Distractions as a researched problem, but where is the citation?

Eliot reading his poem.

Page 8

Jockers talking about the old approach in the 1990s to anecdotal evidence:

… in the 1990s, gathering literary evidence meant reading books, noting "things" (a phallic symbol here, a bibliographical reference there, a stylistic flourish, an allusion, and so on) and then interpreting: making sense and arguments out of those observations. Today, in the age of digital libraries and large-scale book-digitization projects, the nature of the "evidence" available to us has changed, radically. Which is not to say that we should no longer read books looking for, or noting, random "things," but rather to emphasize that massive digital corpora offer is unprecedented access to literally record an invite, even demand, a new type of evidence gathering and meaning making. The literary scholar of the 21st-century can no longer be content with anecdotal evidence, with random "things" gathered from a few, even "representative," text. We must strive to understand the things we find interesting in the context of everything else, including a massive possibly "uninteresting" text.

Pages 7 and 8

Jockers is talking here about Ian Watt’s method in Rise of the Novel

What are we to do with the other three to five thousand works of fiction published in the eighteenth century? What of the works that Watt did not observe and account for with his methodology, and how are we to now account for works not penned by Defoe, by Richardson, or by Fielding? Might other novelists tell a different story? Can we, in good conscience, even believe that Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding are representative writers? Watt’s sampling was not random; it was quite the opposite. But perhaps we only need to believe that these three (male) authors are representative of the trend towards "realism" that flourished in the nineteenth century. Accepting this premise makes Watts magnificent synthesis into no more than a self-fulfilling project, a project in which the books are stacked in advance. No matter what we think of the sample, we must question whether in fact realism really did flourish. Even before that, we really ought to define what it means "to flourish" in the first place. Flourishing certainly seems to be the sort of thing that could, and ought, to be measured. Watt had no yardstick against which to make such a measurement. He had only a few hundred texts that he had read. Today things are different. The larger literary record can no longer be ignored: it is here, and much of it is now accessible.

Jockers, Matthew L. 2013. Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. Topics in the Digital Humanities. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Compare with the definitions of these terms in original text by Barthes here: PDF of Pleasures. Relevant quote "If I read this sentence, this story, or this word with pleasure, it is because they were written in pleasure (such pleasure does not contradict the writer's complaints). But the opposite? Does writing in pleasure guarantee-guarantee me, the writer-my reader's pleasure? Not at all. I must seek out this reader (must "cruise" him) without knowing where he is, A site of bliss is then created. It is not the reader's "person" that is necessary to me, it is this site: the possibility of a dialectics of desire, of an unpredictabilIty of blIss: the bets are not placed, there can still be a game" (Barthes 4).

Discussion of the methodological difficulties involved in close reading: i.e. there is no such thing as "just reading."

Culler, Jonathan. 2010. “The Closeness of Close Reading.” ADE Bulletin, 20–25. doi:10.1632/ade.149.20.

Discussion of the methodology of close reading: middleton, Peter. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa: U of alabama P, 2005. Print.

Page 16

One benefit of traditional hermeneutical practices such as close reading is that the trained reader need not install anything, run any software, wrestle with settings, or wait for results. The experienced reader can just enjoy iteratively reading, thinking, and rereading. Similarly the reader of another person's interpretation, if the book being interpreted is at hand, can just pick it up, follow the references, and recapitulate the reading. To be as effective as close reading, analytical methods have to be significantly easier to apply and understand. They have to be like reading, or, better yet, a part of reading. Those invested in the use of digital analytics need to think differently about what is shown and what is hidden: the rhetorical presentation of analytics matters. Further, literary readers of interpretive works want to learn about the interpretation. Much of the literature in journals devoted to humanities computing suffers from being mostly about the computing; it is hard to find scholarship that is addressed to literary scholars and is based in computing practices.

p. 6

Retrieval methods designed for small databases decline rapidly in effectiveness as collections grow...

This is an interesting point that is missed in the Distant reading controversies: its all very well to say that you prefer close reading, but close reading doesn't scale--or rather the methodologies used to decide what to close read were developed when big data didn't exist. How to you combine that when you can read everything. I.e. You close read Dickins because he's what survived the 19th C as being worth reading. But now, if we could recover everything from the 19th C how do you justify methodologically not looking more widely?

Freire

Though it came out a few years after the texts listed in the previous paragraph, Randall Collins’s Credential Society would be relevant.

Jänicke, S., G. Franzini, M. F. Cheema, and G. Scheuermann. n.d. “On Close and Distant Reading in Digital Humanities: A Survey and Future Challenges.”

After reading a book, this 11-year-old sees ways to create his own version of an imagined world.

Videos as well as digitised versions of the poets' manuscripts are available at the Irish Poetry Reading Collection on the UCD Digital Library, at https://digital.ucd.ie/view/ucdlib:38488. See also coverage at the UCD Library Blog, https://ucdlib.wordpress.com/2015/12/02/irish-poetry-reading-archive-launches/.

