At THATCamp, I will be displaying Distant Readings I (text visualization, 2009), an installation that explores the aesthetics of data mining.  “Distant reading” is the term invented by the literary critic Franco Moretti to mean the opposite of “close reading,” which is the very focused analysis of the elements of a single text.  With “distant reading,” Moretti means identifying—and visually depicting– larger patterns in a text, and also patterns among a large group of texts.

“Distant reading” is a kind of data mining, if we understand that latter term to mean extracting patterns from data.  For my installation, I will use Wordle to “read” a number of classic texts as word clouds; in arranging the words in a text according to their frequency of occurrence, we will be reading in another manner.  The installation will juxtapose several such data-mined texts  next to each other, in order to see at a distance patterns in these texts that we otherwise could not see/read; extracting new levels of meaning from these texts by reading them in a distant fashion. 

I will ask all readers/viewers of the installation: what patterns do you see in the data?  Is this reading?  I will be eager for your feedback after you have read the installation.