Dear students,

Thanks for a fantastic semester. Below are links to your final projects, organized in roughly alphabetical order by contributor. I hope you will take some time to see the great work your colleagues did this spring.

I want to again say how impressed I am by what you’ve accomplished in these projects. I can pay you all the highest compliment I know: I learned a lot while evaluating your work. Best of luck to you all in your future endeavors! — Ryan Cordell

• Laura Alderson and Alisha Petrouske, St. Norbert College’s Academic Buildings
• Sergi Adamovsky and Zhaniya Sauranbaeva, Canon Missale
• Jon DesChane and Jeff LaJeunesse, St. Norbert College and the Green Bay Packers
• Meg Domnick and Calli Nonnemacher, Father Inama Adalbert O.Praem and Father Maximilan Gartner O.Praem.
• Maria Dzurik, St. Augustine’s Confessions
• Matt Evans and Trevor Powell, The Many Residence Halls of St. Norbert College
• Johanna Krogh, Les Confessions de Saint Augustin
• Kelly Levenhagen and Todd Winkelbauer, St. Norbert ROTC Through the Ages
• Justin Nagode, Fr. Rowland De Peaux
• Jerome Palliser, Fr. Pennings’ 1898 Letters, a TEI edition, and accompanying reflection
• Marissa Ryan, The Norbertine Effect
• Jaclyn Schreiner, Fr. Anselm Maynard Keefe: The Legacy
• Brandon Van Pay and Caesar Cai, St. Norbert College Academic Buildings
• Erin Worzalla, A Glimpse into the Life of Abbot Pennings

Recently, one of my friends posted something up on Facebook. It was a video ‘montage’ of this girl, ranging from her birth to her at about 12 years old. It was created by her father, who took literally 12 years worth of video footage and compiled them into one, 3 minute video. The viewer watches the video and, essentially, watches this girl grow up. (Watch it here)

Not only is this video pretty neat to watch, it got me thinking of doing the same thing when I have children some day. I have a huge interest in psychology, especially memory and sensory functions, and I felt this was closely connected. For example, when i think back to my earliest memory, I barely recall what was happening (I was 3 years old). I often wonder if I would remember more from early childhood if I had recalled to mind what had happened in the past more often growing up. Research has proven that keeping a daily journal helps keep memory function sharp, and this girl’s father started this “video journal” from birth, so this girl grew up and became comfortable with keeping a daily video journal. Will her memories of her childhood be clearer and stronger when she is an adult? Perhaps if she were to watch every month’s video at the end of each month, or every week’s at the end of the week (without the compression; watch the video in actual time), would she be able to recall more vividly her childhood memories because of that repetition and recall?

I definitely will archive this video idea away in my “when I’m a parent, Ill…” mental folder. Its not only heartwarming and extremely interesting to watch how time changes and develops a person from childhood, but it will also be interesting to see the psychological effects from this sort of journaling. I think this is an awesome gift for a parent to give their child.

A series of dichotomies (and one trichotomy) for our discussion of Benjamin and McLuhan:

• original / reproduction
• authentic / copy
• reality / representation
• author / public
• medium / message
• content / effect
• manual / mechanical / digital

When analyzing my posts thus far, I hadn’t really realized a pattern that held true for all posts. I noticed I initially started posting about what was happening in the classroom sessions, instead of posting about what had interested me recently. I had a difficult time finding topics outside of what the classroom time allotted as I had absolutely no free time to ‘browse the web’ and find things that interested me. The first few posts were basically thoughts that came to mind while studying the classroom material. I noticed I soon began to find connections to our classroom material and my other studies. For example, the post is have about “text the way it was meant to be used” gently touched on the idea of copyrighting (in reference to the copyright of fashion TED talk we watched). This is relevant to my design studies as there is an EXTREMELY fine line between stolen art and ‘inspired’ art. My theory is that everything art is stolen, it is drawn from something that existed before. My next post titled “Walden” basically touched on how much of a jerk I thought Thoreau was, and how it was pretty hypocritical of him to judge society as a whole from a very high social standpoint. I find there are many people like this in my life, and I noticed I began to shift from just discussing the text to being critical towards it; I didn’t feel as if i had to praise everything we did.

The themes of the early posts were basically an on-going mental question I had towards digital humanities and technology in general. Is this subject, be it text, tools, etc, being used today the way the creator intended it to be used when he/she made it? As time progressed, I began to more freely write about what interested me in the classroom and related topics, not just what was happening. I began to sense my tone became more casual, and I could sense my sarcasm sneaking in to some parts. I feel as if a reader read my posts, they would feel comfortable and casual about them. There is a writing style that is neat but free-style, well-written but casual, and it is that style of writing that I aim to achieve.

