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Chad Wellmon on Reading, From Augustine to Digital Humanists

Chad Wellmon on Reading, From Augustine to Digital Humanists

Chad Wellmon, in “Sacred Reading: From Augustine to the Digital Humanists,” recounts various shifts in the conception of reading over the centuries–how we read, for what we read, the telos of reading, etc. Underlying the compelling narrative Wellmon crafts is a comparison of ‘close’ and ‘distant’ (sometimes equated with ‘computational’) reading:

Computational reading is the culmination of a long tradition in the West in which knowledge-seeking curiosity outweighs transcendent longings. We are awed by our human capacities to organize, reveal, and explain what seems so radically particular and discrete. What is revealed is an order unbound by individual books and, as Piper observes, the “nostalgia…for bibliographic reading.” The wonder of literature is exemplified not by Augustine grasping his Bible but rather by the scholar mining and then explaining an order that exceeds the bibliographic, an order as regular, as universal, and as beautiful as nature itself.

I found the historical account of shifts in reading particularly intriguing (although the picture is painted with quite broad strokes). An obvious question it raised for me is, What is reading (and how does Wellmon understand it)? And another: Does Wellmon mean to equate distant reading with computational reading? (I would want to know whether/how the human is involved in each case). Finally, I thought Wellmon could have made a case for the similarity, not the difference(!), between Augustinian reading and distant reading. Allow me to reword the above quote to illustrate:

Computational reading is the culmination of a long tradition in the West in which knowledge-seeking curiosity [meets] transcendent longings. We are awed by our human capacities to organize, reveal, and explain what seems so radically particular and discrete. What is revealed is an order unbound by individual books and, as Piper observes, the “nostalgia…for bibliographic reading.” The wonder of literature is exemplified [both] by Augustine grasping his Bible [and] by the scholar mining and then explaining an [O]rder that exceeds the bibliographic, an [O]rder as regular, as universal, and as beautiful as [N]ature itself.

In other words, Wellmon’s description of computational reading sounds fairly transcendental!

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