What is distant reading?
Distant reading is a type of analyzation in which large amounts of literary works are fed into a computer program. The text is treated as more of an object rather than the traditional way in which text is viewed via a close reading. It is able to recognize patterns and frequencies of words, allowing you to have a macro understanding of the works. Today, we fed our blog into a distant reading software.
What did distant reading tell us about our blog that we would not know from reading it closely?
Two specific terms that stood out in our results from putting our blog into a distant reading software were art and intelligence. The reason why we think that this is significant is because those two words really encapsulate what this class is all about. Not only do we focus on aesthetically pleasing art, but we also listen and interact with art in this class. Intelligence is also a central theme of this class. Intelligence (from numerous perspectives including: cultural, technological, and emotional) becomes a subject in this class quite regularly.
Distant reading or close reading?
Without distant reading, one may not see the importance that the words, art and intelligence have in our blog because they get hidden within the text. Distant reading is like the sparknotes version of Beowulf, you may not understand everything that gets put into the story but once you read the sparknotes you begin to get a better understanding of things. Distant reading is by no means
sparknotes but is something that can give you more of an incite into what we are talking about. When reading literature you need BOTH, the overview to have a broad understanding of things but you also need a closer and deeper understanding of things with close reading.
An archive preserves valuable memorabilia, pictures, and other forms of media by grouping them into one accessible and searchable source. This is different from a collection, because a collection is less focused on the rarity of the items collected. Being avid hip hop listeners, our tribe has decided to make a 1990s Hip Hop music recording/rarities archive. With its roots in the late 70s and throughout the 80s, Rap began to blossom into the genre of music we know and love today in the 90s. Though much of the genre’s classics are still frequently played and well known, there are many hidden treasures that exist out there for rap’s diehard fans. Knowing this, we need do need to set some parameters for what we would consider rare enough for our archive. The thing that our tribe decided on was, if the piece of music can be found on Apple Music (with a library of 20 million songs), or Spotify (with a library of 7 million songs). For example, one of the pieces we would archive would be the 2pac song: Runnin’. For you hip hop lovers reading this, no we don’t mean the very popular and accessible original version of this song. Rather we would obtain a recording of the remix of this song. This is one of the few songs in which The Notorious B.I.G. and 2pac were recorded together. In this era, the East Coast West Coast feud within Hip Hop was at its peak, and therefore it was uncommon for a California rapper like 2pac to release music with a New York rapper like Biggie. Another example of the sort of music we would have is Heavy D and Notorious B.I.G.s’ song Jam session. This song was only released on the 1994 NBA game NBA Jamz, and is packed full with great 1990s sports and pop-culture references. In addition to music, rap memorabilia of the era would also be included. One idea our group had was related to the action figure released with MF Doom’s Operation Doomsday album from 1994. (This was also the album released with a scratch and sniff cover though smell can’t be digitized, and it will not be in our archive). We figured we could take the MF Doom super villain action figure digitized, so that it could be 3D printed at any point. In addition to this, our archive would have much more included as well. 