I valued writing about what interested me, but at the same time I hated it. Often times, time was scarce, and I would have almost rather been told ‘here, write 2 paragraphs on this’ instead of whatever I wanted. Looking back, I realize that it forced me to think deeply about the subjects at hand, to criticize and grow to like or dislike the information. I would not have achieved that level of understanding of the material if I had been told to write about a teacher-chosen topic. Towards the end, I found that I was actually really excited about my collaboration project, and I was pretty pumped to write posts about it. If I were grading these posts as a whole, I would grade them well, but perhaps it is because I know that I couldn’t just wing it through them; I actually had to think critically. Perhaps an AB? Now that I have taken a liking towards Processing software and will probably post about it for my last 3 posts, I would give an A, because I would like to think the reader can tell how AWEsome I think the software is, and I want the class to geek out about it as much as I have/will.

Blog Audit (a Meta-post assignment)

This week Dr. Cordell will be away at a conference. You will work on this lab in lieu of our regular class. The lab should take awhile: please plan to spend 2-3 hours completing the assignment. The idea for this assignment was stolen from my colleague Paul Fyfe of Florida State University, who spoke with our class on Monday. He describes his version of the assignment in “How Not to Read a Victorian Novel,” Journal of Victorian Culture 16, no. 1 (April 2011). Here’s how Paul introduces the assignment for his students:

Franco Moretti was dissatisfied with how literary scholars accept just a handful of possible texts as representative of cultural eras. Even if those texts are diverse and interesting, how can they possibly represent broader trends at scale? Moretti wants to change our sense of literary history by enlarging it, or by increasing our critical distance from it. He coined the phrase “distant reading” as an approach to analyzing lots and lots of texts instead of an unrepresentative few. Distant reading uses other modes of analysis and models of interpretation than the “close reading” we are familiar with. In his own work, Moretti compiles textual information from lots and lots of novels into maps, graphs, and logical trees. Seen this way, texts can reveal new patterns and language trends than we could otherwise discover close up. An array of digital visualization and text analysis tools now make Moretti’s methods more accessible to the casual user. The first paper will be an experiment in using these tools. We will consider “distance” not only as the subject of our course but also as a potential mode of reading and interpretation. What does literary criticism and analysis look like if we accept distance “as a condition of knowledge”?

Distance is a pretty good approach to the Victorian novel, considering that 40,000+ books of prose fiction were published in the last two-thirds of the nineteenth century. No one can read them all. But perhaps we can learn how to not read them. As Moretti and others have demonstrated, digital technology provides lots of interesting ways of doing this. Using some selected tools, you will analyze a big Victorian novel and then write a paper explaining your questions and insights. There’s one catch: it has to be a book you have never read.

English classes more typically emphasize close reading than “not reading.” This exercise will be new to many of you. So will the technology and the interfaces. The paper requires thinking about texts in a very different way than you might be used to. There may be dead ends; on the other hand, there will be no wrong answers. This preludes two important points:

• Play. Experiment. This assignment is as much about testing the methods as it is learning about the text. The goal here is not to reconstruct a missing story, but to “read” the novel in a fundamentally different way, and to think about the implications of doing so.
• Ask for help. Please don’t struggle with the technology, or tear hair in confusion about the assignment. Visit my office hours or email for an appointment if you’d like to go over this, work out a problem, or discuss how to talk about your results.
• Use frustration creatively. This is perhaps the hardest and most essential trick. If you hit a dead end, feel frustrated, or get null results, how can you use that to learn? In other words, what might be the values of that frustration or failure in thinking about your critical approach? Try to take any moment of frustration as instead an opportunity to reflect on the kinds of questions you are asking and how you might change them.

Ready to get started?

So here’s how you should proceed for this assignment:

1. Choose a big Victorian novel to not read.

   Remember that you must choose something you’ve never read before. Perhaps you’ll pick a famous novel you’ve always wanted to read, but could never find the time for. You must choose a novel that you can find the entire text for online, likely on Project Gutenberg. A few possibilities (don’t tell Dr. Fyfe, but I’ve snuck a few American novels into this list):

   • Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
   • Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights
   • Charles Dickens, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, or David Copperfield
   • George Eliot, Middlemarch
   • Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South
   • Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
   • Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady Volume 1 and Volume 2
   • Herman Melville, Moby Dick
   • Bram Stoker, Dracula
   • William Thackeray, Vanity Fair
   • Susan Warner, Wide, Wide World

   Download the “plain text” (.txt) version of the novel to your computer. Open that text file in a plain text editor—like we used for our HTML and TEI labs—and delete all of the text at the front and back of the file that aren’t the text itself. You want to file to include only the words of the novel itself, not any of the legal language or the metadata. Save the file as a plain text (.txt) file.

