  Distant reading methodologies make use of computational processes to aid in
the analysis of large text corpora which might not be pliable to traditional
methods of scholarly analysis due to their volume. While these methods have
been applied effectively to a variety of types of texts and contexts, they can
leave unaddressed the needs of scholars in the humanities disciplines like
history, who often engage in close reading of sources. Complementing the close
analysis of texts with some of the tools of distant reading, such as
visualization, can resolve some of the issues. We focus on a particular
category of this intersection---which we refer to as near-by reading---wherein
an expert engages in a computer-mediated analysis of a text with which they are
familiar. We provide an example of this approach by developing a visual
analysis application for the near-by reading of 19th-century scientific
writings by J. W. von Goethe and A. P. de Candolle. We show that even the most
formal and public texts, such as scientific treatises, can reveal unexpressed
personal biases and philosophies that the authors themselves might not have
recognized.
