Distant Approaches to the Printed Page

Abstract

Laurence Sterne’s novel – The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentlemen – includes a tongue- and-cheek moment that prefigures distant reading. Near the end of the sixth volume, the narrator represents uncle Toby’s story as a meandering line with unexpected twists and predictable turns. The narrator’s precise line is inserted between two paragraphs. Its shape reminds the reader of the book’s tangential plot. But it also brings the reader back to the material contours of the story. It is a story that comes into being from the organization of lines and paragraphs on the printed page. The narrator’s precise line exists as a material object, in the middle of page 407 in volume 6 of the 1762 Lynch edition. The line gestures towards the physical space that it inhabits. In order to interpret its contours, the reader should also take into account the shape, organization and size of the printed page. This type of material analysis is under-represented in computational humanities, the majority of which has addressed segmented objects at the level of the book—actually, at the level of collections of books. The most common category of this text segmentation procedure is natural to literary scholars: the separation of individual works from within a larger collection of texts. Other categories or types of text segmentation might include the segmentation and parcellation of a longer text into its component chapters or automated algorithmically-defined procedures that ignore chapter and paragraph boundaries to cut a text or collection of texts into equally sized units of words. Segmentation enables comparison of textual objects to determine smaller effects—signals that within the larger stream of words might otherwise be lost. There has been some interest in examining individual sentences. Sarah Allison, Marissa Gemma, Ryan Heuser, Franco Moretti, Amir Tevel, and Irena Yamboliev argue that “style” exists at the level or scale of the sentence. Thematic units, however, as Mark Algee-Hewitt, Ryan Heuser, and Franco Moretti argue, might be best captured at the level of the paragraph. Sentences and paragraphs are two different units of segmentation that are both connected with linear, human reading practices. However, segmenting a text into paragraphs rids us of information about the appearance of the paragraph and its relation to the rest of the page remains occluded. Where, for example, does a particular paragraph appear in the space of the page? Are there gaps between paragraphs? Are there printed ornaments, illustrations or annotations? When digital humanists erase the footnotes from Walter Scott’s novels, the marginalia from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and the irreverent experimental pages from Tristram Shandy, they lose the page-level context with which these texts are presented.