Creative Reading in the Information Age: Paradoxes of Close and Distant Reading

Abstract

This article reflects on transformations of modes of reading in an information age, asking what “creative reading” entails in information‐intensive, multimodal environments. We currently face the challenge of the development of reading strategies that oscillate between “close” and “distant” reading. For years, these reading strategies have been a topic of debate between practitioners of Digital Humanities on the one hand, and “traditional” humanists on the other. This ongoing polemics presents reading methods in an unnecessarily polarized manner. I argue that creativity research can be operationalized to come to a more productive model to characterize the ways we read in an information age. I show that the “schism” between close and distant reading is structured around a number of apparent paradoxes that I unravel such as hyper‐ and deep attention/attention and distraction, and convergence and divergence. The paradox of creativity resides in the fact that we find convergence in divergence and vice versa, that the two by definition intertwine. Building on these concepts, I propose a model that considers reading in terms of scale variance. I suggest the humanities turn to creativity research and the interrelations between divergent‐exploratory and convergent‐integrative thinking (Lubart), for a conceptual framework that will allow us to train students on all levels how to read (and how and when not to read), in an information age.

A Chinese academic tradition examined in the context of international academic communication: exploratory research into Shang Que articles

“…, 2022). It is worth noting that the interconnectedness of the Internet is an inducement to the non-linear development of ideas (Derakhshan, 2016), so perhaps, in digital humanities research, new opportunities will open up for works, such as Shang Que articles, which celebrate divergent thinking (van de Ven, 2019).…”

School Reform: New Future-Ready Quality Outcomes and Proposed Measures

“…This is an approach described in digital humanities as the computational study of text [23,24]. Close reading "entails close and in-depth attention to the details of a smaller section of text", whereas distant reading "involves processing (information in or about) large corpora of texts with the help of computational analysis" [25]. Distant reading "relies on automated procedures whose design involves strategic human decisions about what to search for, count, match, analyse, and then represent as outcomes in numeric or visual form" [26].…”