Graphs, Maps, Trees

What Hacker News says

1. abathurMar 2015
   I'm a little skeptical about whether poetry science/technology will take, largely because the literature community is going to be suspicious of the last half of your terms, and the tech/science communities will be suspicious of the first. :)

   That said, it's nascent, and it may be a while before terms, norms and practices settle. I completed my MFA in 2012 with a thesis I'd call computational poetry or computational literature. Goldsmith as you mention is trying to float uncreative writing--which I think is a decent-enough broad term that covers a lot of territory, but I suspect it, too, won't find much purchase outside of literary circles.

   I'm happy to get this chance to discover a number of your projects, particularly the PoetryDB. You may already know this, but I also wanted to point out that the field of computational literary criticism and analysis are also building steam, and you may want to think of your DB/API in terms of both a creative service for computational poets, and a service to computational literary critics.

   You may want to see work by Franco Moretti for a starting point here if you aren't familiar (particularly "Graphs Maps Trees", and "Distant Reading"). There's a nice review for starters in Wired from a few years ago. Moretti himself laments the lack of shared tools and resources (well--let's be honest, everyone doing this is lamenting it) when it comes to machine-readable texts and analysis.

   Thanks for posting.

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2. akoJan 2026
   According to Claude (easy guess from the wikipedia link?):

   The book is almost certainly by *Franco Moretti*, who coined the term "distant reading." Given the timeframe ("maybe a decade ago") and the description, it's most likely one of these two:

   1. *"Distant Reading"* (2013) — A collection of Moretti's essays that directly takes the concept as its title. This would fit well with "about a decade ago."

   2. *"Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History"* (2005) — His earlier and very influential work that laid out the quantitative, computational approach to literary analysis, even if it didn't use "distant reading" as prominently in the title.

   Moretti, who founded the Stanford Literary Lab, was the major proponent of the idea that we should analyze literature not just through careful reading of individual canonical texts, but through large-scale computational analysis of hundreds or thousands of works—looking at trends in genre evolution, plot structures, title lengths, and other patterns that only emerge at scale.

   Given that the commenter specifically remembers learning the term "distant reading" from the book, my best guess is *"Distant Reading" (2013)*, though "Graphs, Maps, Trees" is also a strong possibility if their memory of "a decade" is approximate.

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3. cobralibreApr 2013
   (Not necessarily responding to the parent comment directly.)

   The wall between STEM and the humanities is, if not artificial, quite porous, and it's in the interest of every intelligent person to bring it down.

   In general, there's been quite a bit of interest in quantitative approaches to the humanities lately. Try googling for J.E.H. Smith's proposal for a data-driven survey of world philosophy, or look into Franco Moretti's work on "distant reading" in Graphs, Maps, Trees. The latter was even profiled in the New York Times Magazine several years ago.

   I also like to trot out the example of Hugh Kenner, a protege of Marshall McLuhan who was one of the 20th century's great scholars of Modernism, particularly of Joyce and Pound — and who was also a contributor to Byte.

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