In recent years, distant reading tools have gained a footing within Danish and Scandinavian literary studies, and there is no doubt that this tendency will increase in the future. 

Students are theoretically aware, but not necessarily methodological so. Digital methods offer a specifically methodological contribution to literary studies that might even lead to a greater general methodological awareness.  

• Voyant Tools  

Voyant has a low entrance barrier and is well suited to stimulate the students’ appetite for experimenting with digital methods. Furthermore, the University of Copenhagen's local version of the software contains some pre-formatted corpora that are relevant to students of Scandinavian literature. 

Before the sessions the students had no or limited experience working with distant reading tools. During the session, they achieved a general awareness of distant-reading as a method in literary studies and a specific awareness of the possibility of combining distant-reading with close-reading methods in literary studies. They got hands-on experience when using Voyant Tools, and when working on a self-identified issue. Furthermore, they achieved an awareness of how time-consuming distant-reading is, the opportunities of the method, of problems one meets when doing so, and of the heuristic limitations of distant-reading.

• Articles, links, examples and references, introducing Voyant Tools and distant reading. 

• The students were shown concrete examples on distant readings within Scandinavian literature (find these under ‘Links and materials’ in the right-hand menu). 

• The students were supported through instructions on the use of Voyant Tools, feedback on the presentation of their distant readings, and presentations, by student instructors who were working with distant reading tools in their MA theses.  

• It is important to allocate as much time as possible to the introduction of Voyant Tools to the students and to their experimentation with the tools. Ideally, a complete session should be devoted to this. 

• The number of pedagogically appropriate articles and book chapters on distant-reading of Scandinavian literature and on distant-reading as a methodological tool in literary studies in Danish is (still) limited, but every year, the number increases. 

• Using the University of Copenhagen version of Voyant proved to be a challenge, since it was not possible for the students to make use of it in the week, when they did their group work. A piece of advice for other teachers is to obtain and test access to Voyant in order for the students to be able to use the program when it is needed.