It's been difficult to stay focused during the pandemic. Only the past week have I been able to return to my dissertation work, and just to go over my reading notes taken in the weeks prior to march 16, when I left New York. I was working through a mountain of reading and research in response to a tweet I sent out about a month ago asking for examples of non-white-cis-male-het distant reading.

So after this time of research and note-taking, I feel ready to start writing again, and I'm starting to constellate some of the central findings in the work of great feminist scholarship on distant reading.

In my last post, I zeroed in on what I see as the crux of my chapter's argument, where I think much of this research will be deployed. The chapter starts off with this conundrum---pointing out the necessity of touch, and then the reality of queer experience and "raw data" which are untouchable, sharing in the status of being constructed in some way. The answer to handling this construction is to celebrate the necessity of critical detachment and how it opens up the way we interface with constructions. By abstracting data we can move with them and find new modes of moving with with them. The method lies in bodies "touching" through their own abstraction.

In my reading, I found that much of the writers were inspired by Drucker, or build off Drucker's ideas as foundational to their thinking. There is this general agreement that all data is capta. They build off this notion into different directions, and below are the two strands I find most useful for my project:

• the first is the strand of criticism as performance. Critics like Katherine Bode and Tanya Clement stress the performativity of the critical process; Bode emphasizing more the materiality of the critical apparatus, and Clement emphasizing the process of discovery. Both are heavily indebted to ideas from textual criticism, particularly of Jerome McGann. They are formalists.

• the second strand is of dynamicity or vantages. These critics look at how computation affords possibilities for social critique by refusing "totalizing" narratives and approaching modeling as something partial yet dynamic. Lauren Klein looks for methods that engage multiple dimensions of the invisible in data; Laura Mandell at how we might "animate numerical processes" rather than establish them; and Susan Brown's category work exhorts critics to work with provisionality, rather than aim for permanence. I could also add Julia Flanders and Pamela Caughie to this list.

Does it make sense for me to separate these two strands? They are both based on approaching criticism as a vital exercise, but they seem to differ on the emphasis of social vs formal critique. Is that a separation I want to uphold here?

What I'm really interested is in how these critics address the body in their processes. How can I incorporate a concern for affect here?