Salon interviewed Stanford professor Franco Moretti, whose Distant Reading (2013) recently won the National Book Critics Circle award for criticism: “As a literary critic who says he aims to study books without actually reading them, Franco Moretti has positioned himself as an iconoclast."

According to the Salon article, Moretti "has described what most non-academics think of as the essence of literary criticism — singling out the best works and describing what’s great about them — as a ‘a theological exercise.’”  The Stanford Libraries’ academic technology specialists, along with our digital humanities librarians, have collaborated with Moretti on many projects at the Stanford Literary Lab, which he co-founded in 2010.  The vast majority of literary data studied by the Lit Lab scholars comes from the Libraries' own digital collections.

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/23/learning_from_failed_books/