Network Sense: Methods for Visualizing a Discipline

At its heart, this is a book about research methodologies: Its central arguments, premises, and motivations adapt, extend, and apply two recently named methodologies, distant reading, introduced in 2000 by Franco Moretti, a scholar of literary history and the evolution of literary forms, and thin description, theorized by literary scholar Heather Love and set in sharp relief against anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s well-known and widely adopted approach to ethnography, thick description. Weaving together these two methodological orientations—the distant and the thin—I argue for their convergence as suited to theoretically underpinning a suite of methods used to visualize patterns indicative of the ongoing growth and maturation of an academic discipline: rhetoric and composition/writing studies.