Supporting Expert Close Analysis of Historical Scientific Writings: A Case Study for Near-by Reading

TL;DR

This paper introduces a visual analysis tool for near-by reading, enabling experts to combine close reading with computational visualization to uncover hidden biases in historical scientific texts.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach that integrates visualization into expert analysis of familiar texts, bridging close and distant reading methods.

Findings

Revealed unrecognized personal biases in scientific writings

Demonstrated effectiveness of visualization in near-by reading

Applied method to 19th-century scientific texts

Abstract

Distant reading methodologies make use of computational processes to aid in the analysis of large text corpora which might not be pliable to traditional methods of scholarly analysis due to their volume. While these methods have been applied effectively to a variety of types of texts and contexts, they can leave unaddressed the needs of scholars in the humanities disciplines like history, who often engage in close reading of sources. Complementing the close analysis of texts with some of the tools of distant reading, such as visualization, can resolve some of the issues. We focus on a particular category of this intersection---which we refer to as near-by reading---wherein an expert engages in a computer-mediated analysis of a text with which they are familiar. We provide an example of this approach by developing a visual analysis application for the near-by reading of 19th-century scientific writings by J. W. von Goethe and A. P. de Candolle. We show that even the most formal and public texts, such as scientific treatises, can reveal unexpressed personal biases and philosophies that the authors themselves might not have recognized.