But Why Always the Novel? Midrange Reading Samples of Persons and Texts

Literary studies, whether digital or analog, have overemphasized the novel, itself an example of the problem of misrepresenting a more complex system through favored individuals or reductive samples. Digitized access to more of the published English-language texts over centuries enables research on overlooked forms beyond boundaries of genre, nation, and period, and yet "distant reading" or algorithmic textual analysis continues to favor the portion of novels that have been digitized—not a representative proxy for literature. The essay reflects on changing methods experienced in the author's career in light of persistent misconstructions of digital humanities (DH); illustrates difficulties of identifying and representing networks and typologies of individual people through an online database, Collective Biographies of Women; and discusses other digital projects working at mid-range with book history as well as cultural and material contexts. Citing colleagues in this issue and a range of advocates for uniting "theory," close reading, and social-justice and engagement initiatives with new media and methods, the essay advocates for varieties of digital scholarship that serve humanities inquiry without privileging the novel as data

Art · Close reading · Digital humanities · Digital media · Epistemology · Literature · Media studies · Political science · Reading (process) · Scholarship · Sociology · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Law