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Creative Reading in the Information Age: Paradoxes of Close and Distant

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DOI: 10.1002/jocb.186

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Special Issue:
The Creativity Paradox - Multidisciplinary Perspectives

Creative Reading in the Information Age:

Paradoxes of Close and Distant Reading

ABSTRACT
This article reflects on transformations of modes of reading in an information age, asking what “creative
reading” entails in information-intensive, multimodal environments. We currently face the challenge of the
development of reading strategies that oscillate between “close” and “distant” reading. For years, these read-
ing strategies have been a topic of debate between practitioners of Digital Humanities on the one hand, and
“traditional” humanists on the other. This ongoing polemics presents reading methods in an unnecessarily
polarized manner. I argue that creativity research can be operationalized to come to a more productive
model to characterize the ways we read in an information age. I show that the “schism” between close and
distant reading is structured around a number of apparent paradoxes that I unravel such as hyper- and deep
attention/attention and distraction, and convergence and divergence. The paradox of creativity resides in the
fact that we find convergence in divergence and vice versa, that the two by definition intertwine. Building
on these concepts, I propose a model that considers reading in terms of scale variance. I suggest the human-
ities turn to creativity research and the interrelations between divergent-exploratory and convergent-integra-
tive thinking (Lubart), for a conceptual framework that will allow us to train students on all levels how to
read (and how and when not to read), in an information age.
Keywords: creativity, reading, digital humanities, information, attention, convergence, divergence.

Whereas creative writing is a topic often addressed in handbooks and encyclopedias on creativity
research (Gonsalves & Chan, 2013; Pritzker, 1999), creativity and reading form a less obvious pairing. This
is not in itself surprising. Creative writing is widely recognized as a skill or even a calling, as well as a pro-
fession and a field of study. As Kiene Brillenburg Wurth (2017) writes, there is a much-discussed schism
between studies like English literature, which offer a (historical and theoretical) training in reading, and cre-
ative writing programs, which provide a training in writing literature (see Leahey, 2016). It is widely
accepted that to write is to create. Reading, often taken to entail a reproductive activity of re-constructing a
pre-existing text in one’s mind, is less obviously “creative” as it does not necessarily leave palpable traces.
Yet, in this article, I make a case for the importance of creative reading. More specifically, I address the
necessity of the development of creative modes of reading in the information age (Castells, 2000).1

This article is part of a special issue, guest edited by: Kiene Brillenburg Wurth and Vlad Glaveanu.
Authors were invited to contribute to this special issue and the articles were reviewed by the guest editors
and other contributors to the special issue.

1
Information Age is the term that Manuel Castells has coined for our current historical period in which human societies perform
their activities in a technological paradigm constituted around microelectronics-based information/communication technologies,
and genetic engineering. (2000, p. 5)

The Journal of Creative Behavior, Vol. 0, Iss. 0, pp. 1–9 © 2017 by the Creative Education Foundation, Inc. Ó DOI: 10.1002/jocb.186 1
Creative Reading in the Information Age

Today, I argue, as unprecedented flows of information reach us through multiple channels, we face the
challenge of the development of new reading strategies that oscillate between “close” and “distant” reading.
Whereas the former entails close and in-depth attention to the details of a smaller section of text, the latter
involves processing (information in or about) large corpora of texts with the help of computational analysis.
For years, these seemingly antithetical reading strategies have been a topic of debate between practitioners of
Digital Humanities on the one hand, and “traditional” humanists on the other. This ongoing polemics pre-
sents these reading methods in an unnecessarily polarized manner. In this article, I propose that creativity
research on the topics of attention and distraction (Langer, 1989; Runco, 2010; Toplyn, 1999), and divergent
and convergent thinking (Baer, 1997; Guilford, 1950; Lubart 2016; Mednick, 1962; Toplyn & MaGuire,
1991), be made operational to solve these issues of scale that the humanities face. Thus, we can come to a
more productive model to characterize the ways we read creatively in an information age. First, I show that
the perceived schism between close and distant reading is structured around a number of apparent para-
doxes that I unravel: close and distant, online and offline, hyper- and deep attention, convergence and
divergence. The paradox of creativity resides in the fact that we find convergence in divergence and vice
versa, that the two by definition intertwine.
On the basis of these concepts in creativity research, I propose an alternative perspective that considers
reading in terms of scale variance: a reading that is “creative” precisely because it integrates divergent-
exploratory and convergent-integrative thinking (Lubart 2016). Rethinking the interrelations between close
and distant reading is of vital importance for training students on all levels how to read, and how not to
read, in the information age, and in order to achieve this, creativity studies and the humanities should work
together. This will contribute to filling the knowledge gap in creativity studies regarding the topic of reading.
Whereas the debate is now carried out in Humanities departments, I argue that primary school education is
in need of strategies for training students to switch between close and distant reading, and between modes
of “deep” attention and hyper-attention.

