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Welcome!

This is the official page of the workshop Distant Reading in Literary Studies. An Introduction to Tools for Data Literacy, which will take place at Bielefeld University on December the 7th, 2022. The workshop is organised by the BiLinked Communities of Practice “Data Literacy” and “Open Humanities”.

Here you can find resources that will allow you to make the most of our workshop, as well as the program. You will also find some recommended readings, which might give you an idea of what Digital Literary Studies are about.

Get ready

Please take your time to explore the different sections of this webpage, in particular the resources. While it is not compulsory to read the material provided here before the start of the workshop, we highly recommend that you get an idea of the approaches and tools that are typically used in Digital Humanities to investigate different aspects of literary texts.

In particular, if you are completely new to R and R Studio – for instance if you are asking yourself, ” R what..?!?” – we think it might be very useful for you to start familiarising with these tools and their interfaces, as you will be using them during most of the workshop. Unless you have R and R Studio already on your computer, you will be able to do everything on the free “cloud” version of R Studio, which you can find and access here.

Yes, we will still go through all the basics with you at the beginning of the workshop, with sessions dedicated almost exclusively to making you at least comfortable with R Studio. Nonetheless, it can be quite overwhelming to “get into” it, all of a sudden, within one morning.

To make the impact a little smoother, we suggest that you go have a look at some of the many existing tutorials offering an introduction to R and R Studio, such as this (pdf), or this (online). You will find more links in the resources section.

Help us give you the best experience

The workshop will help you discover the potential of DH tools and approaches, showing you how a corpus of texts can be used to obtain new insights and perspectives on aspects of literature that are otherwise difficult to identify and examine, with a particular focus on the analysis of literary affect and space.