Digital Literary Studies Workshop (March 2012)
Computational tools for literary research and teaching
Friday, March 9th, 9-11 AM
Watson Library, room 455
This is a practical workshop* in digital literary studies covering skills you can pick up in two hours to benefit your teaching and research in languages and literatures. It is also designed to help you gain, along the way, some broad knowledge of the critical and methodological trends and transactions in this field. In this way, we will establish a base for further exploration and understanding (and creation?) of software tools and computational methodologies in literary studies and pedagogy.
Instructor: Patrick Flor, IDRH Digital Humanities Instructor, KU English and Computer Science
As an organizing device, we will progress through three ways of looking at literary texts:
Frequencies
Questions: How often do words occur? Compared to what? What can this tell us? What can’t it tell us?
Tools: text editors/formats, wordle, tf*idf
Contours
Questions: How can we visualize text spatially? sequentially? Can this enrich/defamiliarize our readings?
Tools: tf*idf revisited, graphing/visualization tools, presentation tools
Structures
Questions: How do we read? How does this relate to how we research/ profess? How might this change when digital tools intervene?
Tools: XML/TEI, command line, programming in python -> NLTK
*No computer or programming knowledge is assumed beyond basic familiarity with mouse and keyboard navigation, and experience creating, modifying, and organizing text files. You should bring a computer of your own, loaded with a recent OS—Windows 6 or 7; Linux; Mac OS 10.6 or later—and, for Windows users, Cygwin.
Questions? Please contact pflor@ku.edu.
