Abstract:

In many people’s view, science and technology and humanities are naturally in a state of opposition, so they have a prejudice against digital humanities. There is no doubt that digital humanities, as a new research paradigm, will bring us a lot of research convenience, with which we get rid of the cumbersome data tracking and retrieval so as to save more time and energy for in-depth thinking and theoretical interpretation of the research object. For the study of world literature, the big data method can give us a general picture of the historical development of world literature in a short time, which has been proved by the distant reading method proposed by American Italian scholar Franco Moretti. Nevertheless, everything has its two sides: the application of “distant reading” method has its own strengths, but in-depth study of world literature classics and their authors should be supplemented by the close reading method. Therefore, the two methods can form a complementary relationship. In short, digital humanities do not definitely exclude humanities, especially those irreplaceable excellent literary works and humanities works with high cultural and aesthetic content created by excellent writers or scholars. Similarly, machine and AI translation cannot replace advanced literary and humanities translation. The ideal literary research should combine the methods of distant reading and close reading so as to form a complementary relationship. Effectively, there is complementarity between science and technology and humanities.

Key words: digital humanities, distant reading, close reading, humanities, world literature studies