2. Make word clouds

   When provided with a bunch of text, tag cloud or word cloud engines will return you a graphical representation of the most common words: the more frequently a word appears in the text, the larger it appears relative to other words on the screen.

   Wordle is nice for making word clouds because, once your word cloud gets generated, you can toggle common English words (e.g. and, the, if) on or off, and you can customize or even “randomize” the display, allowing you different visualizations of the data. Using the text of your chosen novel, experiment with Wordle until you get comfortable with the interface. Then run a couple of different tests with Wordle, making notes of your observations along the way:

   • Generate a cloud for the whole text. How you might “read” this? Come up with a few different observations. What kinds of words are there? Are there patterns or in/consistencies in the words? In what is relatively more or less frequent?
   • Try breaking the book into chapters or sections (many Victorian novels were first published in monthly parts or in three volumes). Paste individual sections in, generate word clouds, and see what you can regenerate from a “distant” perspective.
   • Play with stoplists: in Wordle, toggle on/off the common English words. (You can also create your own custom stoplist, which is a little more advanced.)

3. Reveal your texts

   Word clouds are a first step (on the ProfHacker blog, Julie Meloni called word clouds a “gateway drug” to textual analysis). Next, we will run (slightly) more sophisticated text analysis software on the file using tools provided by Voyant (Voyant has had server troubles lately; if that link doesn’t work, use this link to the software on another server. Upload the plain text version of your chosen novel and click “reveal.” Initially Voyant’s results will look much like Wordle’s. You’ll see a word cloud in the top left corner of the screen, a summary of results below it, and the text of your chosen novel in the center. If you click “more…” in the summary window, however, another window will open below it showing the “words in the entire corpus.” “Corpus” means “a collection of written works,” and Voyant can be used to analyze many texts together; in this case, however, your corpus is one novel.

   Look at the words by frequency. You might have to scroll through a few pages before you get past common words such as “the,” “and,” and so on. What are the first few less common words that appear most frequently in your novel? Double click on of the words listed, and a new set of tools will open on the right side of the window. You can look at “word trends,” which plots the relative frequency of words at different points in your novel. Below this you can click to open “Keywords in context,” which shows the words that appear around the word you’re analyzing within the text. If you look at the text in the center of the window, you’ll see that there’s now a “heat map” running along its left-hand margin which shows where your chosen word appears most frequently within the text. Jot down some notes about this word, and then compare those results with several other words in the “Words in the Entire Corpus” menu.

   Some questions to consider as you play with Voyant: does more focused attention to word frequency change your opinions about your book? What about scarce or infrequent words? What still don’t you know? In other words, what additional information might you need to gain insights? What insights, if any, do these tools provide? What keywords or patterns did you pursue and why? What might you suspect are the values and/or limitations of “not reading” this way? Where might it be useful in future research projects or in analyzing other kinds of texts?

4. Explore the wonderful world of Ngrams

   Google’s Ngram Viewer displays the frequency of worlds over time by drawing on the massive Google Books corpus, which includes the text of more than 15 million books. For more on Ngrams, check out the Culturomics site. Choose several of the words you’ve concentrated on in your previous analyses and enter them into the Ngram viewer. Look at the frequency of those words through time, paying particular attention to their frequency when your chosen novel was published. Do any of them stand out, either as particularly common words during their time or, perhaps as interestingly, as particularly uncommon words during their time. Try a few more words from the frequency lists you generated in TAPoR earlier. The big question here: can a tool like the Ngrams viewer, which analyzes so many texts, help you understand anything about the historical place of a book you’ve never read?

5. Read the first chapter

   Now that you’ve not read the entire novel, go back and actually read its first chapter. Did the textual analyses you performed prepare you to understand the themes, character, setting, or any other aspects of this first chapter? Are there ideas you expected to encounter based on your textual analysis, but didn’t? Were there ideas in the first chapter that seem entirely unrelated to the analyses you performed beforehand?

6. Write a Paper

   Finally, you’ll write a paper to tell me what you did and what you learned. But please keep the emphasis on what you learned: a) about your chosen text, and b) about this kind of “distant reading.” I’m interested in your speculations, your thoughtful reflections on text analysis. Grades will be based on how thoughtfully you engage with the assignment and how clearly those thoughts are expressed in prose. You do not need a central argument (although it’s fine if you have one.) The goal of this assignment is to think about what kinds of knowledge a distant reading can or cannot produce. In other words, it encourages you to think about how textual analysis changes our attention to texts. A good paper can have lots of unanswered questions. Good questions are evidence of thoughtfulness.

