CATA

In my home discipline of 19th Century Literature, Franco Moretti pioneered the notion of “distant reading,” in contrast to the close reading beloved by New Critics and deconstructionists alike. While close reading’s value to student engagement with both literary texts and their own writing in both classroom and writing center contexts has been demonstrated in practice, what about the value of distant reading for these endeavors?

Distant reading is known for the “graphs, maps, trees” of Moretti’s work of the same name; the results of a textual encounter with the CATA software Voyant remind one very much of a perusal of one of his scholarly works. Engaging with a literary text with CATA software enables students not only to read digital texts but also to contextualize the work on a larger scale, noting patterns of language, structure, and so forth, thus creating material for an effective distant reading.

Distant reading also comes into play in the writing center. CATA software useful in assisting students with brainstorming and reading technique within the writing center, enabling them to approach texts in critical ways. In addition, writing center studies themselves form a suitable subject for distant reading. Just as Moretti’s distant reading helps us understand trends in cultural production by looking beyond a narrow range of canonical texts, distant reading in the writing center can help us to draw patterns in understanding the actual needs of student writers.

A significant pedagogical challenge emerging from the recent shift from print to digital-media formats is the need to develop and maintain critical reading strategies for online literary analysis. Because traditional approaches to literature and professional writing were developed to engage different genres of print-based texts, today’s university educators find it pointedly lacking when applied to digital reading environments. This discrepancy appears simultaneously at both a practical and cognitive level. Students reading electronic texts, studies show, are more likely to avoid active note-taking, highlighting key passages or comparing multiple works (Barry, 2012; Gold, 2012). As a result, higher levels of comprehension, including remembering crucial premises and text-specific-terminologies, are adversely affected. Speaking to the difficulty of building critical analyses in electronic formats, one researcher feels “[l]iterary criticism in the academy has reached a crisis point, and what we mean by ‘reading’ stands at the center of the storm” (Freedman, 2015). Responding to this issue and the growing concern over declining academic literacy levels it brings to the Humanities, this paper surveys contemporary theories of reading and analysis in the post-print, digital era before outlining a specific methodology for how writing programs can incorporate new procedures for interpreting and assessing texts distributed electronically. To these ends, the paper critically examines the recent development and increased classroom use of computer assisted text analysis (CATA) software to improve readerly engagement with online and electronic texts. Looking at several specific applications and plug- ins like NowComment and Ponder in standard use today, one key focus will emphasize the growing critical interest among instructors and learners to feature tasks and assignments that combine text annotation and commentary with the aims of social media. Further attention, as I will argue, can then be offered to determine the role these tools might play in the revision of literary scholarship. Based on findings from a pilot study investigating levels of student engagement with digital texts verses print texts, this project situates theories of critical writing within students’ real life reading practices, ranging from simple attempts to master PDFs effectively on personal devices to more complex multimedia, multiscreen interactivity.