CLOSE VERSUS DISTANT: THE DEBATE

Ever since the rise of Digital Humanities several decades ago,2 there have been fierce, ongoing debates
between adapters of computational methods and defenders of “traditional” humanist approaches. Earlier
this year, Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouillette, and David Golumbia published a much discussed piece in
the LA Review of Books (Allington, Brouillette, & Golumbia, 2016), critiquing Digital Humanities advocates
for their alignment with the “neoliberal takeover” of universities (see also Kirsch, 2014), and provoking
media scholar Alan Liu to defend DH on Twitter.3 A recurring point of contestation within this debate
centers on methodological concerns: the “traditional” humanist strategy of close reading, versus the newer
computational methods often called distant reading. Franco Moretti has provocatively stated that close
reading is a “theological exercise” and that we should “learn how not to read” (2013, p. 48). Others,
like Michael Manderino (2015) and Antoine Compagnon (2014), attempt to rehabilitate close reading
and its devotion to detail, arguing that we need these skills more than ever in times of information
overload.
Close reading is an umbrella term for an assortment of reading strategies characterized by a devout
and detailed attention to the meaning and composition of art works. The approach was made famous by
the New Critics, a group of Anglo-American literary scholars including Cleanth Brooks, William K. Wim-
satt, and Monroe C. Beardsley. Inspired by I.A. Richards (author of Practical Criticism, 1929), Matthew
Arnold, and T.S. Eliot, these scholars experienced their heyday of academic fame in the forties and fifties
of the last century. Going against contemporary practices that, in their view, overvalued historical context
and biographical information, the New Critics suggested that literary scholars investigate the text itself.
They wrote extensively on certain contemporary fallacies of literary analysis, for instance, letting your own
emotions factor into the interpretation (Wimsatt and Beardsley’s; “affective fallacy”, 1949) or writing
about authorial intensions (the “intentional fallacy,” Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1946). Another practice they
attacked was the paraphrasing of the contents or “message” of a work (Brooks’; “Heresy of Paraphrase,”
1947).

2
From the second half of the twentieth century, humanities scholars cautiously started using computational methods for research
and teaching; it is only now that these methods are becoming more central to the curricula and research agendas.
3
For Liu’s response see https://storify.com/ayliu/on-digital-humanities-and-critique