   Your paper should be 3-4 double-spaced pages and should be submitted via Google Docs (and only via Google Docs) to rccordell@gmail.com by noon on Friday, March 23.

Today we’ll build on Monday’s introduction to Omeka. You should all have test accounts at Omeka. Today you will be adding several items to your archive and creating a basic exhibit of them. Here are the steps you should follow:

1. Find a set of at least 4 items to import and save them where you can find them easily. You can use anything you’d like, but there should be a connection between the items so that the exhibit you build makes some sense. Remember also that these exhibits will be public; don’t use copyrighted images, sound files, or videos!. I searched the historical photos of St. Norbert for the keyword “computers.” The images I found could make a nice exhibit about the changing computer labs over the past 40 years at St. Norbert College.
2. Add each of your items to your Omeka archive. Include as much metadata as you can using the Dublin Core areas provided by Omeka. Make sure you assign the correct item type to each item you add.
3. Once all of your items are added, learn how to put them together in an exhibit. The video in the tutorial should prove especially helpful. Then try the exhibit builder out. Create an exhibit that brings the items you’ve added together. Experiment with the different layout options. Since you (probably) haven’t researched these items, you might not have reliable explanatory text to add to your exhibit. If that’s the case, add some filler text instead. The objective here is to get familiar with the exhibit builder.
4. If you have time, play around with the built-in themes. Changing your site’s theme will change its entire look.
5. Email me a link to your completed exhibit!

In related-but-unrelated news, The Dublin Core (the metadata standard employed by Omeka) turns 17 today!

Today Dr. George Williams, Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Upstate (and @GeorgeOnline on Twitter) will introduce us to Omeka, a user-friendly platform for building scholarly archives. Dr. Williams recommends that you watch this video introduction to Omeka in preparation for our session (we may watch this during the first minutes of class):

What is Omeka.net? from Omeka on Vimeo.

Dr. Williams also recommends you check out this showcase of Omeka sites. You might be particularly interested in these:

• The Bracero History Archive
• Digital Dos Passos
• Hurricane Digital Memory Bank
• A Thin Ghost
• “Our Tools of Learning”:
  George Arthur Plimpton’s Gifts to Columbia University

In class we’ll be using the fully hosted version of Omeka at Omeka.net, which allows you to use Omeka without getting your hands dirty installing the software on a server, editing stylesheets, etc. However, the fully-hosted version limits users to a few pre-installed themes and plugins. Those of you looking for a greater challenge (and greater flexibility) might try the full version of Omeka available for download at Omeka.org. You will need access to server space in order to install this software—Omeka doesn not run on the desktop. The full version of Omeka allows you to install many community-developed themes and plugins that extend Omeka’s functionality. You can also directly edit the CSS in a unique installation of Omeka, which can allow users to create beautifully styled sites that look very different from Omeka sites that use default themes.

If you would like to work with the full version of Omeka, do let me know, and do refer to the developer’s extensive documentation about everything from installation to developing new themes and plugins.

Since we’re still discussing Walden, I figured I would blog about it/Thoreau. When reading through the first few chapters, the reader learns about Thoreau’s ‘experiment’ and why he decides to escape society and live off the land, so to speak. This was to show that the burdens society pressures us to bear are unnecessary and frivolous. So he goes off onto someone else’s land (Emerson’s?) and hangs out there for 2 years. He decides to live off only the land around him, away and even free from the hardships of work, material ownership, and society.

While I do think his thought process is fairly interesting, his intentions are good, his point is understandable; {and there is a warm place in my heart for Thoreau’s writing} I can’t help but hold on to the fact that what he is doing, his ‘experiment’ in which he lives only off what he is able to come by out of luck or chance with little to no money or work, is a bit ironic and pretentious. The reader must not forget that he is Harvard-educated, comes from a decently well-off family, and, even though he had trouble finding a career path he enjoyed, had plenty of work opportunities. Thoreau intends to simplify his life, to no longer be burdened by material possessions and discontinue being a slave to his own work. This is a very respectable concept, (one that perhaps could do our society today a lot of good) but I can’t help but ask what about those that are burdened with the lack of material possessions? or the lack of an education? or the lack of work to provide for themselves and their families? or even food?

