On November 5th, 2019, I gave a talk in the Renaissance Graduate Seminar at the University of Cambridge. It was a honour to give a paper in the RGS series — because as a postgrad in the Cambridge M.Phil. in Medieval and Renaissance Literature program, back in 1998-99, I regularly attended this seminar. I recall the speakers, that year: Neil Rhodes, Juliet Fleming, Lauren Kassell, Lynne Magnusson. I recall convening in Anne Barton’s cavernous rooms in Wren Court at Trinity, students huddled on patches of carpet. Above all, I recall the incisive question periods afterward, Germaine Greer and Ian Donaldson and Jeremy Maule’s methodological debates above our heads, literally and figuratively. Those debates with speakers could be animated, because debate is the primary function of the RGS: to be a place of contestation, where ideas sally forth for trial by what is contrary, in Milton’s phrase.

Abstract

In 2010, Keith Thomas lamented in the LRB that computers were displacing the Oxford Method of historical ethnography, specifically its diverse readings gathering longitudinal evidence of topical phenomena. “Nowadays,” he wrote, “researchers don’t need to read early printed books laboriously from cover to cover. They have only to type a chosen word into the appropriate database to discover all the references to the topic they are pursuing.” Nearly a decade later, researchers still read books cover to cover. But we also use digital tools to deform, segment, visualize, and retrieve topics from the books we don’t read. Tools address both our temporal and our methodological limits — or as Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore describe them, our “linear reading and the powerful directionality of human attention.” In sum: humans read selectively and heuristically, not optimally.

But optimally for what? I address this question by surveying machine-augmented readings of the EEBO-TCP and other text corpora in English Renaissance literature. I evaluate those readings against standard goals of literary criticism like categorizing and comparing — and then add the goal of categorical knowledge, e.g. of every English sonnet. I propose a criticism that collapses binaries like close and distant reading, humans and machines, knowledge and information, books and data; and that sustains a vital role for our linear readings of exemplary passages.

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