The mystery of humanistic epistemology in 5 tweets and a link

This helped me grasp an aesthetic problem w/ distant reading: it provides description at a scale where we expect interpretive synthesis.

— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) August 17, 2016

@bbenzon I agree, obvs. But I'm really trying to understand the reluctance. Much of it is simple inertia, but part is something else.

— Ted Underwood (@Ted_Underwood) August 25, 2016

@Ted_Underwood Yes on something else. Maybe it's the same 'something else' blocking attentive description of single texts.

— Bill Benzon (@bbenzon) August 25, 2016

The cognitive linguists like to talk about 'human scale.' One of the things that happens in conceptual blending, as they call it, is that phenomena can be repackaged from their own 'natural' scale to human scale. Is that what interpretation does that the descriptive methods of 'distant reading' don't do?