4. Introduction to the Open Peer-Reviewed Section on DR2 Methodology Examples

Abstract

In the last twenty years Franco Moretti’s ‘distant reading’ approach has provided a fresh under­standing of literature and its historical development not by studying in detail a few particular texts (as in the so-called ‘close reading’), but rather by aggregating and analyzing large amounts of information. As members of the DR2 research group at the University of Turin—DR2: Distant Reading and Data-Driven Research in the History of Philosophy—we share the conviction that it is time to apply such methods to the history of thought. This kind of methodological innovation can be of interest for scholars working on different historical periods (ancient, medieval, modern, contem­porary) and from the perspective of different fields (history of philosophy, history of science, his­tory of ideas and intellectual history, sociology of knowledge, and so forth). A founding moment for this approach was the first DR2 Conference, held in Turin in 2017. Some of the participants to the Conference agreed to publish edited versions of the conference talks in the form of working papers, that would be subjected to an \emph{open peer review} process. We present here the results.