science-Literature Divide. Peter M. McIsaac
Distant Reception: Bringing German Books to America. Kirsten Belgum
The One and the Many: The Old Mam’selle’s Secret and the American Traffic in German Fiction (1868– 1917). Lynne TatlockContextualizationThe Vocations of the Novel: Distant- Reading Occupational Change in Nineteenth-Century German Literature. Tobias Boes
Big Data, Pattern Recognition, and Literary Studies: N-Gramming the Railway in Nineteenth-Century German Fiction. Paul A. Youngman, Ted Carmichael
“Detoured Reading”: Understanding Literature through the Eyes of Its Contemporaries (A Case Study on Anti-Semitism in Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben). Katja Mellmann
Can Computers Read? Lutz Koepnick