Visualization as Defamiliarization. Mixed-Methods Approaches to Historical Book Reviews

This paper employs a dialectical mixed methods approach to revisit a previous study in comparative literature on discourses in literary criticism, using data visualizations to analyze the original material, 700 digitized literary book reviews from the years 1906, 1956, and 2006. The aim is to explore alternative ways of understanding the review material by comparatively examining visualizations on word and sentence levels, publication years, and genre categorizations. In the paper, we discuss significant patterns that emerge in the visualizations and how a combination of computational and interpretative analysis provide complementary perspectives on the text collection. Furthermore, drawing upon Russian formalist Viktor Shklovksy, we suggest the notion of ”defamiliarization” as a conceptual framework for the process of looking at familiar research material anew through the lens of visualization, potentially uncovering previously overlooked aspects of the data. We conclude by stressing the criticality of a contextual sensibility for understanding the visualizations.