Preliminary Class Business
- Attendance
- Choice of practicums for Class 7 or Class 8 (do only one)
Getting Ready for Team Tasks:
- Finalizing team formation (Current teams)
- Initial team task: meet once outside class before next Thursday to begin brainstorming a project
- In-class project brainstorming workshop in Class 9 (Nov. 3) [no class on Nov. 5]
- Project idea presentations in Classes 10-11 (Nov. 10, 12)
From Assignments page: "Choose a literary work (or part of a work) that the team will work on; and prepare a presentation to the class that introduces that work, explains why you are choosing it, and gives at least two initial ideas for your team project based on the work. Be prepared to answer the question "why?" That is, have at least an initial hypothesis about what your project might accomplish for our understanding and appreciation of the literary work (or of literature in general). (We will set a schedule by which some teams make their presentations in class 10 while others do so in class 11.) For the presentation, prepare citations, excerpts, and/or summaries of the work as appropriate on your Team Project Page (so that people who don't know the work can get a sense of it and follow your presentation).": - Presentation content:
- The literary work (or part of a work): what it is, context, reason for choice [possibly also an alternate choice of work].
- At least two ideas for a team project, and be prepared to be asked "why?"
- Possible tools you might use
- Presentation format:
- 10 minute presentations
- Presentations should have an organized structure
- [presentations will be followed by discussion with the class]
- Team Project Page:
- Mount materials on a project page linked from the Team Projects collective list
Text Analysis
1. Text Analysis Practicums
- Practicum Folder
2. "2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels"
- Stanford Literary Lab
- Ryan Heuser and and Long Le-Khac, "A Quantitative Literary History of 2,958 Nineteenth-Century British Novels: The Semantic Cohort Method" [PDF] (2012)
- (p. 3) the "meaning" problem
- (p. 4) The "semantic field" approach
- (p. 5) The historical trend correlation requirement
- (p. 6) "Correlator" tool
- (p. 7) Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary
- (p. 8) word cohort ("semantic field") examples
- (p. 11) (p. 19): The "discovery"
- (p. 31) mapping over "understandable units"
- (p. 35) (p. 37 ff.) Interpretative conclusions
3. The Big Picture
- Atomic units
- Molar units (e.g., words
cohorts cohorts in time statistical frequencies & concordances) - Aggregate views
- Mapping of aggregate views over "understandable units"
- Balance between "trained" methods" and "tabula rasa" interpretation
- Goals: evidence & discovery
- The world as "system"
- E.g., N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012), pp. 27-31 on "Scale Matters" [PDF]
- The world as "probability"
- Topic modeling, e.g., Ted Underwood, "Topic Modeling Made Just Simple Enough" (2012)
- Text analysis based on encoding (e.g., WordHoard)
- Text analysis based on "tabula rasa interpretation" (and machine learning)
Playing Literature
1. Playing Literature
- Gaming
- Andrew Plotkin, The Dreamhold (2004) (click on "Play On-line" at upper right of page)
- Game beginning
- Sample transcript of game play (Alan's most recent game)
- Literature and Games:
- Interactive Fiction (text adventure games)
- Role Playing Games -- e.g., Ivanhoe
- Gameology -- e.g., Game Studies
- Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, "Game Design and Meaningful Play" [PDF] from Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (2004)
- –(p. 59) Huizinga on play
–(p. 60) "meaningful play"
–(p. 75) "The Magic Circle"
- Simulating
- NetLogo (downloadable agent-based simulation-building program) [minimum assignment: browse the NetLogo site and learn about the concept] [maximum assignment: download and run the NetLogo program, which comes with many starter simulations]