See the Irish Times coverage of the launch of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive: http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/poetry-for-posterity-the-irish-poetry-reading-archive-launches-1.2450480

perlegi

Lightweight is its own weighted phrase. It seems to suggest that nothing of meaning or value, beyond something skirting the surface, would be worth writing or reading. But I think it all depends on how one uses the margins of a text. If someone writes a racist post, I can't take it down, necessarily, but I can target the writer and the words with annotations, making my views known and inviting others to do the same. Perhaps then, the weight of the annotation protest might have some value. With annotation, we can target specific words and phrases and sentences, as opposed to comments, where observations are more general in nature. Maybe it is the comment bin that is lightweight.

Maria Konnikova also cites a 2014 study in a New Yorker article on this topic that concludes by offering annotation as a kind of deliberate, slow online reading practice. (Note: the article has been annotated by two sets of college students!)

Very interesting. So an intentional online reading practice--fortified, let's say, by a collaborative annotation tool--might produce different results...

Love this line!

At first glance, Sumner seem to be saying: Let's punish those who are successful and reward those who are not. I think what Sumner really means by "penalties" is the consequences that come with not being successful (e.g. poor living conditions). Similarly, when he discusses giving the "rewards" to the less successful, he means that we should share the benefits of success (e.g. money) with those who may not have had the opportunities to succeed like their counterparts so that they may live better, healthier lives. For example, Carnegie had libraries built for the public so that they could access books for knowledge and entertainment, whereas they may never have had access to readily available, free books before.

in other words, if you are black or mixed-race you have to have permission to gather in a group. Did they have permission to gather in churches? Might this be one way they "legally" gathered and help explain the prominence of black churches in the Civil Rights Movement many years later?

Great questions!

Nothing against this, but it's not the game I'm in.

Question is, though, can the same tool be used to do both distant reading and close reading?

Does the slow reading movement parallel the slow food one? In some ways, there might be a point against “consumption” in both cases. Or, at least, utilitarianism.

Never heard this quote before, but it's great!

One of my favorite quotes!

An irreversible step.

This is a pretty good point - but then why would we not see AI-based civilizations?

Besides the piece’s content, the interactions which happened through a layer of Diigo annotations were quite interesting.

Might want to add yet another layer to this old discussion.

I might use something like it as the basis for an NLP passage but at a much much easier level

Link

would be good to check these out

Levy, D.M. (1997) "I read the news today oh boy".

Check out this article and share with JD.

Read this paper

textbook reading 36.9- The human population continues to increase, but the growth rate is slowing.

textbook reading 36.10- Age structures reveal social and economic trends.

36.5- multiple factors may limit population growth

Textbook section 37.13- Invasive species can devastate communities.

Not Mathematical

textbook 37.10- Species diversity includes relative abundance and species richness.

This passage reminds me of Eve Sedgwick's essay on reparative reading.

Yes!

This emphasis on collaboration is particularly important in social reading. Through replies, each annotation is actually the beginning of a potential conversation.

I think Billy Collins captures this tortuous pedagogy well in "Intro to Poetry":

But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope<br> and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose<br> to find out what it really means.

Collins actually imagines a moment of shared marginalia in his poem. In a copy of A Catcher in the Rye that he borrows from a library as a boy, he finds the following: “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.” The young Collins imagines the note to be written by a beautiful girl and feels himself in a sense falling in love with that other reader. Though we need not develop a dating service out of the modern technologies that allow for social reading, we can at least see the humanity that can be shared in the margin of a digital page: the teachable moments, the conversations that might occur. We have glimpsed such moments on other social media like Twitter and Facebook, but I argue they lack the depth of annotation, which brings together text, comment, and now, readers.

It's interesting to think about this idea of "slow reading" in relation to collaborative online annotation. So many traditional humanists complain of the cursory of the digital--hashtags on Twitter replacing sentences, Wikipedia summaries are replacing "actual" research. But web annotation requires readers to pause and consider in the very ways we have always taught our students to do in English classes.

Such an ambivalent phrase. The narrator seems to be claiming that this is a "moment" unparalleled in its significance. Yet this significance is "undetermined"; it remains unclear exactly how the moment is significant.

Digital annotation powerfully visualizes this process, as the application allows the user to isolate a particular word or phrase, and then create a comment specifically on that piece of textual evidence.

Close reading is a major emphasis of the Common Core Standards, though most English teachers since New Critic I.A. Richards would probably agree that is it essential to any humanities curriculum. As the "Introduction" to the ELA section states:

Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying great works of literature.

Digital annotation, though, is close reading 2.0. The major activity of a service like hypothes.is is "annotation," the highlighting and noting of words, phrases, and sentences, which demands that students keep their thinking and writing "close" to the text and its evidence.

Moreover, because digital annotation has the potential to be collaborative. It links this mandate for close reading with later calls in the Standards for collaboration. I like to think of hypothes.is as a "A Social Network for Close Reading." Could we make students obsess with annotations on the web like they obsess with Facebook and Twitter posts?...

