This metaphor suggests that the beginning of a novel: 1. Sets the stage for the reader's expectations and the author's responsibilities 2. Should be alluring and captivating to make the reader want to keep reading 3. Should be clear and concise to avoid confusion or misunderstanding. 4. Should be seductive and irresistible to make the reader want to keep reading.

Anzaldua uses a metaphor to describe the part of her that refuses to take orders from outside authorities and hates any kind of limitations. She personifies her rebellion as a powerful and uncontrollable force within her.

The word choice and setting here work together to create a vivid image of poverty and tradition. The use of "bean tacos" emphasizes the cultural roots of the community, while the mention of "2 peaceful generations removed" emphasizes how long it has been since the revolution that inspired those roots.

he page note can function as a general guide. When I teach I use it as a place to share possible instructions. For example, I want to share a close reading of John's work so that we can be a bit better prepared for the meet on #nwpstudio for First Chapter Friday with John McCaffrey. Or as John writes in the short afterword in the story, "If you really want to know the real story: what I felt, why I did what I did, why I didn’t do what I could? Listen. Listen close. It’s the only way."

Our close reading passage this week is from Book 10, lines 406-449:

from: 10.406 "so she spoke, and the proud heart in me was persuaded..." to 10. 449: "...but followed along in fear of my fierce reproaches."

Instructions: as with last week's passage, pay attention to every detail that catches your attention, or that doesn't seem to make sense. Context matters: the scene in last week's passage was Ithaca, a relatively normal if disorderly human community, but this week's passage deals with events on a magical island where humans are easily changed into animals. Is this island in any way a threat to the homecomings of Odysseus and his men? In your view, does it affect their behavior?

Hopkins at Home The Odyssey of Homer: a Close Reading

Sample close reading passage: 5.475 - 5.493 (end of chapter 5)

This moment occurs at the end of book five, just after Odysseus has escaped the rage of Poseidon by dragging himself ashore on the island of Scheria (likely Corfu), land of the Phaiakians/Phaeacians. Odysseus has just decided to look for shelter in the nearby forest, which despite the danger of wild animals offers somewhat more warmth than the wet shore of the river from which he has crawled. To help with our discussion I’ve divided the text into three parts.

I’d suggest printing this out and jotting your thoughts down—circle words that strike you as significant, as having multiple meanings, etc. Enjoy! You can send your thoughts to me or just keep your notes handy for our next class.

Wondering whether, for fun, we ought to be doing a close listening instead of a close reading of Home.

I like this concept of deep reading.

Compare/contrast with close reading and distant reading.

What other types of reading might we imagine?

ReconfigBehSci. (2020, November 9). Session 2: The policy interface followed with a really helpful presentation by Lindsey Pike, from Bristol, and then panel discussion with Mirjam Jenny (Robert Koch Insitute), Paulina Lang (UK Cabinet Office), Rachel McCloy (Reading Uni.), and Rene van Bavel (European Commission) [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1325795286065815552

This isn't a very difficult problem and the underpinnings of it are well laid out by John R. Pierce in An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise. In it he has a lot of interesting tidbits about language and structure from an engineering perspective including the reason why crossword puzzles work.

close reading, distant reading, corpus linguistics

Link to preview edition on Google Books: https://goo.gl/NEhdBH

I have noticed a lot of similes in this text. I think it would be interesting to create a function to help of find them and then do an analysis on what each simile refers to. Then we could derive a pattern from the out put. We could do this be creating an Ngram function to parse them out and then close read them for analysis. Or maybe a coordinates for the words "like a"?

Is New Historicism close or distant reading? The latter, right? But nonetheless deeply human, perhaps more so than "close reading" criticized as privileging text over lived reality.

Close reading is basically standardized in Common Core--it's referenced in the first ELA anchor standard for reading. Hypothesis is a means to assess competency in that standard by recording, measuring, and allowing feedback on

Like CCSS. Close reading being the common thread.

Yes, of course. But it's ironic that this three post tirade begins with a rather distant reading of the MLA program.

In the above performance of close reading, is the evidence more "inescapable"? Isn't is always in the fullness of the argumentation no matter where the data comes from?

