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string libraries of surface English. They also specify the coding heuristics human
coders had to use to accommodate the indeterminacy of surface English. The
final sections supply an extended case of research conducted within the environ-
ment. This research allowed us to discover important defining language-culture
intersections in a previously unstudied written genre, the technology review.
2 Motivation:
Close Reading and Micro-macro Connections
While we had many motivations for building the DocuScope environment, a
salient one worth recounting here was to address some fundamental gaps in cur-
rent formulations of close reading. Although a frequently referenced skill and
seemingly intuitive to grasp, the notion of close reading is, in fact, a deeply elu-
sive concept. Most of us readily recognize the expression “close reading” as a
positive attribute of any reader able to practice it. Fewer know that this admired
attribute, or reading standard, began in the early 20th century as a technical
term of art, originating with the great British critic I.A. Richards. Richard's
founding term for the art of the “close reader” was practical criticism, in part
suggesting the hope that critical reading powers could be laid bare operationally,
in the context of teaching literary criticism to students while conveying an un-
derlying skill transcending the classroom and even literature. What was this skill
specifically?
Richards never framed this question so directly. What he did do, in his topic
Practical Criticism [5], was painstakingly elaborate a classroom method whereby
students would write interpretations of poems and then publicly compare their
interpretations, seeking to develop standards of literary judgment by noticing
what was common and what variable across readings. Sameness and variation
across texts and readings have since marked central pillars of any definition of
close reading.
Furthermore, both with and after Richards, the idea of close reading acquired
new shadings based on further attempts to investigate the underlying skills that
the term references without defining. Perceiving sameness and difference across
texts is a knowledge developed not just from exposure to single texts but to a
large comparison sample. The close reader wishing to understand microscopic
differences across readings of texts is advantaged when he or she can also bring
to texts a telescopic perspective, one that positions any text within families of
texts previously grasped and mentally indexed. The close reader, in this now
commonplace and widely accepted view, is also the copious reader. To read well
is to be well-read.
In addition to a focus on textual contrast and copiousness, further under-
standings of close reading have relied on juxtaposing a content interest in texts
with an interest in a textual design or textual presentation that is severable from
content. Defining close reading from both content-dependent and -independent
frames of reference seems necessary if we are to explain how close readers can
continue to perceive sameness across texts that differ significantly in content,
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