{"id":76,"date":"2014-08-27T15:47:17","date_gmt":"2014-08-27T15:47:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/?page_id=76"},"modified":"2020-08-06T14:08:11","modified_gmt":"2020-08-06T14:08:11","slug":"topic-2-close-reading","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/seminar-digitalhumanities\/reading-topics-2\/topic-2-close-reading\/","title":{"rendered":"Topic 2: Close Reading"},"content":{"rendered":"

Close Reading<\/em> is a phrase that you hear most frequently nowadays in K-12 classrooms. \u00a0It’s become a sometimes controversial hallmark of the reading standards for something known as the Common Core<\/a>. \u00a0You can read a good summary of the criticism in this piece<\/a>\u00a0by Aaron Barlow (via the Washington Post<\/em>), which claims that “close reading” does little\u00a0to prepare students for college. But the truth is that close readings (in some form or fashion) have been a part of humanistic enterprises like English and History since the origins of those disciplines. \u00a0The trouble is that there are many ways to define a “close reading,” but for our purposes, we will treat it as a careful study of a text, one that aspires to understand its meaning by putting it into context and by analyzing any subtext (or hidden meanings). \u00a0Think about that framework:<\/p>\n