My original work of electronic literature is a Grey's Anatomy Self-Generating Poem. This poem takes lines from the television show "Grey's Anatomy," including the life advise the characters give each other, mixed in with medical terminology used. People who have seen the show will understand this, but the poem randomly breaking up the quotes and throwing in medical terms is similar to the show. In this series, the characters are all very close friends that work together in a hospital. One will be going through a crisis and a friend will be giving them deep, heart-felt advise, when all of a sudden a patient is dying or the emergency room is fulling up with patients. So their advise is quickly interrupted so they can move on to the importance of the medical attention a patient needs. Mixing literature with my favorite Netflix series made college a lot more fun.
~Morgan Gleixner
Monday, November 21, 2016
"The Inexhaustible Gatsby"
F. Scott Fitzgerald is known for his poetic prose, and for this reason, I am in love with his writing style. I have read The Great Gatsby a total of five times, and fall in love with it a little bit more every time I read it. The Great Gatsby specifically impacted my love for literature, and indirectly directed me when it came time for me to decide on my college major; analyzing it in my high school literature class made me realize that I possess a passion and talent for analyzing literature. For this reason, The Great Gatsby holds a special place within my heart.
Due to my love for this novel, I dedicated my first-ever electronic literature creation in tribute to Fitzgerald and his novel, and created "The Inexhaustible Gatsby." (Warning: It takes a minute or so to load)
"The Inexhaustible Gatsby" is a self-generating poem that (sort-of) randomly spews words from a list provided within the poem's coding. Every word within the poem can be found within Fitzgerald's novel, and manages to capture a vital theme of the novel in the process.
This "major theme" involves reality versus illusion. The parties, colors, money, and rich people within the novel act as illusions, masking the reality of the unhappiness and corruption occurring within the novel. These materialistic people and things end up hurting Nick and Gatsby, and the novel ends with Nick's (the narrator) illusions being broken, and a new understanding of reality.
After playing with the code for a while, I figured out the code's pattern to generating text. Once I figured the code out, I realized that if I put certain words in certain places, I can make it match a vital theme within Fitzgerald's novel.
The first noun in each line of the poem (not including the lines that only involve one noun, or the lines starting with a verb) starts with a noun the novel used in reference to, or quoted from, a corrupted character within the novel (like Tom or Daisy Buchanan). All but one verb within the poem has a negative connotation attached to it (hurt, harm, etc.), and is used within The Great Gatsby as well. The last noun within the each line is used in reference to Nick or Gatsby, who are being fooled by the corruption within the novel. That makes every stanza within the poem a match to the idea of "reality" of Fitzgerald's novel; all of these grotesque things are happening in reality., and the illusions are being broken. However, The Great Gatsby wouldn't be The Great Gatsby without all the things that cloud the novel's reality.
After a stanza of self-generated poetry, the poem generates a line starting with a verb, and continuing with one or many adjectives. After working with the code, I made sure the verb always starts with "believe in" (because Gatsby "believed in the green light"), and used all beautiful adjectives with positive connotations attached to them. Every line that starts with the words "believe in" represents the illusions clouding reality with the novel.
This poem is actually the coolest thing I have ever created. Authorship goes to myself, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the code, and Nick Monfort (who created the code).
Due to my love for this novel, I dedicated my first-ever electronic literature creation in tribute to Fitzgerald and his novel, and created "The Inexhaustible Gatsby." (Warning: It takes a minute or so to load)
"The Inexhaustible Gatsby" is a self-generating poem that (sort-of) randomly spews words from a list provided within the poem's coding. Every word within the poem can be found within Fitzgerald's novel, and manages to capture a vital theme of the novel in the process.
This "major theme" involves reality versus illusion. The parties, colors, money, and rich people within the novel act as illusions, masking the reality of the unhappiness and corruption occurring within the novel. These materialistic people and things end up hurting Nick and Gatsby, and the novel ends with Nick's (the narrator) illusions being broken, and a new understanding of reality.
After playing with the code for a while, I figured out the code's pattern to generating text. Once I figured the code out, I realized that if I put certain words in certain places, I can make it match a vital theme within Fitzgerald's novel.
The first noun in each line of the poem (not including the lines that only involve one noun, or the lines starting with a verb) starts with a noun the novel used in reference to, or quoted from, a corrupted character within the novel (like Tom or Daisy Buchanan). All but one verb within the poem has a negative connotation attached to it (hurt, harm, etc.), and is used within The Great Gatsby as well. The last noun within the each line is used in reference to Nick or Gatsby, who are being fooled by the corruption within the novel. That makes every stanza within the poem a match to the idea of "reality" of Fitzgerald's novel; all of these grotesque things are happening in reality., and the illusions are being broken. However, The Great Gatsby wouldn't be The Great Gatsby without all the things that cloud the novel's reality.