2
 Journal of Creative Behavior

What was allowed according to this school was the examination of evidence offered by the text itself:
images, symbols, and metaphors as part of a larger structure that gives the text its unity and meaning. Of
particular interest to the close reader were devices that create ambiguities, paradoxes, irony, and other forms
of tension within the text. Importantly, its practitioners did not consider close reading a method. They held
that it could not be systematized, as it demanded tact, sensitivity, and intuition.
Perhaps none too surprisingly, the 1960s saw the downfall of this textual approach (that is, in its purest
form). Besides being considered elitist (solely focused on complex, “high-end” texts) and intellectualist (fa-
voring intricate and dense interpretations and treating the text as a puzzle to be solved), the New Criticism
was deemed too restrictive. In its most dogmatic form it does not invite considerations of race, class, gen-
der, emotions, the author, reader response, socio-historical context, and ideology—all categories that moved
to the center of literary studies in the sixties. With the rise of poststructuralism, close reading became a bit
of an embarrassment, connoting evasiveness and acquiescence of the status quo.4 Yet these last decades, it
seems ready for a revival: the term is brought up more frequently, and always in opposition to distant
reading.
Distant reading is the practice of aggregating and processing information about, or content in, large bod-
ies of texts without the necessity of a human reader who reads these texts (see Drucker, 2013). “Reading” is
outsourced to a computer: it is in fact a form of data mining that allows information in (e.g., subjects,
places, actors) or about (e.g., author, title, date, number of pages) the text to be processed and analyzed.
The latter are called metadata: data on the data. Natural language processing can summarize the contents of
“unreadably” large corpora of texts, while with data mining we can expose patterns on a scale that is beyond
human capacity. Franco Moretti coined the term, somewhat provocatively, in 2000. He introduced distant
reading in explicit opposition to close reading which, to his mind, fails to uncover the true scope of litera-
ture as its sample sizes are simply too small. Moretti is founder of the Stanford Literary Lab, which seeks to
confront literary “problems” by scientific means—computational modeling, hypothesis-testing, automatic
text processing, algorithmic criticism, and quantitative analysis. With this laboratory, he published a series
of pamphlets answering questions like: “can computers recognize literary genres?” and “can we employ net-
work theory to map out plots?.”
The new possibilities of computational analysis bring considerable merits to the humanities. Yet, distant
reading has not been received in an unambiguously positive light. Several scholars have expressed their con-
cern that we will underestimate the importance of interpretation if data-centered methods take center stage.
As the title of Lisa Gitelman’s (2013) collection goes, Raw Data Is an Oxymoron. Jos
e Van Dijck (2014),
too, has argued that we should not assume that through data (which in Latin means “given,” in the sense of
“fact”) the “real” is transmitted, as if independent of representation and the subjective human perspective.5
More information does not necessarily bring us closer to meaning; in fact, the opposite is often the case.
Strikingly, in this debate, close and distant reading are usually presented as mutually exclusive. Of course,
they do have undeniably antithetical features: transparency versus ambiguity, information versus form,
devout attention versus not reading, small versus big (in fact, metadata can be seen as the ultimate para-
phrase). To give close attention to anything we need to make choices, and we live in an era that tends to
undervalue selection (think of the word “discrimination”). We want the full picture: Big Data, Big Science,
and Big Humanities. Distant reading (“[T]he more ambitious the project, the greater must the distance be,”
Moretti, 2013, p. 48) caters to current demands. Yet by reinscribing this binary, the debate remains stuck at
the surface level. Are quantified, big-scale methodologies and meticulously attentive readings indeed mutu-
ally exclusive? This article goes against that premise, by proposing a creative reading that combines diver-
gent-exploratory and convergent-integrative tasks, and oscillates between different scales of text.

PARADOXES OF ATTENTION
I argue that the deadlock in the debate on close and distant reading is caused by multiple apparent,
unexamined paradoxes informing the discussion: “deep attention” versus “hyperattention,” concentration

4
Note that here, I am writing about close reading as the New Critics envisioned it, with exclusive attention to the text itself with-
out regarding context. In a more general form, especially combined with gender, postcolonial or other ideological critiques,
close reading has remained a dominant hermeneutical approach until this day. Each of the most influential poststructuralists
(Jonathan Culler, Paul De Man, Derek Attridge, Jacques Derrida), can be said to perform their own branch of close reading
(see Herrnstein Smith, 2016, p. 58).
5
On the devaluation of interpretation in distant reading and computational approaches, see also Drucker, 2011; Compagnon,
2014, p. 276.

