CAFe Speaker Series: Close/Distant, Scales of Analysis in Digital Projects ft. Dr. Ruth Ahnert

This presentation by Dr. Ruth Ahnert of Queen Mary University examines a journey through three digital projects, each one requiring a more distant lens than the one preceding, as the scale and complexity of the data increased. The argument hopes to offer proceeds at two distinct levels. At the micro or local level the talk will share some of the literary and historical insights yielded by the use of different qualitative methods across these projects. In parallel, however, the talk makes a broader case against the oppositions that have been drawn up between close and distant reading: of humanistic versus scientific modes of epistemology, small versus big data, and human versus machine-driven insights.