4 Matching Annotations
  1. Aug 2023
    1. This is an argument that Steve Ramsay makes in Reading Machines. Computers let us practice deformance quite easily, taking apart a text—say, by focusing on only the nouns in an epic poem or calculating the frequency of collocations between character names in a novels.

      Isn't this the sort of analysis that William Gladstone did on Homer, or Milman Parry subsequently? Hasn't the practice of ars excerpendi always been a form of deformance? Excerpt, mix, remix, repeat...

      How far can one deform a text, subject, topic, and come up with something useful?

  2. Nov 2022
    1. As the British prime minister WilliamGladstone put it at the time in the Edinburgh Review, speaking of the remarkablePrussian success in the Franco-Prussian War: ‘Undoubtedly, the conduct of thecampaign, on the German side, has given a marked triumph to the cause ofsystematic popular education.’
  3. Jul 2022
    1. Imagine that when you reading The Odyssey in a WorldLiterature class, you found you were interested in

      Or maybe you were interested in color the way former British Prime Minister William Gladstone was? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_on_Homer_and_the_Homeric_Age

      Or you noticed a lot of epithets (rosy fingered dawn, wine dark sea, etc.) and began tallying them all up the way Milman Parry did? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milman_Parry

      How might your notes dramatically change how we view the world?


      Aside: In the Guy Ritchie film Sherlock Holmes (2009), Watson's dog's name was Gladstone, likely a cheeky nod to William Gladstone who was active during the setting of the movie's timeline.

  4. Jun 2022