Blog

At the end of this week, I presented at Kemp! Preparing for doing so was helpful because it gave me the push to make a lot of the numerical visual aids I’d be using in my final paper anyway, and deciding how to format and structure these in advance ended up being helpful in how… Continue reading Week 15 Journal

This was the week that (with help again!) I successfully wrote the code for my final project, as well as deciding on, downloading, and converting the rest of my corpus. I had to do this in several days’ phases; for deciding on which books I’d investigate, I used several recommendation lists and the Wikipedia page… Continue reading Week 14 Journal

The main focus of this week’s start was completing the Pythonic Paraphrase, which I think is one of the most well-thought-out additions to this class. Being able to work specifically with a literary text, doing the kind of investigation we’d end up doing for our final projects, gave me an added sense of confidence in… Continue reading Week 13 Journal

This was the week we completed a series of harder Python exercises on our own time, a push that I found to be one of the most rewarding experiences in this class. We did a little bit of Python in Applied Digital Studies but I found that it was largely lost on me; in this… Continue reading Week 12 Journal

I started off Monday by (having assumed they were homework) working through all of the Python exercises we looked at this week, and attempting all of them successfully except for the one involving counting positive numbers. As I suspected I would at the start of our class beginning to learn Python, I like doing this… Continue reading Week 11 Journal

This week I was most focused on the Dataset Deep Dives, the process of finding one and of reporting on one. I fully recognize that what I reported on was not actually a dataset, and wasn’t even much of a corpus, but I really wanted to report on something closer to digital literary studies in… Continue reading Week 10 Journal

Late again by miles. Every time I take a digital studies-designated class, I have to remind myself just how bad I am at blogging. Anyway: this was for the week following Spring Break, during which we finished discussing Blatt’s book and began to learn programming. The initial experience of reading Exploratory Programming was somewhat frustrating,… Continue reading Week 9 Journal

Firstly, I’ve really been enjoying the experience of reading through Nabokov’s Favorite Word is Mauve. I mentioned in class that it feels friendly in a way for it to be written by someone unfamiliar with the field, who therefore evades the typical and sometimes circular metadiscourse that we witnessed the week before, and rather jumps… Continue reading Reading Literature with Computers: Week 7 Journal

I’m famously horrible at reflective writing, especially in blog format, so I’m catching up on these embarrassingly late. In Week Six we looked at a lot of the theoretical context surrounding “distant reading” the term and other related concepts in the digital humanities. I was introduced to Moretti as a side conversation in Dr. Barrenechea’s… Continue reading Reading Literature with Computers: Week Six Journal

This week, we spent Monday pairing W.E.B. Dubois infographics with characters from Beloved, which was in certain ways an interesting way to approach a discussion post. Certainly it could be a productive approach for a series of charts like that of Dubois, where it’s hard to focus equally on each one and devote the same… Continue reading Week #5 Journal