3
Creative Reading in the Information Age

versus distraction, and, ultimately, convergent versus divergent thinking. In the present section I disentangle
these paradoxes. In order to get out of the current aporia in the polemics on reading methods associated
with digital and traditional humanities, and to ultimately bridge the gap between close and distant modes of
reading, I turn to creativity studies and its theories of attention and distraction, and convergent and diver-
gent thinking. Finally, I propose a more nuanced way to map the interrelations between these pairings,
which takes scale variance into account.
The polemics regarding big data approaches versus more “traditional” ways of reading masks an older
issue: the problem of attention. Attention is central to this debate in at least two senses. First, in the sense
of valuation: in this respect the debate can be traced back to the canon wars of the 1980s (Bloom, 1987).
Moretti in fact proposed distant reading as a solution to questions of the canon of World Literature: “Read-
ing ‘more’ is always a good thing, but not the solution” (p. 46). Big data would be the ultimate dissolver of
the canon, and not reading the most democratic gesture thinkable. Matthew Wilkens (2011), in “Canons,
Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method”, regards literary canons as a product of the practices of close
reading which he reads in terms of injustice to what is excluded. A shift to computational studies and algo-
rithmic methods in the humanities, he feels, “will hurt, but it will also result in categorically better, more
broadly based, more inclusive, and finally more useful humanities scholarship” (257). Such accounts invari-
ably make a coupling between distance and scale, where a close-up perspective pertains to the small and dis-
tance allows us to see the bigger picture.
The debate also, and perhaps more importantly, regards attention in a second sense, of concentra-
tion: a shift in modes of attention we use for acts of reading. Two distinct modes of attention are often
presented in a dichotomous fashion: in How We Think (Hayles, 2012), N. Katherine Hayles refers to
these modes as “deep attention” and “hyperattention.” The former is described as a focused form of
concentration, and the latter as a more distracted, non-linear mode of attention. As contemporary media
environments become more information-intensive, Hayles claims a shift in cognitive modes is taking
place, turning from the deep attention needed for humanistic inquiry and heading toward the hyperat-
tention that is typical in the act of scanning Web pages. The enormous amount of material online that
awaits us for reading leads to skimming instead of prolonged attention to one source of input. Hyper-
links draw away our focus from the linear flow of the text, very short forms of writing like tweets pro-
mote reading in a state of distraction, and small habitual actions such as clicking and navigating
increase the cognitive load of web reading (12). Hayles therefore considers web reading a powerful prac-
tice for “rewiring the brain” (2012: 67). Hyperattention and deep attention, she holds, each have their
respective advantages. While deep attention is essential when coping with complex phenomena such as
“mathematical theorems, challenging literary works, and complex musical compositions” (72), hyperatten-
tion can be useful for “its flexibility in switching between different information streams, its quick grasp
of the gist of the material, and its ability to move quickly among and between different kinds of texts”
(Ibid). Hayles claims that hyperattention and its associated strategy of hyperreading are growing in
importance and frequency, while deep attention and its associated acts of close reading are diminishing,
especially among the “digital native” generation.6 She concludes that the “chapter of close reading is
drawing to an end” (59).
In Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007), developmental psychologist
Maryanne Wolf makes a similar argument concerning the demise of deep reading. When the printing press
made the large-scale production of long, complex works of prose feasible, Wolf argues, a style of deep read-
ing emerged. Today, our capacities of interpreting and making mental connections are more and more often
left disengaged, and consequently may be weakening (13–20). Wolf characterizes the style of reading that
the Internet solicits as marked by “efficiency” and “immediacy.” When we read online, she says, we tend to
turn into decoders of information (see also Carr, 2010).
Sven Birkerts diagnoses the same challenge in maintaining the attentive focus, arguing that “[w]hat has
changed is either the conditions of reading or something in the cognitive reflexes of the reader. Or both”
(2010, par. 32). In our current information spaces, he claims,

6
Several studies have been carried out that attempt to find evidence for the digital consumer’s need to “multitask” in order to
keep boredom at bay for the increasingly impatient nature of the “Google Generation,” and for its lowered tolerance for delay.
See Frand, 2000: 18; Los Angeles Times/Bloomburg 2007; Johnson, 2006; Shih and Allen, 2006; Rowlands and Williams, 2007:
17. Whereas the studies by Johnson and Shih and Allen present this intolerance for delay as a characteristic of the digitally
native Google Generation, Rowlands and Williams argue that it holds true for all generations exposed to digital technologies liv-
ing at the present moment.

