| Martin Mueller Professor of English Northwestern University |
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The MONK project, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aims at creating an environment that allows non-technical users to perform sophisticated text analysis and text mining procedures across a large collection of English texts written between the late fifteenth and the early twentieth century. One way to think of it is as a Book of English or a cultural genome in which readers can complement traditional practices of ‘close’ reading with new practices of ‘distant’ or ‘macro’ reading, digital and more powerful ways of ‘skimming,’ ‘thumbing through,’ ‘eye-balling’ or otherwise ‘not-reading’ the many books that one cannot read but must learn enough about to identify what will be closely considered in the end. Grouping and sorting as well as visualization techniques will be an important component of the interface.