Over at the blog, Clio Machine, proprietor Sterling Fluharty surveys the ongoing debate concerning the humanities’ relative worth in what Zbigniew Brzezinski famously dubbed “the Technotronic Era.”

On this issue, Generation Bubble maintains the position that the humanities — or, more specifically, the protocols and procedures of academic humanities — find themselves in jeopardy; because the debate, which centers on issues of profitability, places them at a profound disadvantage from the outset.

Should champions of academic humanities prevail against their bottom line–minded antagonists, however, they may just find themselves under assault from another quarter. “Some commentators would point to the recession as the primary reason for why these questions are being asked,” Fluharty writes:

We should also consider the possibility that the mainstreaming of the digital humanities over last couple of years is another (but overlooked) reason for why questions about the value and worth of the traditional humanities are being taken more seriously.

The profitability issue, in other words, may be mooted by the march of technological progress, as the latter completely transforms scholarly practice.

Humanities scholars, slow to countenance the changes wrought on their disciplines by computer technology, remain mired in the pre-internet convention of “close reading,” a mode of textual criticism that involves parsing words and phrases with (typically obscure far-Left) ideological ends in mind. Close reading, with its emphasis on words and phrases minutely and extensively considered, finds itself at odds with the information-age realities. The internet’s overwhelming abundance, ready at hand to anyone with a computer and an ISP, makes close reading appear as time absurdly misspent.

Artifacts of a communicative act no longer, humanities texts have become data. So-called digital humanists, sensing the sea change, have already altered their practice accordingly. Influenced by maverick literary scholar Franco Moretti, these digital humanists have instituted as their method “distant reading,” which, as the name suggests, is the very antipodes of close reading. “Distant reading […] allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes — or genres and systems,” Moretti writes in “Conjectures on World Literature,” his distant-reading manifesto.

And if, between the very small and the very large, the text itself disappears, well, it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, Less is more.

Indeed, Moretti goes so far as to characterize distant reading as a sort of unreading. Where a close reader sees a literary text, a distant reader sees a “system” whose literary devices represent so many bits of quantifiable data.

Fluharty throws his support to the digital humanists’ distant reading, believing that they promise to offset what he considers close-reading humanists’ shortcomings. He asks:

How would traditional humanists react if they knew that various digital humanists have searched Google Books to test the arguments set forth in some monographs and found them lacking when text mining revealed an significant number of counterexamples that were missed or ignored by the authors?

Fluharty thus calls upon all humanists to begin “thinking seriously about the advantages and disadvantages of relying so heavily on anecdotal, case study, and close reading research methods in the humanities.

Close reading being really a sort of selective reading has for some time now been something of an open secret among humanities academics. In fact, they consider such selectiveness vital; it tends to spice up otherwise dull conferences. Tweedy antiquarians love a good bout of recondite oneupsmanship. Fluharty, however, by wanting to turn the humanities over to statisticians and “supercrunchers,” threatens to rob old-guard academics of job security. Rendering obsolete close-readers, whose work is often prolix and impenetrable, may seem a commendable aim, but just how charting metaphors or graphing similes illuminates … er … literary systems remains unclear. One could argue that such a method simply leads to a data glut. Distant reading thus strikes one as a kind of inforrhea.

Take me to your reader: supercrunchin' digital humanist.

Someone who anticipated the myriad excesses of contemporary existence is French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In his indelible work, Fatal Strategies, he presents the example of Exxon as illustrative of how unmanageable information quickly becomes. “Exxon: the American government asks the multinational for a general report on all its activities throughout the world,” Baudrillard writes:

The result is twelve volumes of a thousand pages each, which would take years of work to read, let alone analyze. Where is the information?

Given that a single multinational oil company’s operations fills twelve thousand pages, one wonders how many would a statistical analysis of all the tropes of world literature. The mind fairly boggles.

Fluharty himself seems unconcerned about such proliferation. He is optimistic that the humanities will eventually assimilate themselves to the new age of data and statistics. On data’s revolutionary promise he is unequivocal. “Data and databases have become the holy grail of the new class of information workers,” he writes.

One recent books [sic] applies the term super crunchers to these data analysts. Recent articles in the popular press describe how large data sets allow trained professionals to find new patterns and make predictions in areas such as health care, education, and consumer behavior. In fact, we have probably reached the point this country where it is impossible to change public policy without the use of statistics. Even the American Academy of Arts and Sciences jumped on the statistics bandwagon when it launched its Humanities Indicators Prototype web site last year, presumably in plenty of time for congressional budget hearings. The fact that the humanities were the last group of disciplines to compile this kind of data raises some troubling questions about the lack of quantitative perspectives in the traditional humanities.

Fluharty admits that there’s work yet to be done, mostly in the area of academic legitimacy. Digital humanists have suffered the peremptoriness of old-guard close readers. But, now, as the sun sets on the latter, digital humanists find themselves primed for primacy. “Traditional humanists distinguish their scholarship from that produced in the social sciences, which they often think lowers itself to the level of policy concerns, continues Fluharty.

Digital humanists, by contrast, are almost universally oriented towards serving the needs of the public. And while traditional humanists place a premium on theoretical innovation, digital humanists have so far focused much more on embracing and pioneering new methodologies.

How number-crunching in the domain of arts and letters stands to serve the needs of the public will remain an item of debate for some time to come. I certainly have no ready answers. But until such time as we find one, I’m off to occupy ourselves with our latest critical endeavor: plotting the frequency of characters’ being likened to pea pods in Charles Dickens’s novels.