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Close reading

Reading one text carefully, in full, attending to its actual language. The traditional method, and still the one that produces most arguments.

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Close reading means working through a text at the level of its sentences — noticing what a word is doing, where an argument turns, what a translator chose. It is what humanities scholarship has mostly consisted of, and computational tools have often positioned themselves against it.

That framing is a mistake. The reason to compute over a corpus is usually to find out which parts of it deserve close reading, and the reason to read closely is often to test something a computation suggested. They are the same project at two magnifications.

What a tool can usefully do for close reading is remove the obstacles that are not intellectual: getting the text off the page, putting a translation beside the original rather than instead of it, and saying which model produced which line.

Compare distant reading.

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