MONK is a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study. It supports both micro analyses of the verbal texture of an individual text and macro analyses that let you locate texts in the context of a large document space consisting of hundreds or thousands of other texts. Shuttling between the “micro” and the “macro” is a distinctive feature of the MONK environment, where you may read as closely as you wish but can also practice many forms of what Franco Moretti has provocatively called “distant reading.”

MONK stands for Metadata Offer New Knowledge, and metadata (data about data) are at the heart of its very radical “divide and conquer” strategy. For every document in a MONK environment there are explicitly recorded metadata at the top level (bibliographical data), at the bottom level of individual word occurrence (lexical, morphological, and syntactic data), and at the mid-level of discursive organization (chapters, scenes, stanzas, etc).

This triple-decker structure of metadata helps to organize the MONK inventory of words in a collection. Visualization tools will play a critical role in helping scholars both formulate the questions they want to ask and interpret the result sets their questions produce.