Distant reading
Analysing a corpus too large to read, by computing over it. Franco Moretti's term, and a deliberate provocation.
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Franco Moretti proposed distant reading as a way to study literature at scales no one can read: not the hundred canonical novels but the thousands nobody finished. The method is to compute — counting, clustering, mapping — and to accept that you are looking at a shape rather than a text.
The provocation was aimed at a discipline that treated not-having-read something as disqualifying. The useful residue, twenty-five years on, is less confrontational: some questions are about a corpus rather than a work, and those questions need different instruments.
The honest limitation is that distant reading produces candidates, not findings. A cluster is a claim that some passages resemble each other; whether the resemblance means anything is settled by reading them. Which is why a tool that does one and not the other leaves you stranded halfway.
Compare close reading.