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.

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.”