Digital Humanities and Distant Reading Concept by Franco Moretti

Abstract

The article provides an outline of the prospects for the development of the digital humanities in the context of the work of the Italian-American literary theorist and sociologist Franco Moretti (b. 1950). Moretti’s methodology is given the most at­tention, it is presented as a complex of interrelated methods. The theory of cul­tural evolution, world-systems analysis, cultural geography, computational criti­cism of the digital humanities and distant reading are considered in detail. Moretti takes literary forms as an analogue of biological species and shows what cultural niches they occupy, how certain forms survive, how they interbreed with each other, how “unadapted” forms die off and what influences all these pro­cesses. Modern technologies make it possible to work with big data, and this provides new material for research (quantitative aspect), and also changes the ob­ject of research (qualitative aspect). Using cartographic and statistical methods, as well as the method of world-system analysis, Moretti shows that the study of world literature becomes the study of the struggle for symbolic hegemony in the world. The world-system approach in relation to literature and, more broadly, to culture as a whole makes it possible to understand exactly how the unity of world literature is combined with its unevenness and heteroge­neity. Therefore, the researcher’s field of vision includes not only established cultural forms (canon), but also what has been discarded by cultural evolution (the “Great Unread”), and this significantly changes the entire cultural picture of the world. Distant reading problematizes the value of the literary canon, strives for the maximum and exhaustive coverage of the corpus of texts.