Seems like an article worth reviewing when we dive into whatever changes need making to the fuzzy anchoring components.

Adam Hyde on proprietary knowledge culture

This has to be one of the most intense opening scenes in all of literature. We are immediately thrown into a moment of panic as each guard responds wearily to the other's approach. In general these opening lines set the tone of the play to be one of apprehension.

Oh, again.

This conclusion even accounts for the everyday rave in Berlin. A fatigue throughout devastated individuals is not to deny anymore.

subsumption of this paragraph

typo

Claudia Müller-Birn differenziert in ihrem Vortrag als "types of scholarly reading":

1. close reading
2. hyper reading
3. machine reading

und bezieht sich damit auf N. Katherine Hayles vgl. Beyond reading in print – “close reading” vs “hyper reading”. In: Communication Mediated. 28.08.2013

"the scholarly and scientific record is rapidly evolving to become a formalized web of content, in which any node must be able to be linked to any other node, with formal, typed relationships" (2)

Reading the first 3 chapters of AoC for discussion in #coasespenguin on 2013-02-11.

If thriving is a metric (is it measurable? too subjective?) of success then the 3 characteristics it must have are:

• modularity: divisible into components
• granularity: fine-grained modularity
• integrability: low-cost integration of contributions

I don't dispute that these characteristics are needed, but they are too general to be helpful, so I propose that we look at these three characteristics through the lens of the type of contributor we are seeking to motivate.

How do these characteristics inform what we should focus on to remove barriers to collaboration for each of these contributor-types?

Below I've made up a rough list of lenses. Maybe you have links or references that have already made these classifications better than I have... if so, share them!

Roughly here are the classifications of the types of relationships to open source projects that I commonly see:

• core developers: either hired by a company, foundation, or some entity to work on the project. These people care most about integrability.

• ecosystem contributors: someone either self-motivated or who receives a reward via some mechanism outside the institution that funds the core developers (e.g. reputation, portfolio for future job prospects, tools and platforms that support a consulting business, etc). These people care most about modularity.

• feature-driven contributors: The project is useful out-of-the-box for these people and rather than build their own tool from scratch they see that it is possible for the tool to work they way they want by merely contributing code or at least a feature-request based on their idea. These people care most about granularity.

The above lenses fit the characteristics outlined in the article, but below are other contributor-types that don't directly care about these characteristics.

• the funder: a company, foundation, crowd, or some other funding body that directly funds the core developers to work on the project for hire.

• consumer contributors: This class of people might not even be aware that they are contributors, but simply using the project returns direct benefits through logs and other instrumented uses of the tool to generate data that can be used to improve the project.

• knowledge-driven contributors: These contributors are most likely closest to the ecosystem contributors, maybe even a sub-species of those, that contribute to documentation and learning the system; they may be less-skilled at coding, but still serve a valuable part of the community even if they are not committing to the core code base.

• failure-driven contributors: A primary source of bug reports and may also be any one of the other lenses.

What other lenses might be useful to look through? What characteristics are we missing? How can we reduce barriers to contribution for each of these contributor types?

I feel that there are plenty of motivations... but what barriers exist and what motivations are sufficient for enough people to be willing to surmount those barriers? I think it may be easier to focus on the barriers to make contributing less painful for the already-convinced, than to think about the motivators for those needing to be convinced-- I think the consumer contributors are some of the very best suited to convince the unconvinced; our job should be to remove the barriers for people at each stage of community we are trying to build.

A note to the awesome folks at Hypothes.is who are reading our consumer contributions... given the current state of the hypothes.is project, what class of contributors are you most in need of?

The first analytic move.

Towards the end of our last conversation the text following "common appropriation" seemed an interesting place to dive into further for our future discussions.

I have tagged this annotation with "meta" because it is a comment about our discussion and where to continue it rather than an annotation focused on the content itself.

In the future I would be interested in exploring the idea of "annotation types" that can be selectively turned on and off, but for now will handle that with ad hoc tags like "meta".

Note that this disclaimer only says the document should not be used for citation purposes, but doesn't say we can't use it for annotation purposes like testing out the Chrome PDF.js + Hypothes.is extension! :)

You can install the extension from the Chrome Web Store with this link:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pdfjs-%2B-hypothesis/bipacimpfefoidapjkknffflfpfmjdog/related

The second analytic move.

Reading in the Middle Ages considered a mild form of exercise.

This may be a reference to the Eighteenth Century Collection Online-Text Creation Partnership (ECCO-TCP) project, which transcribed and marked up in XML ~2,200 eighteenth-century books from the Eighteenth Century Collections Online database (ECCO). The ECCO-TCP corpus is in the public domain and available for anyone to use: http://www.textcreationpartnership.org/tcp-ecco/

Similar to what Quintilian said.

Writing is essential to improve not only the way we speak, but how we organize our thoughts. It produces clarity

First time this has been addressed explicitly for education, though Cicero did mention the need to be well-read