Distant viewing and multimodality theory: Prospects and challenges

This article discusses the prospects and challenges of combining multimodality theory with distant viewing, a recent framework proposed in field digital humanities. advocates use computational methods to enable large-scale analysis visual multimodal materials, which must be nevertheless supported by theories that explain how these materials are structured. Multimodality is well-positioned support this effort providing descriptive schemas impose structure on under analysis. The research can also benefit from adopting methods, help achieve long-term goal building large corpora for empirical research. However, despite their immense potential research, warrants caution, because they involve number potentially cascading risks arise biases inherent underlying data different approaches phenomenon multimodality.