Presume Not that I Am the Thing I Was

I think this is the last old post I had to write.  This is focused on my final project for Prof. Witmore’s class in May:

Over the course of a semester, Professor Witmore introduced our class to writings about relational patterns and networks, then subsequently applied them to the study of literature.  We read books such as Graham Harman’s “Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics”, Franco Moretti’s “Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History”, and Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein’s “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction” which slowly coalesced in my mind and led into my final project; a Java program designed to help render Docuscope quality text from a plain or formatted transcription.

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There is Nothing Either Good or Bad, But Thinking Makes it So

I have recently been working on an extension to shakesbook.org that employs Ajax to retrieve a file of Shakespeare’s plays from the server.  This is similar in theory to the Simile timeline I used before and also akin because of my use of a JSON data format.  I am hoping to apply a JSON data structure to complete works of literature instead of using XML.  Jon Bosak organized Shakespeare’s works into XML as early as 1996, the files here are from 1999, but from what I can tell no one has tried to place the plays into JSON.  I wish to return to this, instead of leaving it settled in XML, for several reasons.  For one, JSON is arguably more easily readable [1] by humans and computers and JSON has familial ties to Java/JavaScript, which is the language I can work in best.   JSON also takes up much less space than XML [2] which means faster communication between the server and the webpage.  These reasons together made me choose to remake Shakespeare’s works, however my acquaintance with both the plays and the data format did not result in a quicker solution; instead I inadvertently arrived at larger questions of meaning in these plays.

Shakesbook is Live

Hello All,

I am sorry for the delay in posting for so long this summer however all of the delay can be attributed to my newest project, Shakesbook.  Shakesbook is a website that I designed which focuses on social relationships in Early Modern England, particularly on relationships to do with the London theatres and playwrights.  (It is available at http://www.shakesbook.org/ )  

Action is Eloquence (Part III)

As the question of discriminatory influence in results lingers, I would like to redirect thoughts to what Michael Witmore wrote in one of his recent posts.  In it, he speaks  about a text as being “massively addressable at different levels of scale”, such as through genre, lines, or single words or even through different modes such as a phone book dress or text tagging.  I am mainly reminded of his article because the texts that I have been looking at are addressable at mainly levels of scale but the results garnered from these texts are also, themselves, massively addressable.  As I noted in the last post there are an infinite variety of notes that I could make on any one of the diagrams that I can make. 

This Thing of Darkness (Part III)

To finish this trio of posts, I would like to provide a response to Mike Witmore’s post at Wine Dark Sea labeled Shakespeare Out of Place?.  In this post Witmore notes that “when we did a further study of the clusters containing works by Shakespeare, we noticed that their elevated levels of two different LATs that dealt with punctuation – TimeDate and LanguageReference – was an artifact of hand modernization.”  These two Language Attribute Types (LATs) lie within the Docuscope’s Dimensions of Narrative Time and Reference Language and Docuscope’s Clusters of Narrative and Special Referencing respectively.  Witmore notes the difference between the clustering of Shakespeare’s plays among their contemporaries before and after the emendation of these LATs.  I must presume that Witmore also chose to use Ward’s Test at the LAT level of Docuscope’s output in JMP to create his diagrams, since he doesn’t mention adjusting any of the Dimensions or Clusters so therefore wouldn’t have changed diagrams.  I created similar diagrams to reflect on the diagrams I created when first starting out, for my post Epic.  For that post, I made a diagram looking solely at Shakespeare’s corpus in the First Folio.  I then recreated the experiment a second time, but left out the two LATs mentioned by Witmore above.  Both portraits are side by side for comparison below.