Distant reading and the datafication of testimony: a case for hybrid reading
Matías Alvarado Leyton's 2026 article in Virtualis examines the epistemological limits of applying distant reading to digital oral-history testimony and proposes a hybrid or stratified reading that combines computational methods with historiographic interpretation.
Summary
AI-assisted summary of the linked sourceMatías Alvarado Leyton's 2026 article in Virtualis examines the epistemological limits of applying distant reading to digital oral-history testimony and proposes a hybrid or stratified reading that combines computational methods with historiographic interpretation. The article argues that computational methods reconfigure the status of testimony by translating it into abstractions—aggregation, pattern detection and large-scale recurrence—that can reveal relations at scale but may obscure narrative, situated and relational density.