From the readings this week, I saw two major themes emerge:

1. Distant vs. close reading (perhaps as a parallel for structural vs. individual patterns)
   • It’s ironic to me that Jocker makes the claim that close reading has been rendered “totally inappropriate” and then goes on to — at least Mandel argues — recreate or embed a sexist structure within his distant reading analysis.
2. Something like… negative definition? Defining something by its relation to other things (how like or unlike it is)
   • In So & Roland, “white” and “black texts” defined relative to each other
     • I found it rich in meaning that the absence of the word “white” in a text was a strong indicator that a text was by a white author; whiteness defined by its very absence
   • Comp titles being a means of defining what kind of books are expected to find commercial success
     • A parallel in Mandel’s discussion of the conservatism of statistics and Bayesian probability

Questions I have coming out of the reading:

1. Mandel criticizes Jocker’s analysis as veering from a study of style instead to mere counting. How does one find the line between such approaches, especially when using quantitative methods?
   • Maybe Mandel argues that there never is a line, it’s always both? (“The biological binary…is a textual and numerical” [production].)
2. The shift in the So & Roland essay from categorizing texts along a racial binary to instead a spectrum of probability seemed brilliant, and opened up a lot of avenues of inquiry. And Mandel speaks of “animat[ing] numerical processes.” But it feels hard to know how to design projects this way from the outset. Do you find that after some time in the field, digital humanists can kind of “slice and dice” their research questions this way or is it really a matter of experimenting and seeing which way the data leads the research?