Dr. Yael Dekel, a literary scholar at the Open University and Ben Gurion University of the Negev and a lead fellow at Brandeis University’s Institute of Advanced Israel Studies, talks about the Literary Laboratory: how can digital methods be used to study the canon of Hebrew literature – and redefine it, along the way?
This episode is part of a series in partnership with the Institute of Advanced Israel Studies at Brandeis University.
What a fascinating episode. I love the idea of “distant reading,” especially as I’m an elderly amateur close reader who has accumulated a vast number of books on disparate subjects. It occurred to me that, when you get too much to keep up with using close reading, scholars try to turn it into data and we seniors just get a blur, with a few texts where we at least remember how we felt back when we read them… It had never occurred to me that close reading is so closely related to canon, either, with scholars picking through the same elite texts over and over. I guess I thought y’all would be doing the literary equivalent of ethnography, close reading of texts that are NOT well-known… Anyway, thanks so much!