these all look interesting . . perhaps the map might be the most approachable topic, e.g. how does Chaucer "map" his England? And, can you compare this "map" to other contemporary texts, documents, poems, etc.?

yes . . but if you wanted to do a graph . . .I think you'd have to expand your variety of genres, e.g. the question would become more like: where, when, how does classic soul/r&b develop as a dominant genre? and, how does it give way to other genres?

wow . . very interesting! In fact, when did death become an important formal/genre element in teen lit? I wonder, as a device, how it develops, and how it's connected (or not) to historical/social developments?

yes . . I agree . . so much of social media today is wrapped in the rhetoric of "community," yet Shirky shows that in many ways all of this new stuff hasn't moved very far from the old "audience" focused media . . .

very interesting . . . where does a text (Iron Throat, for instance) get more figurative (e.g. more likes and as's) and where does it eschew or resist similes and metaphors? . . . this could be a powerful tool for reading the form of the text . . .

yes . . in a way Moretti tells an alternative story by connecting different texts, by tracing one history (of texts) and mapping this onto another history (social) . . .

true . . but how about this as alternative, Morettian approach: we focus on a device within contemporary sitcoms and then trace its rise from a series of other possibilities? Perhaps, the "family" sitcom . . .from Honeymooners to All in the Family to Full House etc.? Or some device within that subgenre? The "t.v. dad"?

e.g. what "survives" and what goes "extinct" . . to use Moretti's Darwinian metaphors?

yes . . . I wonder how many of these new platforms (say Instagram or SnapChat) are one-to-many versus many-to-many, to borrow Shirky's distinction. Has the many-to-many model reached its social limit, as opposed to technological limit?

This is really interesting . . I wonder if there's another dimension (besides use) to consider as well - - to frame the topic. E.g. genres in which digital predominates? box office success and digital vs. film? These and others might be ways of thinking about the significance of your proposed media history.

I like this topic, though it's broad. A couple of ways, perhaps, to narrow it: thinking about sci-fi in terms of subgenres and their role in the history of sci-fi (do some die out while other survive?); how about a device, a la Moretti - - for instance, "the alien," or "the space traveler"? etc.

how do the popular forms of social media in today's elections correspond to Shirky's "one-to-many" and "many-to-many" distinctions?

well . . . the comic is good too . . but suicide seems to offer an easier purchase . . . I think you'd have to focus on defining suicide as a "device" . . and that itself would be interesting.

This is very interesting! "Sucide" as the device. What would your corpus be - - especially in terms of genre (novel? comic novel?) and period? Particularly interesting to correlate this device with social/historical patterns.

OK. Is there a particular device you would use to focus your analysis, e.g. like "clues" in Doyle?

good . . . it seems that Shirky stresses the "political" or the human over software . . .e.g. software designers et al need to know more about human sociality than coding . . .

I'm not sure if Moretti can help you answer the taste issues here . . .but distant reading could help to chart where, when, and how devices migrated from one genre to another, or how a prior genre goes "extinct" even as it's "competitor(s)" survive.

Very interesting. Is there some particular rhythm or time signature that you could trace? I'm not a classical music person. For me, it might be easier to to make things more confined - - e.g. the diffusion of blues tempos into pop music.

American poet, deceased.

I'm really interested in Scalar for student-authoring . . be great to follow your use of it +hypothes.is . . sending the blog post to my colleague as well . . .a possible scholarly apparatus for him to use . . .

T. S. Eliot

Italian

A quick bio of Gilman.

If one reads the poem as an apocalypse or as a wasteland, this famous poem by W.B. Yeats maybe be a helpful context: "The Second Coming"

YouTube Video of "They Feed They Lion"

what is "wet slate bread"? . . . black bread, which is usually associated with cheap, coarse bread .. . or perhaps the wet slate is "bread" for the lion's meal?