After a stanza of self-generated poetry, the poem generates a line starting with a verb, and continuing with one or many adjectives. After working with the code, I made sure the verb always starts with "believe in" (because Gatsby "believed in the green light"), and used all beautiful adjectives with positive connotations attached to them. Every line that starts with the words "believe in" represents the illusions clouding reality with the novel.
This poem is actually the coolest thing I have ever created. Authorship goes to myself, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the code, and Nick Monfort (who created the code).
21st Birthday google maps essay
My Original Work of e-lit
My original work of e-lit is a google maps essay from my 21st birthday trip to Key West, Florida.
Trope on a Rope
Here is my original work: "Trope on a Rope." "Trope on a Rope" is a second-person, present-tense hypertext narrative that allows viewers to adventure through a string of fantasy, sci-fi, and horror tropes. Each knot on the string is a vignette of around 100 to 200 words. Please enjoy.
Sixteenth-Century Setta Sandals
Our tribe has decided to preserve a very specific type of artifact in our proposed archive: sixteenth-century setta sandals.
Setta sandals (also spelled "seta") were, according to tradition, invented by Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyu for wear during tea ceremonies on snowy days. At the time, the two dominant shoe types were called "zori" and "geta." Because zori were traditionally made of straw, they would soak up the water one would pour in one's garden to start a tea ceremony. However, they were once the fashion trend, before the geta sandals came along, and many future grooms gave these to his bride as an engagement gift.
Geta, made of wood, were unfit for wear on snowy days, for they left large footprints in snow. This shoe had a reputation that one could hear them before they could see them. Since they were made of wood, they tended to clack against the ground in a loud manor. This sound has been reported as heavily missed because they are no longer worn as much, so the clacking is scarce.
This form of sandal resembles a common flip-flop, though the two have much different compositions. Setta sandals have a hanao (strap), a ten (insole), a nakaita (middle board), a kasane (heel), and a sole. There are also some metal pieces and glue that bind the shoe together. The nakaita is made of wood, and the sole is made of leather. When one walks in setta sandals properly, one makes a clicking noise, which is considered fashionable.
Though setta sandals are still worn today, they have fallen in and out of fashion over the course of time. As of today,they are mostly worn by Buddhist monk's. For this archive, Just Us Hugh Manatees would like to try to preserve examples of this curious shoe from the century in which they were first conceived. It may be very difficult to find surviving pairs, but any we find would be valued as historical artifacts. How many objects manufactured today have been around for as long as these sandals and possess such a singular reason for their existence? Not too many, we would wager.
Setta sandals (also spelled "seta") were, according to tradition, invented by Japanese tea master Sen no Rikyu for wear during tea ceremonies on snowy days. At the time, the two dominant shoe types were called "zori" and "geta." Because zori were traditionally made of straw, they would soak up the water one would pour in one's garden to start a tea ceremony. However, they were once the fashion trend, before the geta sandals came along, and many future grooms gave these to his bride as an engagement gift.
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| Geta Sandals |
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| Zori Sandals |
Geta, made of wood, were unfit for wear on snowy days, for they left large footprints in snow. This shoe had a reputation that one could hear them before they could see them. Since they were made of wood, they tended to clack against the ground in a loud manor. This sound has been reported as heavily missed because they are no longer worn as much, so the clacking is scarce.
 |
| A modern pair of setta sandals |
This form of sandal resembles a common flip-flop, though the two have much different compositions. Setta sandals have a hanao (strap), a ten (insole), a nakaita (middle board), a kasane (heel), and a sole. There are also some metal pieces and glue that bind the shoe together. The nakaita is made of wood, and the sole is made of leather. When one walks in setta sandals properly, one makes a clicking noise, which is considered fashionable.
Though setta sandals are still worn today, they have fallen in and out of fashion over the course of time. As of today,they are mostly worn by Buddhist monk's. For this archive, Just Us Hugh Manatees would like to try to preserve examples of this curious shoe from the century in which they were first conceived. It may be very difficult to find surviving pairs, but any we find would be valued as historical artifacts. How many objects manufactured today have been around for as long as these sandals and possess such a singular reason for their existence? Not too many, we would wager.
Friday, November 18, 2016
Data Mining: Cool Tool of the Digital World
The internet has provided people the ability to access research around the world. This research can lead to future research, and further research after that. Nowadays, technology offers tools that allows its users to conduct their own research in simple ways. Our Digital Humanities class recently used tools that allowed us to conduct interesting research within a short period of time; these tools were data mining technologies.
Data mining is the process of analyzing data from different
perspectives and summarizing it into useful information. Our Digital Humanities class spent some time working with websites that allowed us to perform the process of data mining: Voyant and Ngram. In the process of working with these websites, our tribe made interesting observations and were able to form hypotheses regarding the data-mined information.
