Distant Reading

Distant reading is taking a large body of text or database and looking at it as a whole and finding patterns within the writing. I find distant reading to be more interesting than close reading and it reveals a lot of information. This information would be very difficult to find out without the use of the Voyant tool. Voyant can be used for a variety of data including articles, lyrics, and books for example. I have used Voyant before once for the book Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft and I found the data to be very helpful and revealing as well. This time however I am doing a distant reading of my own blog so it will be a little weird doing a distant reading on my own writing.

The first thing that I look at after entering in the data I am performing the distant reading on is the word cloud as it tends to be the thing that pops out the most. A word cloud is a great visualization as it very easy to understand. From this, I can tell that my most used words are data and time. This makes sense knowing more than half of my blog posts are how I spend my time with certain hobbies and about tracking myself and using that data in visualizations.

The word cloud is not the only visualization there. There are multiple graphs and types of phrases used that can present different types of information.










This is the first time I have heard of or used NGram Viewer. To simply put it the NGram lets you find and visualize how words and phrases have developed and been used over time. After entering the phrases you want you will be given a graph showing the amount the phrases appear over time. I was then able to see a multitude of titles of books relating to the phrases I entered.

I find distant reading to be very interesting in general although I found my distant reading on my own blog did not reveal as much as I thought it would so I will keep this information in mind for any future writing I do.