ENGL 8203: Digital Humanities

As the new school year has kicked off, I have had the opportunity to meet a vast number of people. As with any introductory conversation, various questions were asked and answered, such as: Where are you from? What are you involved in on campus? And, of course, What is your major? Being at TU, I have met countless engineers. My response to their major is usually, "I should have guessed that." Of course, like any polite human being should, they return the question: What is your major? With a moderate level of enthusiasm, I simply respond, "I'm an English major." Being a male English major at one of the nation's most renowned engineering schools has been an interesting experience. I find myself having few classes with the majority of my friends and fraternity brothers. I often find myself involved in conversations of a very technical,scientific, mathematical nature with no idea how to contribute any thoughts. It has been quite the black sheep experience.

Don't get me wrong, though, I have loved it. I tried the whole engineering thing my first semester at TU and I was not a fan. Over the last three semesters, I have found a love for Modernism. I find myself fascinated with fragementation. I love shifting perspectives. I love unhappy or unresolved endings. I love brutal realism hiding behind carefully crafted images and texts. In addition, I find that I can often express myself more accurately (and eloquently) through writing.

Recently, I have noticed that I speak somewhat differently than I type. In this instance, I am referring to text messaging. I often text my friends and love to keep in contact with them. However, I find myself putting an extreme amount of care into crafting each message. I simply care a lot about how a message looks. I care about how the words appear on the screen, and how that appearance relates to my meaning. I find this to be an interesting connection between thinking and technology because it certainly impacts my communication. All in all, technology seems to cause me to pay special attention to the visual.

Hi everyone!

I'm Justin, and I'm a junior English major and psychology minor. I grew up in Tulsa and went to Jenks. I had originally committed to OSU during my senior year of high school, but upon visiting campus for their Senior Open House, I noticed that half of my graduating class was there. Not wanting high school, part II, I applied to TU. I visited the campus shortly thereafter and fell in love with it. On campus, I am heavily involved in Student Mobilization (StuMo) and my fraternity (Lambda Chi Alpha). After college, I would love to move to India for long-term missions. Honestly, I'm pretty open to whatever the future holds. I'm excited for this class and for getting to know each of you over the next semester!

Hi, I'm Megan Grier. I am a sophomore English and Communication major. I'm from Texas, something I probably talk about way too much. In regards to literature, I'm going to be honest here and say YA fiction is my favorite, but yes I acknowldge the fact that they are generally extremely cheesy. I want to be a book publisher or editor, preferably for young adult literature, so I'm really interested in what makes certain literature popular and how it spreads so quickly from one place to another, specifically through the use of social media. 

I am an english/education major in my junior year and a member of the rowing team. I love studying and learning about societies and time periods through the literature produced in that time period and society.  

Hi! I'm Brenna, and I'm a junior English major. I'm like a confused old person when it comes to technology, so I'm not sure why I decided to take a class like this, but it sounded fun at the time (twitter and blogs are fun I guess). When it comes to literature, I'm mostly interested in modern and visual forms of literature like comic books, movies, television, video games, etc. Becoming a comic book writer would be awesome if that was a realistic goal... Oh, and I really have no idea what "digital humanities" means, so this will be interesting.

My name's Michael, though for some strange reason everywhere I go, I end up being called by my full name. I have moved a grand total of eight times, and without fail, people start calling me by my full name. Grew up in Los Angeles, moved to Beijing when I was 8, then Hong Kong when I was 12, then Wichita, Kansas for my last two years of high school. 

Starting my third year at TU, Film and Communications double major. I want to make movies, tell stories in a visual medium but part of that is my interest in how people interact; more specifically why people choose to like the things they do and the cycle of how things can become popular and fade away again. So it goes wihtout saying I'm a huge pop-culture junkie. I've seen every movie and TV show you can think of and care way too much about what Kanye is currently up to.

To begin with, I am a very unserious person who tends to take the path of least resistance. This is largely because the types of literature I've gratitated towards. I've stuck with more philospohical reads for the past few years. Within that vein I tend more towards existentialsim, Nietzche of course, I've read a bit of Borges too. My favorites authors are Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. The polarity within their writing, the manic bouncing of the walls of their own brain, that's when I get most excited about literature. I'd be interested to see some ancient philosophical texts be analyzed like the wasteland.

http://voyeurtools.org/tool/TypeFrequenciesChart/?corpus=1329252640907.4758&stopList=stop.en.taporware.txt&type=humor&mode=corpus&freqsMode=raw

I've attached a Voyant ngram of "Humor, Comedy, and Tragedy" in The Little Review.  These topics interest me because I typically consider Modernism to be a hyper-serious artistic movement.  The words "comedy" and "tragedy" uphold this concept and "comedy" is used much less frequently, suggesting "tragedy" is more important.  "Humor," however, appears just as frequently as "tragedy" and follows a similar pattern.  

Based on our discussion of TLR 5.5 (and the "Hades" episode of Ulysses), I don't really know how to read the ngram data.  None of these words appear in this issue of The Little Review.  This issue has less critical analysis than other issues and art does not typically categorize itself explicitly.  The similar trends of "humor" and "tragedy," though, suggests an unexpected relationship that I'd like to know more about.  Obviously, whether something is funny or not doesn't rely on using the word "humor," but these trends show that the editors were interested in humor as much as tragedy.     

Using the Yifan Hu algorithm, I noticed that the "Irony" node was connected to "Death," "Greatness," and "Poetry."  While we discussed how Yeats eulogizes Gregory with a somewhat sarcastic tone and Bloom's irreverant thoughts at the funeral, I did not expect irony to connect to greatness or poetry.  Poetry seems to be the only sacrosanct thing in The Little Review.  Although the connection likely means that these poems utilize irony, Gephi's presentation suggests that the poetry itself is compromised by its irony similar to death.  Having discussed the problematic attitude toward death in class, the connection between these four items encourages a reader to understand the poetry with the same sense of deflation.   Furthermore, the irony node overlaps the mediocrity node.  Does this mean that irony and mediocrity share more in common that the modernist lead on?  I doubt it, and it's more likely TLR used irony to attack mediocrity.  Nevertheless, Gephi brings these two topics together in a way that makes me want to re-evaluate their relationship. 

When I change the layout to Fructherman Reingold (with the Ego node still focused on irony), irony becomes the central node along with mediocrity and praise.  Again, Gephi suggests that irony compromises every topic in TLR.  The FR layout heightens the sense of irony even more than the Yifan Hu layout by centralizing it as its topic.  After removing irony from the Ego filter, the irony node remained relatively centralized.  I noticed, however, that Yeats and Joyce were the only writers connected to irony.  Eliot and Pound were not.  Eliot is the only one of these four not connected to the greatness node.  

I think these layouts reveal some insights into the function of irony in TLR.  Gephi definitely encourages a re-reading of this issue and makes me want to be a little more suspicious of terms like Greatness and Poetry in general.