Sharing the syllabus for a course called “Distant-Reading the Long Nineteenth Century,” in case anyone finds it useful.
I profited a lot from other syllabi in writing this, taking hints in particular from courses designed by Rachel Buurma, James A. Evans, Andrew Goldstone, Lauren Klein, Alan Liu, Andrew Piper, Benjamin Schmidt, and Matthew Wilkens. My goals were especially close to Goldstone’s syllabus for “Literary Data” (Spring 2015), and there’s a lot of borrowing here: like him, I’m teaching R, using texts by Matt Jockers and Paul Teetor.
Although the title says “nineteenth century,” this is definitely a methods course more than a survey of literary history. (I mention a period in the title for truth in advertising, since I don’t have the data to support research projects outside of 1750-1922 yet.) The course will include several occasions for close reading of nineteenth-century literature, but the choices of texts will mostly be made as we proceed and motivated by our distant readings.
Three years ago I taught a very different grad seminar called “Digital Tools and Critical Theory.” That was more about teaching the conflicts; this one focuses on preparing students to do distant reading in their own work.
[Postscript a day later: One thing I’m borrowing from Goldstone, and emphasizing here, is an analogy to sociological “content analysis.” It’s been striking me lately that some useful applications of distant reading don’t require much algorithmic complexity at all — just thoughtful sampling of passages from a large collection.]
The Stone and the Shell 