This section of Lu Chi's text explains that only after we accept the tranquil inner depth of the mind, will the hard work of searching for inspiration payoff and wild creativity finally emerge to the surface. We see this in his use of words such as “Blithe,” “calmly,” “secret,” “lost,” “subterranean,” “arduously,” “hidden,” “out,” “bottom,” “emerge,” and “hook.” Going from a place of being carefree (blithe) and reaching below the minds surface (Subterranean) will the writer come out the other side (emerge) victories (angler’s hook). He uses the juxtapose of “celestial” and "Subterranean" as a metaphor of going from a "celestial" place of security above and being conscious, to “subterranean” as going to that unknown place below, the subconscious to find oneself. Also he uses “water” as referencing to the limited and small mind, “Current” as the mind breaking free and drifting, to the “Ocean” to become a massive and unlimited force of creative energy. Lu Chi also uses the transformation of the writer as the “diver,” who enters this unknown water and becomes the “fish” searching and finally metamorphosis into the “angler” who has found what he is looking for and pulls inspiration and creativity with "hook."

In this section of Lu Chi’s text, he is describing the most important task and responsibility of a writer is to teach future generations present and not yet born the importance of proper writing. We see this with his use of words such as “Let,” “full-blown,” “morning,” “ancients,” “own,” “stand,” “life,” “late,” “yet,” “bud” and “endeavor.” Lu Chi uses the metaphors of a garden and its plants to illustrate this with “full-grown garden” who are a group of mature writers in all their “glory,” who give clarity on how to write with the word “morning” and are beacons with the word “stand,” for present and future writers that will come after they are gone and he demonstrates this with the use of “late blossoms” and “yet to bud.” The words “full,” “late” and “yet” is the juxtapose of past, present and future. Lu Chi use of garden also exemplifies how proper writing are order, beauty and neat, because he doesn’t use words like jungle or forest, which grow wild. Also “Ancient” means that history will prove which writers will stand the test of time to teach others in the future.

Page 8

Jockers talking about the old approach in the 1990s to anecdotal evidence:

… in the 1990s, gathering literary evidence meant reading books, noting "things" (a phallic symbol here, a bibliographical reference there, a stylistic flourish, an allusion, and so on) and then interpreting: making sense and arguments out of those observations. Today, in the age of digital libraries and large-scale book-digitization projects, the nature of the "evidence" available to us has changed, radically. Which is not to say that we should no longer read books looking for, or noting, random "things," but rather to emphasize that massive digital corpora offer is unprecedented access to literally record an invite, even demand, a new type of evidence gathering and meaning making. The literary scholar of the 21st-century can no longer be content with anecdotal evidence, with random "things" gathered from a few, even "representative," text. We must strive to understand the things we find interesting in the context of everything else, including a massive possibly "uninteresting" text.

Pages 7 and 8

Jockers is talking here about Ian Watt’s method in Rise of the Novel

What are we to do with the other three to five thousand works of fiction published in the eighteenth century? What of the works that Watt did not observe and account for with his methodology, and how are we to now account for works not penned by Defoe, by Richardson, or by Fielding? Might other novelists tell a different story? Can we, in good conscience, even believe that Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding are representative writers? Watt’s sampling was not random; it was quite the opposite. But perhaps we only need to believe that these three (male) authors are representative of the trend towards "realism" that flourished in the nineteenth century. Accepting this premise makes Watts magnificent synthesis into no more than a self-fulfilling project, a project in which the books are stacked in advance. No matter what we think of the sample, we must question whether in fact realism really did flourish. Even before that, we really ought to define what it means "to flourish" in the first place. Flourishing certainly seems to be the sort of thing that could, and ought, to be measured. Watt had no yardstick against which to make such a measurement. He had only a few hundred texts that he had read. Today things are different. The larger literary record can no longer be ignored: it is here, and much of it is now accessible.

Discussion of the methodological difficulties involved in close reading: i.e. there is no such thing as "just reading."

Culler, Jonathan. 2010. “The Closeness of Close Reading.” ADE Bulletin, 20–25. doi:10.1632/ade.149.20.

Discussion of the methodology of close reading: middleton, Peter. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa: U of alabama P, 2005. Print.