4
 Journal of Creative Behavior

[w]e have had to evolve coping strategies. Not merely the ability to heed simultaneous cues from
different directions, cues of different kinds, but also . . . to engage those cues more obliquely. When
there is too much information, we graze it lightly, applying focus only where it is most needed. We
stare at a computer screen with its layered windows and orient ourselves with a necessarily fractured
attention. It is not at all surprising that when we step away and try to apply ourselves to the
unfragmented text of a book we have trouble.
(par. 33)
In these accounts, we see that close reading is invariably made to correspond to deep attention and con-
centration, whereas online reading is aligned with hyper-attention and distraction.
Even without denying the ongoing changes in the modes of attention we employ, one might question
the binary logic underlying these categorizations of the different forms of attention that pertain to Internet
and literary reading. The borders between the two modes are porous: in fact, we continuously switch
between them. Kristin Veel offers a correction to this binary in her article “Information Overload and Data-
base Aesthetics” (2011). Taking her cue from architectural historian Beatriz Colomina (2002), Veel points
out that today in our information-dense and multimodal media environments, we precisely need distraction
in order to concentrate: “distraction is not the opposite of concentration, but rather its precondition” (312).
This puts the debate on close versus distant reading in a different light and renders the antithesis spurious
at best. To further the debate, we would do well to reflect on the interrelations between these modes of
attention. I therefore turn to the topic of attention as it is researched in studies of creativity. Interestingly, a
recent study (Agnoli, Franchin, Rubaltelli, & Corazza, 2015) suggests that people who are attentive to irrele-
vant information score higher on “openness,” which is in turn associated with creativity. Not only do such
studies typically value distraction, or diffuse and broad attention, as an important prerequisite for creativity:
creativity research dissolves the binary between the two by proposing a paradoxical state where the one is
always present in, and unthinkable without, the other.
Ellen Langer (1989) argues that many of the actions we undertake on a daily basis are based on routine
and are often mindless. Mark Runco (2010) further points out that there are notable advantages to the
selective attention and allocation of resources that these mindless behaviors entail. We need to rely on routi-
nes and habits at times, precisely in order to attain a deep focus when needed (414). Pertinently, Glenn
Toplyn (1999) asserts that not focused but broad and diffuse modes of attention deployment are typically
associated with creative potential. Creative individuals are hypothesized to “include a wider and more
diverse range of environmental stimuli in their field of awareness” (141). In this “associative basis of the cre-
ative process,” mental associations are generally conceived of as grouped along a gradient of conventionality
versus unconventionality. For any problem, that is, there are associations which are given frequently, as well
as more uncommon alternatives. Conventional associations, which make up the majority, form a steep gra-
dient with many associations clustered closely together. The uncommon alternatives called “remote associa-
tions” conversely form a flat gradient (142). Through tests like the Remote Associates Test (RAT) and tests
of divergent thinking, studies of creativity and attention have suggested that access to remote associations is
correlated with broad, diffuse attention deployment (Mednick, 1962; Toplyn & MaGuire, 1991). This corre-
lation between broad attention and creativity already offers a corrective to thinkers like Birkerts who associ-
ate dispersed attention with superficial readings, as it suggests that for creative reading, hyper-attention is of
vital importance.
Modes of attention and creativity are two parts of the process of creativity, in particular the alteration of
solitary versus more social or collaborative work episodes. In this respect, close reading is decisively aligned
to the solitary episode, whereas digital humanities methods are often used in a more collaborative way. Both
episodes are vital in a creative process and should be understood as interrelating. Let us now go one step
further and turn to the concept of divergent thinking in order to problematize the binary between, and gain
insight into the paradox of, close and distant reading.
In 1950, J.P. Guilford developed a model (the “Structure of Intellect” [SOI] model) for measuring cre-
ativity as a cognitive ability. This model differentiates “divergent” from “convergent” thinking. Divergent
thinking explores multiple different solutions to a problem or many different associations evoked by an
image. It is the ability to “produce many ideas, . . . to produce unusual and original ideas, . . . and to take
an idea and spin out elaborate variants of the idea” (Baer, 1997, p. 21).
Convergent thinking, conversely, aims at finding the correct answer to a question, and thus entails a
more directed way of thinking leading to a set target. Guilford hypothesized that creative personalities are

