Machine Reading

For your final projects, you will use one of a set of tools (e.g. Many Eyes, TAPoR) to perform a “machine” reading of Henry James, In the Cage. For a complete list of tools available for this assignment, see Alan Liu’s Toy Chest.

Throughout the term we have been considering the changes in everyday reading practices.  For the final, we will turn our attention to what we might call professional reading practices – more specifically, academic literary criticism as it has been re-imagined by the digital humanities.  Put another way, we are now shifting our attention from the solitary to the computer-aided reader.  As you saw in Geoffrey Rockwell’s overview of the work of text analysis, researchers are now able to run sophisticated syntactical queries and perform machine-assisted searches of large textual corpora.  Instead of working with a database – e.g. the Internet Shakespeare Editions – you will work with a single text, in this case the novella by Henry James, the full text of which you can download from Project Gutenberg.

Our basic question is this:  how does text analysis enhance human interpretation?  We will also consider how and to what extent the traditional modes and methods of humanist inquiry can be supported by machine reading.  How can they be mutually productive?  In what sense does machine reading ask us to reconsider our governing assumptions about what a text is, what is involved in “proper” reading, and what knowledge production looks like?  What are the advantages and disadvantages of adopting what we might call a computational perspective on a literary text?

Your assignment is to use the tool or tools of your choice to analyze the James novella and then to reflect on these questions in a 4-5 page critical commentary on the data that results from your machine-assisted text analysis.

Other resources:  W. Bradford Paley, TextArc

Projects

Reno Botelho, “Reading by Machines: Friend or Foe?”
Stacey Church, “Critical Analysis of Many Eyes Machine Reading”
Alex Congrove, “Textual Analysis Using Psychoanalytic Categories”
Kimberly Floyd, “Throw the Text Analysis Back in the Oven, It’s Not Done Yet”
Karan Gogri, “Up-close Look at Distant Reading”
Sierra Hennings, “Machine Reading: the Upcoming Digital Aide to Literary Studies”
Jonathan Jiang, “Can Computers Read?”
Celia Katz,
Morgan Livingston, “Machine Reading and In the Cage”
Scott Morley, “Machine Reading: Dehumanizing the Humanities”
Bao Nguyen, “Imperfect Reading”
Max Oakley,
Gina Paradiso,
Laurie Piña, “Machine Reading: A Supplement to Literary Analysis”
Erika Reyes, “Machine Reading: Only Supplementary”
Stephanie Ross, “Machine Reading…The New Way of Reading?”
Patrick Scott, “Machine Fantasies: an RID-based analysis of a novella and reflection on the methodology of machine reading”
Sara Stivers, “Machine Reading: In the Cage”
Zoe Williams, “Machine Reading as Literary Criticism“