Writing
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Teaching Black Arts Poetry and Computational Methods
[Cross-posted from the Scholars’ Lab.] An introductory note: this post offers a rough sketch of the planning that went into, and the ideas that emerged from, a three hour seminar on African American poetry I visited last week taught by Professor Lesley Wheeler at Washington & Lee. As such, it’s... -
Poems with Pattern and VADER, Part 2: Nikki Giovanni
[Cross-posted from the Scholars’ Lab.] (This post is part of a two-post series—I ended up having too much to say about the poems I looked at with VADER and Pattern, so I split it up. First half can be found here!) Nikki Giovanni’s “The True Import of the Present Dialogue,... -
Poems with Pattern and VADER, Part 1: Quincy Troupe
[Cross-posted from the Scholars’ Lab.] (This post is part of a two-post series—I ended up having too much to say about the two poems I looked at with VADER and Pattern, so I split it up. Second half can be found here!) Quincy Troupe’s “Come Sing a Song”—the 11-line poem... -
Transcription is Complicated
[Cross-posted with minor changes from the Scholars’ Lab] In a recent PMLA issue on digital methods, Johanna Drucker concludes her article “Why Distant Reading Isn’t” by claiming that distant reading’s literalness makes it the closest form of reading imaginable. What distant reading lacks is distance. That distance is critical; it... -
First Steps with NLP and a Collection of Amiri Baraka's Poetry
[Cross-posted with minor changes from the Scholars’ Lab] Amiri Baraka’s Black Magic, 1969 In this post I’ll discuss my initial foray into natural language processing (NLP)—cleaning up a corpus and prepping it for some basic text analysis techniques. I want to begin, however, with a note on the small textual... -
Measured Unrest in the Poetry of the Black Arts Movement
[Cross-posted from the Scholars’ Lab] As one of the graduate fellows at the Scholars’ Lab this year, I am working on a year-long digital project (that’s also a chapter of my dissertation) in collaboration with the folks at the SLab. To sum it up in a sentence, the project hopes... -
The Ghost in the Graph: A Recap on Time, Things, and Entanglement
[Cross-posted from the Scholars’ Lab - this is the protein-rich version of a series of related posts from our Praxis site, with fresh reflections on the process and product now that I’m done. If you want to see originals, check out the project idea, the data itself as I recorded... -
Visualization #2 of Everything I Used in a Seven Day Period
[Cross-posted from my post on the Praxis page] So with a significant amount of help from Eric, I was able to get this force-directed graph from d3js.org up and running with my data set from “Everything I Used in a Seven Day Period”. This force-directed graph is one of Mike... -
Visualization #1 of Everything I Used in a Seven Day Period
[Cross-posted from my post on the Praxis page] So, I’ve tried a few different visualization examples from the d3 site. They are amazing. The one I used here is called “Parallel Sets” and made by Jason Davies. You can find here the github page that I took this code from... -
Inktober 10/21: When Things Break
[Cross-posted from my post on the Praxis page and on the Scholars’ Lab.] The third of my four installments (here’s one and two of Inktober). And oh boy, get ready for some strange-looking sketches in this one. I tried to use a new kind of pen that has two tips and... -
Inktober 10/13: Time Pieces and Graphs
[Cross-posted from my post on the Praxis page and on the Scholars’ Lab] Hello all - three more images for Inktober. The first is a continuation from my previous Inktober post, very simply, two tubes of toothpaste, both almost empty. Was still thinking of the consumption of objects, for two... -
Inktober 10/5: Three Sketches
[Cross-posted from my post on the Praxis page and on the Scholars’ Lab.] Wanted to put up a few time sketches for our own version of Inktober. I’m aiming for every other day or so, so here’s three. All three have to do with time and consumption. I love going... -
Time and Praxis 2015-2016
Time is a massive concept. If you were asked to think about it – how it works, feels, changes, what it looks like, how people go about talking about it, or representing it – where would you start? As a person interested and invested in critical theory, my initial reflex would... -
Physical Computing at DHSI 2015
[Cross-posted from my post on the Scholars’ Lab site] In the beginning of June I had the pleasure of attending the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria for the second year running. My experience this year was so good that I wanted to write a quick post... -
Printing Things That Print: A Miniature Hand-Press Project
[Cross-posted from my post on the Scholars’ Lab site] For the past few months, fellow English PhD candidate James Ascher and I have had a small side-project going on in the Makerspace: printing a small, desktop-sized hand press, and getting it to work consistently. The model we found calls it... -
Getting 'under the hood' with Arduino
[Cross-posted from my post on the Scholars’ Lab site] Circuit boards, breadboards, digital inputs/output pins, analog outputs – “physical computing” can be an intimidating prospect for people with no experience. As a person with almost no experience, I know these apprehensions first-hand. Learning a new vocabulary, basic electronics, even basic...
