I started this post with a few digital-humanities posturing paragraphs: if you want to read them, you’ll encounter them eventually. But instead let me just get the point: here’s a trite new category of analysis that wouldn’t be possible without distant reading techniques that produces sometimes charmingly serendipitous results.
I’ll call it dopplegänger books. A dopplegänger is, for any world-historically great work of literature, a book that shares many of the same themes, subjects, and language, but is comparatively obscure, not widely read, and–most likely–of surpassingly mediocre quality.
From Sapping Attention: Literary Dopplegängers and interestingness
I started this post with a few digital-humanities posturing paragraphs: if you want to read them, you’ll encounter them eventually. But instead let me just get the point: here’s a trite new category of analysis that wouldn’t be possible without distant reading techniques that produces sometimes charmingly serendipitous results.
I’ll call it dopplegänger books. A dopplegänger is, for any world-historically great work of literature, a book that shares many of the same themes, subjects, and language, but is comparatively obscure, not widely read, and–most likely–of surpassingly mediocre quality.
From Sapping Attention: Literary Dopplegängers and interestingness
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