The intervention of digital tools has changed the ways of production of knowledge (Meyer & Schroeder, 2015), and has created a systemic transition of approach towards literature and philosophical research from text to data-driven analyses. The computational turn in the humanities (Berry, 2011; Burdick et al., 2012; Gold, 2012; Rogers, 2013) has led to an epistemic shift in the forms of analysis from “close reading” to “distant reading” (Moretti, 2005), “macroanalysis” (Jockers, 2013), and “close reading with computers” (Eve, 2019). The use of computational tools in narrative analysis raises ethical questions that demand critical intervention.
The study is focused on challenges associated with computational distant reading vis-à-vis close reading of texts in the field of Computational Literary Studies. The authors propose the need to integrate close reading with distant reading through the method of blended reading. The proposed approach takes into account the use of best practices from both the methods for narrative research. The depth and nuance of close reading can be leveraged along with the scale and automation offered by the use of computational tools in distant reading. The exploration of computational tools can lead to an augmented experience by presenting it as complementary to traditional practices.
The research also delves into the preliminary process of transforming the physical text into the computer-readable text in narrative analysis. The text is ‘prepared’ by the researcher for the analysis through preprocessing of textual data, which entails different steps including identifying errors, outliers, aberrations, inconsistencies, or missing values in the dataset and fixing those. The active role of the researcher leads to creation’ of a ‘new’, changed text. Therefore, the role of the researcher becomes significant as they are implicated in the process of ‘data creation’, which is an act of ‘remediating knowledge’ (Drucker, 2016). The ‘preparation’ of the text not only deals with the treatment of text as data but also through a discretionary inclusion or exclusion by the researcher. The process of ‘data creation’ demands a discussion on the question of authorship as the process of a careful curation of data can be viewed as an act of co-creation.
The final part examines the intervention and role of a researcher in the inclusion/exclusion of data and underscore how it throws open the possibilities of bias of the researcher in the process. The act of ‘cleaning’ data shifts the onus on researchers of literary and philosophical texts to follow ethical practices such that the data and pre-processing of data preserves the density of the text without running a risk of oversimplification.
Keywords: Blended Reading, Bias, Co-Creation, Computational Analysis, Ethics, Tools