Distant Readings

Reviews / Votes

This is a cutting-edge publication in the field of German Studies, a shot across the bow of traditional scholarship. The essays are persuasively organized, and repeatedly place themselves in relationship to the ongoing debate on digital humanities. Precisely because of this debate, the book should have a significant impact on the field, and it may well turn into a model for potential digital work in other literary fields. This is an important topic, and one that we in the academy should not avoid. It is an opportunity to begin to envision different trajectories of distant reading in German. As the discussion around the digital humanities continues to develop, I see this potentially becoming a central element of the university. In fact, I believe that within a decade significant exposure to the digital humanities will be a required component of doctoral programs.-Russell Berman, Stanford University -- Russell Berman, Stanford University The volume . . . demonstrate[s] that there is still room for close readings, that the theoretical issues are not yet sorted out, and that we can look forward to any number of interesting analyses based on methods about which traditional scholarship has not yet dreamt. Distant Readings provides an excellent introduction to the issue, and it offers at least preliminary answers to questions whose relevance extends far beyond the nineteenth-century texts that it uses to map the controversy. * MONATSHEFTE * This outstanding volume . . . speaks to a constituency far beyond the field of German studies, making a bold and convincing claim that we can no longer be either in the 'for-camp' or the 'against-camp' when it comes to the digital humanities. Instead, by bringing distant and close readings together, we can only enrichen our discipline-both the questions we ask, and the answers we provide. -- Ben Schofield * JOURNAL OF EUROPEAN STUDIES *