Recording: Honorary Doctor Paul Cobley's lecture on the opposition between close and distant reading

On 2 December 2025, Paul Cobley — Honorary Doctor of the University of Tartu — delivered a public lecture titled “Thinking: close and distant” as part of the Juri Lotman Lecture Series. The lecture is now available to watch online.

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Despite influential contributions by Lacková and Falýnek (2021), Compagno (2018), and Fontanille (1992), semiotics has remained largely oriented towards qualitative close reading rather than quantitative approaches (Sonesson 2026). This raises important questions: How significant are issues of scale and quantity for semiotics? And how do they relate to the central role of close reading as a scholarly practice?

Parallel to the rise of the digital humanities and the growing possibilities offered by Big Data analysis and other computational methods, Moretti launched his project of distant reading in 2013 — in explicit contrast to the established practice of close reading. Yet Moretti had already outlined the potential of distant reading in a 2000 recapitulation of the Annales School method. It can even be argued that computational methods have a much longer history (Igarashi 2015). The opposition between close and distant reading is often framed as a matter of scale, sometimes accompanied by the claim that distant reading entails a loss of attention and diminished focus (Editors of SubStance 2009).

Cobley’s public lecture examines the criticism of distant reading in opposition to close reading, questioning the assumption that the scale of reading directly corresponds to its quality — understood as a more affectively nuanced interpretation that highlights the reader’s negotiation of “extrinsic and intrinsic determinants of literary scale” (Orlemanski 2014: 230). Cobley argues that the issue of scale is far more complex than the apparent dichotomy between qualitative and quantitative methods suggests (Eve 2019). He will show how recent debates on the nature of reading itself (Trasmundi and Cobley 2021; Engberg et al. 2023) challenge and, at the same time, enrich the scale-related promises of Artificial Intelligence.

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Paul Cobley has published over a hundred articles, several monographs, and edited dozens of collected volumes. His research focuses on semiotics and narratology, as well as on integrating different schools and fields within the discipline of semiotics. He has been dedicated to creating publishing opportunities for semiotic research, editing some of the most important semiotics journals, as well as book series in the field for the De Gruyter publishers. He has written Semiotics for Beginners, a textbook translated into 18 languages, including Estonian (2002).

Cobley’s collaboration with Estonian semioticians and his first visits to Tartu date back to the 1990s. He has contributed to the international recognition of the university’s cultural, bio-, and sociosemiotic studies, helping scholars from Tartu publish their research at prestigious academic publishing houses and special issues of journals. His cooperation with Tartu semioticians in compiling and editing the book series Semiotics, Communication and Cognition continues to shape the field today.

Paul Cobley was named an honorary doctor of the University of Tartu in 2025 in recognition of his outstanding achievements in semiotics, media studies, literary studies, and communication research, as well as his long-standing contributions to the international advancement of Estonian semiotics. The titles and medals of honorary doctors were conferred on 1 December at the ceremony marking the anniversary of the Estonian National University.