literature
John Unsworth gave a talk at Harvard tonight teasingly titled "How Not to Read a Million Books: Text Mining, and Reading the Unreadable." He spoke mostly about the MONK project,
a Mellon-funded collaboration that's familiar, I'm sure, to many HASTACers.
MONK applies text mining techniques and visualizations to discover new
dimensions to literary and historical texts.
Yesterday's New York Times profile of the work of James Pennebaker is just the latest evidence of a revival of interest in computational stylistics, and I'd be curious to hear other HASTAC Scholars' thoughts on the topic.
I'd be the first to admit that I have something of a counting fetish, and I'd love to see this kind of thing done well, but I can't help thinking that arguments like the following have a touch of the phrenological about them:
On Wednesday morning Michael Meredith didn’t stay as long as usual at the group's breakfast table. He wanted to get ready for his demo of Virtual Vellum, starting at 9AM sharp.
Michael is just a really great communicator. I wish that more CS folks were like him...:) Even in something as serious as Illuminated manuscripts he finds a way to make things fun such as by callin the "Manuscripts Torture Chamber" to the room where they carefully manipulate the manuscripts - most (all?) from France and Belgium.
The indomitable David Liu is presenting on his project to create an "affective metaphysics," and by affect he means far more than human emotion, but " anything suffered - physical, mental , or otherwise - by any subject, be it human, iron, or whatever." And to suffer is to interpenetrate, to interface. While it has been said in the past that there are few more mandarin pursuits than metaphysics, the need for metaphysical revival has become pressing as digital technologies tear down our common-sense - or should I say medieval? - divisions of the world into individual objects. This ebb and flow, the collapse of these once-sacred divisions of the world, while first brought to widespread attention by literary criticism, actually has much deeper roots, and any project to revise our metaphysics will require a keen sense of history. The study of "New Media" focuses far too much on the "new": As Liu puts it in his translation of the Hebrew Qohelet, "An age goes, an age comes go, but the earth ever stands."
