As I mentioned in class, Thursday we’ll be sharing our experiences/projects, briefly and informally, as we eat, drink, and think about the semester as a whole. For those who feel more comfortable with some parameters, here are some ideas of how to approach this brief assignment (3-5 minutes is ample):

• for essays, give a sketch of the argument
• for objects you’ve built, share a few slides that show what the thing looks like
• talk about interesting materials you dug up in your research
• tell us where you’d like to to take this project in the future, or otherwise how the project might lead to future work (e.g., Kelley has discussed doing Twine games with HS students; Katharina is interested in expanding her project to include all available narratives of Jews displaced from Vienna during the Nazi period)
• talk about failures and frustrations: we don’t do this nearly enough in higher ed, though JITP is a leader
• explore ideas for new projects that working on this project inspired in you

Have fun, and I look forward to hearing about your work next week.

A hearty thanks to Patrick for his excellent tour of text analysis and NLTK in particular. I just wanted to follow up with a couple of notes and links that might be useful to those interested in further study:

• The NLTK Book is one-stop shopping for getting up to speed on the platform and (as Patrick demonstrated several times) quick searches for syntax, etc. even for experienced users.
• The Stanford Literary Lab is an excellent place to sample the kinds of things you can do with text analysis in ways that combine traditional humanistic questions with data-driven answers grounded in the kinds of analysis that computing makes possible, or in some cases, just must easier, than traditional print-based research methods.
• In case anyone was puzzled about Patrick’s references to the cloud over Franco Moretti, the figure most associated with “distant reading” (and a founder of the aforementioned Stanford Lit Lab). He has been accused of truly horrible acts: for those who want to read about it, one of his accuser’s narratives is here.