Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Early Ecologies: Distance Reading Popular Scientific Journals In Turn-Of-The-Century Sweden, Erin Modersitzki, Dr. Christopher Oscarson

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The understanding of art and literature depends on an ability to contextualize it within the discourses from which it emerges. This project combined two important new strands of literary research to flesh out the context in which the idea of ecology emerged in Sweden: digital humanities and ecocriticism. We used digital tools to complement traditional literary approaches, broadening our understanding of even non-literary texts by suggesting patterns and constellations of ideas that elude any individual reader attempting to read and analyze hundreds of thousands of pages of text. Proving the viability of these “distant reading” tools through test cases like …