[1] In the article, Moretti proposed a mode of reading which included works outside of established literary canons, which he variously termed "the great unread"[2] and, elsewhere, "the Slaughterhouse of Literature".
[2] Only later did the term distant reading (via Moretti and other scholars) come to become primarily identified with computational analysis of primary literary sources.
[5] Underwood emphasises a social-scientific dimension in this prehistory of distant reading, referring to particular examples in the work of Raymond Williams (from the 1960s) and Janice Radway (from the 1980s).
Empirical approaches to literary study are a regular characteristic of distant reading, and are often accompanied by a reliance on quantitative methods.
This principle, for Moretti, consists of "building a bridge from concepts to measurement, and then to the world" (104), underscoring the combined interests of empirical and quantitative study at its heart.
In practice, distant reading has been undertaken with the aid of computers in the twenty-first century (though Underwood has argued for prominent non-computational precursors[8]); however, some works combining scale and literary study have been described as "distant-reading-by-hand".
[10] In a similar vein, Stephen Marche focuses on the prospects for interpretation within the framework of computational literary analysis in an article which begins with the provocation, "[b]ig data is coming for your books".
Gayatri Spivak is unconvinced about distant reading's claims to represent the perspectives of the "great unread", asking "[s]hould our only ambition be to create authoritative totalizing patterns depending on untested statements by small groups of people treated as native informants?".
It aims to create a network of researchers jointly developing the distant reading resources and methods necessary to change the way European literary history is written.