I read a book maybe a decade ago on the "digital humanities". I wish now I could remember the title and author. :(

Anyway, it introduced me to the idea of using computational methods in the humanities, including literature. I found it really interesting at the time!

One of the the terms it introduced me to is "distant reading", whose name mirrors that of a technique you may have studied in your gen eds if you went to university ('close reading"). The idea is that rather than zooming in on some tiny piece of text to examine very subtle or nuanced meanings, you zoom out to hundreds or thousands of texts, using computers to search them for insights that only emerge from large bodies of work as wholes. The book argued that there are likely some questions that it is only feasible to ask this way.

An old friend of mine used techniques like this for dissertation in rhetoric, learning enough Python along the way to write the code needed for the analyses she wanted to do. I thought it was pretty cool!

I imagine LLMs are probably positioned now to push distant reading forward in an number of ways: enabling new techniques, allowing old techniques to be used without writing code, and helping novices get started with writing some code. (A lot of the maintainability issues that come with LLM code generation happily don't apply to research projects like this.)

Anyway, if you're interested in other computational techniques you can use to enrich this kind of reading, you might enjoy looking into "distant reading": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distant_reading

> I wish now I could remember the title and author.

LLMs are great at finding media by vague descriptions. ;)