For my Archival Research class we just had to read about feminist historiographers using distant reading. The entire article was about incorporating and amending feminist methodologies for physical archives in digital ones and finding digital sources that would diversify and expand their research. Distant reading was one of the topics they brought up and I was excited to see it in this sort of practice. The goal of many feminist rhetoricians is to “recover” lost histories of women, that have been silenced in all sorts of ways. It focuses intensely on the individual stories of women; this is completely opposite in distant reading which Moretti calls a collective system, it’s entire purpose is to see the whole system in order to identify patterns. The authors of the article admit that on the surface distant reading goes against their values but could be useful in “exploring the circulation of the women’s text…of how women’s texts have appeared and traveled across time and space.” The researchers used a program called the Ngram Reader, which “reads” Google books for particular terms. The historiographers searched for Aspasia, the rhetorical teacher of Pericles. Information of this rhetor is quite slim and relies on the “accounts of others from Plato to Plutarch.” In searching Aspasia’s name they weren’t able to discover any new information about the real Aspasia but they did see when she had peaks of interest. For example, she had her highest peak in the 1870s, in which, the researchers  discovered, that her romantic relationship with Pericles was written about in two novels.

Despite the lack of new information, the feminist historiographers found distant reading useful in seeing how this woman was written about through history. Also, its a useful tool for other historiographers to discover how and what women wrote and spoke about, and how this information has been remembered and rewritten. However, the authors also mention that the source they used, the Google corpus, isn’t a perfect and unbiased, as they gather their texts from libraries that don’t keep large collections of women authors, so the information some feminist researchers may be looking for won’t be represented. Maybe, this is the hopefulness of distant reading. Yes, looking at a select few individual texts won’t give you an accurate view of the novels published at certain times, but we can’t say that distant reading does that exactly either. As men tried to push women out of the publishing world; they could of also pushed them out of institutions that held their work, pushing them out of the corpus used for distant reading. This is not to say Moretti thinks the program is absolute; for example, the pattern of the sudden disappearance of genres is not fully understood by him yet. I do think the article makes really good use of his method. The researchers are searching for a “pattern as a whole”, in looking for the ways these women’s words were rewritten. In combing with Moretti the feminist historiographers could even look at what genres women were pulled to throughout history, in attempts to get published or various cultural reasons. Overall, they created another possible way this data could be used for interpretation.