5
Creative Reading in the Information Age

often divergent thinkers, and therefore divergent thinking became a test for measuring creativity. Tests like
the Torrance test for Creative Thinking were developed in the 1960s to measure how inventive and
resourceful people were in problem solving (Guilford, 1967).
Yet since then, several researchers in the field of creativity studies have departed from the hypothe-
sized association between creativity and divergent thinking, arguing that creative cognition and creative
development necessarily entail a combination of divergent and convergent thinking. According to Todd
Lubart, creativity can only be properly understood when two types of skills are equally taken into
account. One is divergent-exploratory, which means generating multiple ideas from an initial prompt.
The second is convergent-integrative: to generate “an elaborated work that synthesizes several elements
(stimuli) provided” (in Henshon, 2016, p. 3). A complete creative process involves both divergent-
exploratory and convergent-integrative thinking. Kiene Brillenburg Wurth concurs that it is precisely the
“felt and fruitful tension between such a limiting and limitless thinking” that “epitomizes creation as a
constant becoming and differing” (working paper, 2017). The paradox of creativity resides in the fact
that we find convergence in divergence and vice versa, that the two by definition intertwine. This prob-
lematizes the presupposed binary, and I argue that the same paradox can be seen in deep and hyper-
attention and, by extension, close and distant reading. They presuppose each other and are intercon-
nected by default.
In Humanities accounts juxtaposing close and distant reading, we saw that close reading is made to
correspond to deep attention and concentration, which can be coupled to convergent-integrative think-
ing, whereas online reading is aligned with hyper-attention and distraction, aligned to the divergent-
exploratory tasks. However, we can just as well argue that when presented with already-digitized infor-
mation, the convergent thinking has been outsourced to the digital instruments. In distant reading the
text or data diverge: they are pluriform, quantitative, and thus more divergent, consistent of several
types and modalities, and larger sets. Computational methods perform convergent-integrative operations
on these data.
And by the same token close reading is in fact divergent, as it produces many associative, imaginative,
and creative threads on the basis of a small amount of input (think of Jacques Derrida’s Ulysses Gramo-
phone, where he spends over eighty pages on the word “yes” in James Joyce’s Ulysses). The input is necessar-
ily more convergent, whereas reading is divergent, it fans out. A close reading can be directed at identifying
an internal consistency or even semantic unity in a texts, but more than anything, it produces more text. It is
often associative and innovative.
Proving the dichotomy untenable, creativity research offers a more productive model to characterize the
ways we read in an information age than the binary thinking of Hayles, Woolf, and Birkerts: a model that
allows us to grasp the ways we continuously zoom in and out, and switch between different scales when
processing information. Obversely, the issue of creative reading furthers creativity research in the following
ways. First, it substantiates the knowledge on reading in the context of creativity. As I pointed out at the
outset, there is a knowledge gap regarding creative reading, especially compared to the topic of creativity
and writing, which is widely discussed. Second, it contributes to ongoing attempts to undo the conceptual
dichotomy between divergent and convergent thinking (Lubart 2016).

CONCLUSION: BRIDGING THE GAPS

As I have argued above, current conceptualizations of the paradox of divergent and convergent thinking
by creativity researchers can inspire (digital) humanists to come to more fruitful ways to interrelate close
and distant reading. We need such a model as I believe that both have undeniable assets to offer humanities
research, education in general, and the world beyond it. As Jonathan Culler describes close reading’s unique
potential:
[C]rucial to the practice of close reading is a respect for the stubbornness of texts, which resists easy
comprehension or description in terms of expected themes and motifs. The close reader needs to be
willing to take seriously the difficulties of singular, unexpected turns of phrase, juxtapositions, and
opacity. Close reading teaches an interest in the strangeness or distinctiveness of individual works
and parts of works.
(2010, p. 22)
Close reading digs for complexity, opacity, and ambiguity: values that stand to be reappraised in a
time when we encounter vast bodies of information through multiple platforms, and when we, moreover,

