The Distant Reader is a tool for reading.

The Distant Reader empowers you to use & understand large amounts of textual information both quickly & easily. For example, the Distant Reader can consume the entire issue of a scholarly journal, the complete works of a given author, or the content found at the other end of an arbitrarily long list of URLs. Thus, the Distant Reader is akin to a book's table-of-contents or back-of-the-book index but at scale. It simplifies the process of identifying trends & anomalies in a corpus, and then it enables you to further investigate those trends & anomalies.

Technically speaking, the Distant Reader is a system which locally harvests/caches content you specify. It then transforms the content into plain text, performs sets of natural language processing & text mining against the text, saves the results in a number of formats, reduces the whole to a cross-platform database file, queries the database thus summarizing the collection, zips the results of the entire process into a single file, and makes the file available to you for further investigation -- "reading".

Some links of possible interest:

• Sample output of the Reader ("study carrels")
• blog postings
• Twitter feed
• Slack channel
• GitHub repository

I don't know about you, but now-a-days I can find plenty of scholarly & authoritative content. My problem is not one of discovery but instead one of comprehension. How do I make sense of all the content I find? The Distant Reader is intended to address this question by making observations against a corpus and providing tools for interpreting the results. It is my hope you will find the tool as useful as I do.

Eric Lease Morgan <emorgan@nd.edu>
Created: August 21, 2019
Updated: April 16, 2020