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| ...No, not quite. |
Voyant is a technological tool that can take in a large amount of text and find the most commonly used words within the text. The tool then takes those commonly-used words and creates a collage of sorts for the user to analyze. While it may seem as though the site has just made a collage of random words, those commonly-used words can say a lot about the text as well as its meaning.
When using the tool, our tribe used some of our blog posts to see what kind of words we used the most:
The first chart presented from Voyant is tribe member Patrick's usage of words from all of his individual blog posts for the class, as well as the tribe posts he wrote. The second chart is tribe member Morgan's word usage of the posts she wrote as well. It may be unsurprising to notice that students tend to use the words "digital", "media", and "humanities" when observing the charts.When comparing the charts to each other, one may notice that both members have used the exact same words, such as "digital", "like", "human", "humanities", and "just". This can portray the ideas and themes that students are getting out of the Digital Humanities class.
Ngram is another data mining tool that takes the usage of words into consideration. A user will type in words, separated by commas, and produce a graph that portrays the usage of words in print texts from 1500 to 2008.
In this Ngram, I typed in the words happy, sad, angry, annoyed, and scared. The results of this were, in my opinion, quite fascinating. As one can see when looking at this graph, the usage of the word "happiness" in texts has significantly decreased from the year 1800 to the year 1980, and slightly increase again from 1980 to 2000. Could the decreased use of this word in texts symbolize a decrease in societal happiness itself? The term "angry" is pretty static, and then spikes a bit at around 1990. After contemplating this, my professor urged me to add in the terms "war" and "peace":
The tribe found these results to be especially interesting. It is not at all surprising to see an increase of usage in the words "war" and "peace" in about 1918 and 1942; these are around the times where World War I and World War II occured. We also noticed that during the times that the term "war" spiked in usage, "happiness" was decreasing, and the usage of the term "angry" slightly increased. The tribe feels as though this could say a lot about society's reaction to wartime.
The tribe also used Ngram to compare Morgan and Patrick's commonly used words to research how often those words have been used within a 200-year span. We entered each of their number one mos-used words into Ngram: "digital" and "media". The results show a prominent increase in the usage of both words beginning in the 1960s, yet the usage of the word "media" skyrockets. Media studies have been popular for quite some time, but digital studies (such as the Digital Humanities) and quite new. The word usage shows the difference in popularity.
Voyant and Ngram are tools that have allowed us to conduct research through the popularity and usage of words within texts and specific time frames. These data mining sites have allowed our tribe to observe interesting results, as well as form hypothesis that could be further researched. Tools like these can easily pose interesting questions, as well as lead to research that can further continue our attempt to understand society.
Collaborative Effort: Molly, Patrick, Morgan, Zack
Monday, November 14, 2016
Virtual Zack
Social media is
just one of those things in the world… I hate that I love it. The world is in
constant transition, especially with social media. Who thought that 10 years
ago we would be post something on the internet that could go directly to someone
anywhere around the world. It is said that 78% of Americans have some social
media profile and almost 2 billion people worldwide. This is just an
unbelievable number to really put in your head and think about it.
I personally
have many different social media platforms including Facebook, twitter,
Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest and Reddit. Out of all of these platforms I use
to use Facebook the most when there were no parents on it trying to get the
hang of it and talk to you all the time. I use Instagram, twitter and snapchat
the most.
Instagram, I
have had an Instagram for 5 years now, starting with a picture of me and my
best friend at our soccer camp over the summer.
This was back
when only a few people had Instagram so I only received around 5 likes on the
picture. Instagram is a platform where most people go and post a picture or
video that others will like or enjoy. Typically from a vacation, party, concert
or some significant event that they went to. The other things on Instagram are
direct messages where you can send pictures to individual people, also there
are Instagram stories. This is something that is pretty much stolen from
snapchat which I will be discussing next. Lastly is my most recent picture that
I posted to my Instagram.
The social
network account that I use just as much as Instagram is Snapchat. Like I was
saying earlier, stories on Instagram were kind of stolen from Snapchat because
they have what is called snap stories. You can post this just like an Instagram
picture or video but on snapchat it is only there for 24 hours. You can also send
pictures or videos to 1 or people at a time without putting it on your story
for everyone to see. Now the biggest thing on snapchat is filters, there are
different filters you can scroll through and put animations on things or your
face. The most popular is the “puppy face”. One of the latest things is “featured
and subscriptions”, which includes daily mail, NFL, Buzz feed, ESPN,
Cosmopolitan, CNN, Comedy Central, MTV, etc. These are pretty much like stores
that snapchat puts out about these topics. I usually do not post much to my
stories but do send individual snaps quite frequently.
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