“Reading” Lots of Books with a Computer
What is a corpus?
Watch in class: “What We Learned from 5 Million Books”
Discuss: Google n-gram vs. BookWorm
Download: Laurence Anthony’s AntConc (if you have a Mac, you may have to go to System Preferences > Security in order to allow it to run)
1.Explore: Google n-gram vs. BookWorm Choose some words that you think might have changed their usage over a period of time and test them again the corpus of books digitized by Google and HathiTrust. Take a snapshot of your favorite and present it to the class in Chat, accompanied by the usual quick writing. Is there a difference between G n-gram and BookWorm? Which one is more reliable?
2. Give AntConc a try. Here is a playlist of tutorials that can show you how AntConc works. This tutorial is also helpful: “Corpus Analysis with Antconc.” (Froelich) (also available in Spanish and French).
I have put a small corpus of the seven Harry Potter novels into our class Drive. Download your favorite and load it into AntConc. What does a "concordance" or collocation analysis tell you about it? Hold on to your observations and be ready to share them in class on the 17th.
3. Work on your Site. Experiment with adding elements that personalize it. Use the preview button to see the way that it looks across devices. Do you know what responsive design is?
Discussion: Harry Potter results ; situating our "reading like a computer" along the close/distant/surface/artificial spectrum.
What is Fan Fiction? ; Harry Potter fandom
Live exercise: Let's try out AntConc for more than one text. And let's add fan fiction into the corpus.
Discussion: what previous analyses of the fan fiction have produced
1. How do you think people typed and did programming a long time ago?
Watch this "blast from the past" video. Try the Punch Card Emulator or the Virtual Keypunch; then go watch a restored 1964 IBM 029 (one of the formats available in the Punch Card Emulator) in action. Who do you think did so much of the card punching? You may have seen punch cards used to read code in the movie Hidden Figures (clip here)- thanks to ID from my F20 class for this!
2. Quick writing Week 2 : Pretend that you are in 1964. Use the punch card emulator to type a message to your classmates. Download the image of the card and share it in the quick writing thread in Chat. Respond to colleagues with one or two more punch cards. You will want to do this from a laptop--I don't think it will be practical on a device. What do you think about this way of using a keyboard to create text? You don't have to type 100+ words this week! That would be a lot of cards.
Curious about how digital text was created in the past? Read these short pieces: Weaving, coding and the secret history of "women's work" | Father Busa's Female Punch Card Operatives
Using AntConc, explore the Harry Potter fan fiction texts we worked with. What are you able to observe? How are they different? How can you use the concordance function, as well as the clusters / n-grams and collocation to gain insight into the different texts? Our exercise in AntConc takes but a few seconds, but how long do you reckon it would it have taken you to type in the Harry Potter corpus on punch cards in the 1970s? Does fan fiction exist in other languages you know?
If you would like to try something different, try the corpora of African-American or colonial South Asian literature put together by Amardeep Singh. You will have to figure out how to retrieve them from GitHub.
Create a page in your Site. This post should be a subpage labelled "Blog 1". Posts can be maximum 750 words and should include visual and use the affordances of the Sites. (DUE: 25 Sept, 0600)
If you would like to see the rubric that I use to assess blog writing, check it out here.