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

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

According to Claude (easy guess from the wikipedia link?):

The book is almost certainly by *Franco Moretti*, who coined the term "distant reading." Given the timeframe ("maybe a decade ago") and the description, it's most likely one of these two:

1. *"Distant Reading"* (2013) — A collection of Moretti's essays that directly takes the concept as its title. This would fit well with "about a decade ago."

2. *"Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History"* (2005) — His earlier and very influential work that laid out the quantitative, computational approach to literary analysis, even if it didn't use "distant reading" as prominently in the title.

Moretti, who founded the Stanford Literary Lab, was the major proponent of the idea that we should analyze literature not just through careful reading of individual canonical texts, but through large-scale computational analysis of hundreds or thousands of works—looking at trends in genre evolution, plot structures, title lengths, and other patterns that only emerge at scale.

Given that the commenter specifically remembers learning the term "distant reading" from the book, my best guess is *"Distant Reading" (2013)*, though "Graphs, Maps, Trees" is also a strong possibility if their memory of "a decade" is approximate.

After some digging, I think it was likely this one: https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5346/Digital-Humanities