While our common understanding of ‘reading and reflecting’ on a piece of literature can be labeled as ‘close reading’, the concept of ‘distant reading’ can be approached as its exact opposite, involving thousands of bits of literature for analytical purposes. But enabling innovative and sophisticated computational methods of literary text analysis is a clear challenge, especially when considering the cross-national traditions.
Introducing DISTANT-READING
That is the challenge that COST Action ‘Distant Reading for European Literary History’ (DISTANT-READING) has been tackling during its four years of activity: bringing together a vibrant and diverse network of researchers to develop the resources and methods necessary to change the way European literary history is written.
Finished recently, in April 2022, this network has successfully advanced research on this topic, yielding a key deliverable considered as gamechaning for the field.
To help us discover more about DISTANT-READING’s activities and outcomes, the Chair Prof Christof Schöch talks to us, providing generous insight into this topic and its developments.
COST: What is distant reading?
Christof Schöch: Simply put, distant reading means applying computational and statistical methods to large collections of literary texts. Under varying terms, distant reading as a practice has been around for several decades. As such, distant reading is an important subfield within the broader field usually called Digital Humanities.
COST: What was the state of research on this topic in Europe and why did you consider that it was timely and important for your COST Action to tackle this topic?
Christof Schöch: Most of the research on methods relevant to distant reading was and still is heavily focused on English-language resources, methods, and tools.
We felt that a key strength of research coming out of Europe could be to counter this tendency with an emphasis on multilingual resources and methods. In Europe, we have a rich multilingual culture and literary history, but also the competencies to tackle this challenge. So we felt like a COST Action would be uniquely suitable, even necessary, to make progress in the area of distant reading for investigating the multilingual, European literary history.
COST: One of the Action’s objectives was to build a multilingual ‘European Literary Text Collection’ (ELTeC), ultimately containing around 2,500 full-text novels in at least 10 different languages, permitting to test methods and compare results across national traditions. At the end of your Action, this was delivered and can be considered as a key success, since it is the first comparable, massively multilingual, state-of-the-art, digital literary corpus of European literature. Can you tell us a bit more about this collection?
Christof Schöch: ELTeC is indeed our key deliverable. The basic idea is to unite 100 novels each from as many different European literary traditions as possible. Currently, we have 21 European literary traditions represented in ELTeC. We took great pains to make these collections comparable to each other; for example, all novels come from the same period (1840 to 1920), but many more criteria were used. Also, we provide them freely and in a standardised format so others can easily use them in their research. Without suitable digital texts, no distant reading!
COST: When it comes to other outputs and deliverables, how can these affect the way scholars in the Humanities do research, but also the way institutions like libraries operate?
Christof Schöch: The many publications coming out of the Action present ELTeC as a best practice in corpus building and use it as a showcase for cross-language literary analysis. Both perspectives can stimulate new research, I believe. The key impact of the Action on the relationship between libraries and researchers is to foster closer collaboration, both in terms of digitisation of more library holdings, and in the provision of metadata that is relevant to literary historians.
COST: Could you provide us with a few specific examples of best practices of distant reading?
Christof Schöch: In terms of corpus building for distant reading, I think following the FAIR principles, as we did, is certainly a best practice. In terms of methods of analysis, I find it a bit less obvious to point out specific best practices that we showcased, but we certainly tried to lead by example in terms of the openness and transparency of our research.
COST: How many researchers did this COST Action bring together? What were the main added values of gathering international and multidisciplinary researchers to work together on this topic?
Christof Schöch: Over the years, more than 200 researchers from more than 30 countries have become involved in our Action. Our topic requires expertise in literary history and in natural language processing for all the different languages that we are dealing with, so without this network, our work would simply not have been possible.
COST: Did you receive any feedback from young researchers who may have benefited from joining the network or participating in STSMs?
Christof Schöch: In summary, I believe what made the STSMs and Training Schools work so well was that there was a real mutual benefit: The Action benefited from the linguistic and literary expertise of the participants, and they benefited by learning about the standards and best practices relevant to distant reading. And of course, we all benefited from becoming part of the Action’s community.
COST: How was your experience in chairing this COST Action?
Christof Schöch: Chairing this Action has been a great privilege and a considerable responsibility. Most of all, however, it has been a wonderful opportunity to become involved in fostering a dense and lively pan-European network of researchers with similar interests, from Norway to Portugal and from Ukraine to Ireland. In fact, the way that we have come to feel connected all across Europe in the course of this Action, and how we have all shared our knowledge for a common goal, gives me hope that we can overcome the current period of difficulty for the European idea.
COST: What are the next steps for the network? Any plans on continuing the activities?
Christof Schöch: We are still working, maybe a bit more slowly and more informally than before, on expanding ELTeC and on several publications that use ELTeC. Also, a number of Action partners are involved in our follow-up initiative, a rather large project called ‘Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure’ (CLS INFRA) that is funded by the European Commission until 2025.
Many thanks Christof Schöch for talking to us and sharing your experiences and the work of DISTANT-READING.
Further information
- About COST Action ‘DISTANT-READING”: https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA16204/
- Entry point for the COST Action “DISTANT-READING” multilingual ‘European Literary Text Collection’: https://www.distant-reading.net/eltec/
- Article “Creating the European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC): Challenges and Perspectives” Christof Schöch, Roxana Patraș, Diana Santos, Tomaž Erjavec (2021), in: Modern Languages Open 1/25, DOI: https://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.364