Is it possible and useful to employ tools and techniques that use computers’ elaboration capacities for the analysis of great amounts of in-class tests, with students?
What could be the effects in didactics of research in this field carried out in the past 15 years? In this workshop we will offer a brief overview and provide practical examples of test analysis techniques with specific software, starting with the concept of distant reading elaborated by Franco Moretti in 2000. Distant reading is opposed, albeit potentially complementary, to close reading, i.e. reading a text word by word. This is a way to make new information arise from a large number of tests with the goal of identifying characteristics that the reading of single texts would not be able to identify. This type of analysis can provide surprising results not only in the context of literary studies, but also historical, as well as in interdisciplinary projects of media education, allowing for the analysis of ample textual apparatus and the decoding of the underlying cultural schemes.