I wonder if Thoreau would feel differently about his experiment if he had actually struggled with those real burdens, if he didn’t have the option of moving back into a wealthy society with food, shelter, education, and possessions. I have a lot of experience in non-profit work, and one of the most frustrating sights (for me) is to see a group of people, who haven’t the slightest idea of what poverty or need feels like and probably never will, come into a place/city/culture/etc, wear work clothes, eat minimally, and do a few hours of physical labor, participate in other ‘charity’ activities, and at the end of their “service time” pack up and go back to their normal lives, and then feel as if they truly understand what it is like to live and exist in those situations. It is easy to jump into a situation that is completely in your control, hang out in conditions that are less than ideal for a bit, then jump back out of it when you feel like it.

To break away from my lengthy rant, I did like Thoreau’s statement about education. I forget exactly where it is in the first 3 chapters, but he says something to the point of not only allowing certain people in society to be highly educated while others remain uneducated. It should be an educated society in its entirety. This redeems HDT a little bit in my book.

I also found Thoreau’s method of determining cost VERY  interesting. I sometimes use the same method when determining my need vs want when making purchases. “How much life must I give up for this item?” “How many hours do I have to work for the money to buy this?” When I look at purchases in that light, as frustrating as it can be, it really helps add definition to the line between want and need…

To my surprise, I’m enjoying reading Walden thus far, and I’m looking forward to more discussion about it.

In today’s lab we’ll be delving a bit further into TEI. This lab includes a written component. Please compose your responses in an email and send them directly to me.

Recall that TEI offers a number of advantages over HTML for encoding scholarly editions of texts. Among these advantages,

• TEI uses markup that has been developed and standardized by textual scholars and technologists for long-term preservation. In other words, the TEI Consortium ensures that TEI documents will continue to be machine readable well into the future. While no format—including, for that matter, printed text—is permanent, TEI is less susceptible to the rapid changes in encoding technologies than other markup languages. This means, perhaps, that TEI documents won’t benefit from the shiniest advances of the coming years, but most textual scholars will happily sacrifice shine for robustness.
• TEI embeds the metadata of an electronic edition into the file itself. Because TEI has become the standard for electronic editions, many systems understand how to read TEI metadata. This means that libraries, scholarly repositories, and other academic systems can easily incorporate TEI documents. By embedding metadata into each TEI document’s header, scholars ensure that users can search not only the text of the documents they encode, but also information about the document’s author(s), editor(s), place(s) of publication, and so forth.
• TEI allows scholars to encode their theoretical concerns into their documents. In other words, TEI documents can be more than simple transcriptions. Remember how the journal Kathryn Tomasek showed us, in which the names of people were tagged with individual identifiers, which would allow readers of the electronic edition of the journal to search or sort entries by the people referenced in them. Scholars particularly interested in geography—who plan, for example, to use geospatial software to map the texts they’re encoding in TEI—might pay particular attention to place names in their texts. When encoding poetry, literary scholars can tag features of the poetry itself: its rhyme scheme, its allusions, or its poetic tropes.

In today’s lab we will explore these ideas using TEI files developed by students in Kate Singer‘s “Feminist Poetics” class at Mount Holyoke College.

1. First, download this zip file and unzip it into a folder on your drive. Right click on the files “dream_meganandeeyalaura_revised.xml” and “dream_pagenicolealyssa_FINISHED.xml” in turn and open them in Chrome or Firefox.
2. Read the poems closely, paying special attention to the words highlighted in various colors. What do you think those colors might signify? As you work to make sense of the encoding scheme, jot down your thoughts, either on paper or in a document file.
3. Once you’ve studied the poems in your browser and developed some ideas about the color coding, open the same files in a plain text editor on your computer. You can use the same editor you used for the HTML exercises last week, or (if you’re working on your own computer) you can download the free 30-day trial of The oXygen XML editor.
4. Compare the rendered version of the file (in the web browser) with the “raw” file in your editor. Can you see how the encoding relates to what’s displayed in the browser? Does reading the code directly give you any more insight into the poem’s colors in the browser? Is all the metadata in the TEI header displayed when the file is opened in a web browser? What does the browser display and what does it ignore?
5. Write a short reflection that synthesizes this comparison. In particular, try to work backward to the editorial choices that determined the poems’ color schemes. What were the priorities of these student editors? What do they seem to want readers to better understand about these poems? Is color an effective way to convey these interpretive ideas?

As you work during the next few days, please remember these handy resources for understanding TEI:

• Alex Gil‘s “Short and Sweet TEI Handout”
• TEI by Example
• Brown University Women Writers Project, Guide to Scholarly Encoding