I chose to create a distant reading visualization of quotes from the Doctor Who episode “The Christmas Invasion” using the IMDB quotes page. Here is my pic:
Obviously, “doctor” is the most important word; it is Doctor Who after all. But the interesting thing about this picture, is that since it is made from quotes and the format for quotes is “(person speaking): (what they say),” you can’t tell if the word “doctor” is the most used because he is the one most often speaking, or because he is the most often referred to by other people. Or it might be a combination of these. Or, it may because some quotes are repeated, incorrect, use stage directions, or are interpreted differently by different people. There is so much variety, that this picture tells us more about the quotes page itself, than the actual Doctor Who episode.
As far as coming up with a new distant reading tool, I’m not particularly creative, so it’s likely someone has come up with this before, but here goes: a 3D model of a page of words, with the words at different heights. The different heights of the words could mean the amount of times the word is repeated, the significance of the word (left up to the artist’s interpretation), the number of letters in the word, the number of syllables, the number of different letters in the word, etc. The list goes on and on. I know this is a very general idea, but I think flexibility is good for this kind of thing. It means many people can use this tool to demonstrate different things about a piece. And 3D stuff is cool.