Page 16

One benefit of traditional hermeneutical practices such as close reading is that the trained reader need not install anything, run any software, wrestle with settings, or wait for results. The experienced reader can just enjoy iteratively reading, thinking, and rereading. Similarly the reader of another person's interpretation, if the book being interpreted is at hand, can just pick it up, follow the references, and recapitulate the reading. To be as effective as close reading, analytical methods have to be significantly easier to apply and understand. They have to be like reading, or, better yet, a part of reading. Those invested in the use of digital analytics need to think differently about what is shown and what is hidden: the rhetorical presentation of analytics matters. Further, literary readers of interpretive works want to learn about the interpretation. Much of the literature in journals devoted to humanities computing suffers from being mostly about the computing; it is hard to find scholarship that is addressed to literary scholars and is based in computing practices.

At first glance, Sumner seem to be saying: Let's punish those who are successful and reward those who are not. I think what Sumner really means by "penalties" is the consequences that come with not being successful (e.g. poor living conditions). Similarly, when he discusses giving the "rewards" to the less successful, he means that we should share the benefits of success (e.g. money) with those who may not have had the opportunities to succeed like their counterparts so that they may live better, healthier lives. For example, Carnegie had libraries built for the public so that they could access books for knowledge and entertainment, whereas they may never have had access to readily available, free books before.

in other words, if you are black or mixed-race you have to have permission to gather in a group. Did they have permission to gather in churches? Might this be one way they "legally" gathered and help explain the prominence of black churches in the Civil Rights Movement many years later?

Nothing against this, but it's not the game I'm in.

Question is, though, can the same tool be used to do both distant reading and close reading?

This emphasis on collaboration is particularly important in social reading. Through replies, each annotation is actually the beginning of a potential conversation.

I think Billy Collins captures this tortuous pedagogy well in "Intro to Poetry":

But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope<br> and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose<br> to find out what it really means.

Collins actually imagines a moment of shared marginalia in his poem. In a copy of A Catcher in the Rye that he borrows from a library as a boy, he finds the following: “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.” The young Collins imagines the note to be written by a beautiful girl and feels himself in a sense falling in love with that other reader. Though we need not develop a dating service out of the modern technologies that allow for social reading, we can at least see the humanity that can be shared in the margin of a digital page: the teachable moments, the conversations that might occur. We have glimpsed such moments on other social media like Twitter and Facebook, but I argue they lack the depth of annotation, which brings together text, comment, and now, readers.

It's interesting to think about this idea of "slow reading" in relation to collaborative online annotation. So many traditional humanists complain of the cursory of the digital--hashtags on Twitter replacing sentences, Wikipedia summaries are replacing "actual" research. But web annotation requires readers to pause and consider in the very ways we have always taught our students to do in English classes.

Such an ambivalent phrase. The narrator seems to be claiming that this is a "moment" unparalleled in its significance. Yet this significance is "undetermined"; it remains unclear exactly how the moment is significant.

Digital annotation powerfully visualizes this process, as the application allows the user to isolate a particular word or phrase, and then create a comment specifically on that piece of textual evidence.

Close reading is a major emphasis of the Common Core Standards, though most English teachers since New Critic I.A. Richards would probably agree that is it essential to any humanities curriculum. As the "Introduction" to the ELA section states:

Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying great works of literature.

Digital annotation, though, is close reading 2.0. The major activity of a service like hypothes.is is "annotation," the highlighting and noting of words, phrases, and sentences, which demands that students keep their thinking and writing "close" to the text and its evidence.

Moreover, because digital annotation has the potential to be collaborative. It links this mandate for close reading with later calls in the Standards for collaboration. I like to think of hypothes.is as a "A Social Network for Close Reading." Could we make students obsess with annotations on the web like they obsess with Facebook and Twitter posts?...

This has to be one of the most intense opening scenes in all of literature. We are immediately thrown into a moment of panic as each guard responds wearily to the other's approach. In general these opening lines set the tone of the play to be one of apprehension.

Claudia Müller-Birn differenziert in ihrem Vortrag als "types of scholarly reading":

1. close reading
2. hyper reading
3. machine reading

und bezieht sich damit auf N. Katherine Hayles vgl. Beyond reading in print – “close reading” vs “hyper reading”. In: Communication Mediated. 28.08.2013