6
 Journal of Creative Behavior

tend to overemphasize transparency and immediacy when processing this information. Distant reading
uncovers textual elements at scales inaccessible to the human reader, offering new and unexpected vantage
points for researchers. Besides, the similarities between both approaches have rarely been noted: both
modes of (not-)reading are directed at pattern recognition. Close readers look for repetitions, contradic-
tions, and similarities, and ask “how does this object work?” instead of “what is its message?” or “what
does it stand for?” Distant readers ask surprisingly similar questions, only for larger datasets and aided by
non-human readers.
As Michael Manderino has it, today the close reading of digital and visual texts requires that we engage
our students in specific strategies across multiple texts—not linearly but simultaneously (2015, p. 23). Close
reading of multimodal texts requires the support of students’ synthesis across multiple text types. One
should, however, bear in mind that creativity is domain-specific (Barbot, Besancßon, & Lubart, 2015; Lubart
& Guignard, 2004). Hence, to be divergent creative with close reading or convergent creative with distant
reading will expectedly ask different skills of students. Students are not equally creative over all domains, so
they might have a natural inclination toward either close or distant reading. So the challenge that lies in
front of us is reinvestigating the different ways in which we read today—online and offline, analog and digi-
tal, deep and hyper, computer and human—with attention to shifts and scale variances. And we can only
do so if we take both close and distant reading and their respective potentials seriously. How can we read
creatively, making use of this whole range? Even at their most extreme (not reading thousands of nineteenth
century tomes, writing a 600-page analysis of a 6-line poem), both approaches point us to the question as
to what constitutes legibility now writing is increasingly replaced by, and reworked into, other codes. How
to decide what to read and what to outsource? How to combine reading with strategically not-reading, or
hermeneutics with computation? Literature can become a testing ground for strategies of dealing with signs
systems in a time of big data.
Furthermore, there are texts and media that actively resist the binary between close and distant read-
ings and demand a variation between scales. Qualitative, traditional humanities methods of textual anal-
ysis fall short of analyzing works of literature like Richard Grossman’s ever-in-progress Breeze Avenue, a
novel with a projected three-million-page length, or “endless” computer-generated texts that do
nevertheless reward close analysis. What to do with micronarratives or Twitterbot poetry7 whose single,
minimal units of output are in themselves not terribly interesting, but whose underlying algorithms are?
Such objects solicit new ways of reading which zoom in and out between part and whole, micro and
macro, surface and depth, and which negotiate between attention and distraction, the legible and
illegible. Ultimately, they thus operationalize the paradox of convergent and divergent thinking
(Table 1).
I have argued that, to move beyond the reiteration of binary oppositions in the debate between tradi-
tional and Digital Humanities on close and distant reading, both should consult research on the recon-
ceptualization of creativity as an inevitable entanglement of divergent and convergent thinking. This way,
we can shift our attention to the ways in which people actually read in our information age, continuously
shifting between different scales. The humanities, especially literary studies, are of vital importance in
rethinking how we can employ such reading strategies in education in order to stimulate creativity
through reading from an early age. The present day of creative reading thus not only urges us to bridge
the gap between close and distant reading but also the one between creativity studies and humanities
research.

TABLE 1. The binaries of close and distant reading

Close reading Distant reading
Deep attention Hyper-attention
Concentration Distraction
Focus Broad, diffuse attention
Convergent thinking Divergent thinking

7
See, for instance, poem.exe for a Twitterbot which “randomly” assembles haikus from a database and spews them out on
Twitter.

7
Creative Reading in the Information Age

A more open-minded perspective on the close and the distant is warranted outside academia as well.
After all, we collectively read more than ever before, both online and offline. Training and reflection on
how we read and how we select what not to read, what demands close attention and what can be skimmed,
what must be understood in a deeper sense and what can be consumed in a distracted fashion, would bene-
fit education from an early age. As E. Paul Torrance stated in 1962, creativity is a process that entails being
sensitive to “problems, deficiencies, gaps in knowledge, missing elements, and disharmonies” (Krippner,
1999, p. 599). Current debates in Digital Humanities point to precisely such lacunae in a rapidly changing
world, asking from us a certain adaptiveness to new media environments, new forms of information and
modes of processing in a digital age.

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Inge van de Ven, Tilburg University

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Inge van de Ven, Tilburg School of Humanities, Tilburg University,
Dante Building, room 2.13, Warandelaan 2, 5037 AB, Tilburg, The Netherlands. E-mail: I.G.M.vdVen@uvt.nl

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