Distant Reader Stacks

Here you will find a collection of about 1.7 million open access journal articles or etexts ("books").

The collection's primary purpose is to provide you with access to a wide variety of textual materials. From these materials you can make Distant Reader study carrels ("data sets"). A study carrel is a curated dataset of texts, complete with indexes, concordances, and analytical tools for reading at scale. You do not need to use these materials, necessarily, to create study carrels. In fact, after getting the concept of study carrel creation under your belt, I hope you use your own content for such purposes. Thus, primarily, the stacks are a set of sample data.

What's in the Collection?

The collection is divided into a number of subcollections falling into three types:

1. Open access journal articles (about 1.3 million items), harvested from the Web using OAI-PMH (a standard protocol for harvesting open access content).
2. Open access etexts (about 0.47 million items), which I have been curating for a few decades using quite a number of different means. Among the etexts, the alex collection is a hand-picked set of approximately 650 canonical works, while the books collection contains about 60,000 etexts from Project Gutenberg.
3. Curated study carrels, a very small set of early examples, some now outdated, showing what is possible with the Distant Reader.

Thematic Focus

Thematically, the collection centers on but is not limited to the topic of "big" ideas. These are the fodder for a continuing liberal arts education in the Western tradition, of which I am still a student. Examples of such ideas include but are not limited to: truth, beauty, honor, justice, love, and virtue. I am constantly asking myself, "What are the definitions of these ideas, how are they related to each other, and how have they ebbed & flowed over time?"

The collection also includes targeted datasets such as COVID-19 research and specialized archival materials that fall outside the thematic focus but serve practical research needs.

A Personal Library

That said, the stacks also form the basis of my personal library, which rivals the sizes of many public libraries and more than a few smaller college libraries. On a daily basis, if not more often, I use my library to address questions surrounding big ideas. Such is the secondary purpose of the collection.

For More Detail

New to all of this? Explore alex for foundational texts, browse the small collection of curated study carrels to see how reading at scale can work, or peruse the collection of 4,200 previously created but uncurated study carrels. For more detail and to learn why you should care, see the Distant Reader home page.

Thank you for using the Distant Reader.

--
Eric Lease Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>
Librarian Emeritus, University of Notre Dame

October 17, 2026