Distant reading is not our choice

Maybe you're deciding whether distant reading is right for you. If you favor distant reading, you may--like Moretti--would like to gather aggregated information about literature with the tools of quantitative sciences. If you oppose that, you may--like Moretti--find that literary texts are simply too dense. By "dense" I mean that you may find that literary language may contain unnaturally contradictory, nonsensical, or otherwise ambiguous language. The language of Ulysses, for example, makes no promise that it will comply with Stanford Natural Language processing. That app parsed the first sentence ("Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.") thusly:

(ROOT
  (S
    (ADVP (RB Stately))
    (, ,)
    (NP (NN plump) (NNP Buck) (NNP Mulligan))
    (VP (VBD came)
      (PP (IN from)
        (NP (DT the) (NN stairhead)))
      (, ,)
      (S
        (VP (VBG bearing)
          (NP
            (NP (DT a) (NN bowl))
            (PP (IN of)
              (NP (NN lather)))
            (SBAR
              (WHPP (IN on)
                (WHNP (WDT which)))
              (S
                (NP
                  (NP (DT a) (NN mirror))
                  (CC and)
                  (NP (DT a) (NN razor)))
                (VP (VBD lay)
                  (VP (VBN crossed)))))))))
    (. .)))

(ROOT
  (S
    (NP
      (NP (DT A) (JJ yellow) (NN dressinggown))
      (, ,)
      (VP (VBN ungirdled))
      (, ,))
    (VP (VBD was)
      (VP (VBN sustained)
        (ADVP (RB gently))
        (PP (IN behind)
          (NP (PRP him)))
        (PP (IN on)
          (NP (DT the) (JJ mild) (NN morning) (NN air)))))
If a scholar knows how to read both Joyce and this fragment of parsing, then she can write to me about the efficacy of the automation. Nevertheless, this kind of resource makes very simple stylometric units available to inhuman "readers." And this is where the trouble begins.

~~~

Jaron Lanier begins You Are Not A Gadget thus:

It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons—automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computer facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams."

The "automotons or numb mobs" are probably parsing "Stately pomp Buck Mulligan" more than contemporary texts. The classics of English literature are freely available on many sites, and provide"industrial cloud computing facilities" with an epic bulk of text to be "scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers..."

My point is that the 21st century has created legions of nonperson readers--possibly more nonpersons than persons--who will by sheer numbers come to predominate our reading communities. Now, more than ever, we have to arrive at a New Aesthetic to understand these inhuman persons, and our inter-phenomenal experience within a Democracy of Objects.