My girlfriend Christine Mahady (Chris) and I recently met with my friend Alexander Flurie to discuss a potential project. The project revolves around making a tool to assist in performing close readings in an educational environment.
Close reading is a technique used in literary criticism which focuses on the careful analysis of the language of a text. These analyses are typically done on passages or short texts and critique low level features of the text, such as word choice, syntax, and the structure and flow of the ideas expressed in the text. Performing a close reading often begins with a careful annotation of the text, making notes on observations of structure, tone, rhetorical devices, or anything about the text the reader notices. During this process, the reader will also look up any unfamiliar words, make note of word choice, such as the use of slang, and so on.
Interestingly, we aren’t the only people to consider doing close reading online. The Golden Notebook Project launched about a month ago. Seven authors and critics are collaborating to do a close reading of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Their goals our different than ours; this is an interesting case study on one novel.
Our goals are more focused on making it easy for instructors to create close readings in educational environments. In order to ease adoption, we’d like to seed the tool with publicly available texts, such as those found in Project Gutenberg. We also want to allow instructors to easily create discussion groups for students, where all students’ annotations could be shared for collaborative reading or private for individual assignments. Finally, we’d like this tool to allow the instructor to import annotations they’ve previously created for the text into a group, so that instructors can easily reuse their own annotations from semester to semester. I’m personally very excited about this side project, because I think it is a great example of how online tools can be easier to use than traditional tools.
Comments (2)
Check out the MONK Project:
http://monkproject.org/
I found them through their evaluation of part-of-speech taggers:
http://workproduct.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/evaluating-pos-taggers-conclusions/
Here’s their blurb, which also mentions “close reading”, a term I wasn’t previously familiar with:
MONK is a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study. It supports both micro analyses of the verbal texture of an individual text and macro analyses that let you locate texts in the context of a large document space consisting of hundreds or thousands of other texts. Shuttling between the “micro” and the “macro” is a distinctive feature of the MONK environment, where you may read as closely as you wish but can also practice many forms of what Franco Moretti has provocatively called “distant reading.”
Thanks, Bob.
The MONK Project is a good find. Close reading is also new to me, but a standard method used by scholars to analyze text.
The phrase “distant reading” reminds me of the patterns of text corpus linguists and information retrieval researchers investigate.
The WordHoard demo that is linked to as an example of prior work has a few interesting tools for corpus analysis such as search by part of speech or collection frequency. They also provide users who have logged in the ability to annotate the text, which nicely aligns with some of the goals we have with our own project.
It’s encouraging to see others thinking about how tools such as these can assist research and education in the humanities. The tools that people adapt are the ones that make their existing analysis methods easier to perform or provide them with new insights. It’s good to see evidence that some of the ideas behind our project have traction with scholars.
It will be interesting to follow what the MONK Project produces.