Category: Uncategorized

The point of this blog post is to discuss how I view “English,” as a discipline, differently as a result of my work in this course. I can safely say that this class has definitely changed how I view aspects of this discipline. Yet I would be remiss if I didn’t state that some of these views changed after confronting the reality of our situation as a result of COVID-19. This class. To me, this class and this situation has allowed me to understand the importance of being able to adapt.

Early on in this class, adapting was very clearly important with the introduction of GitHub, Visual Studio Code, and the other tools we had to learn how to use. At first, I thought that these tools were just harder ways to do various tasks with the computer, as evidenced with opening my file explorer through the command line. But as time went on, I started realizing how these tools were enhancing the experience. Understanding my computer better has allowed me to review how I tackled aspects of this discipline. It has allowed me to open my eyes to how this discipline adapts. By looking at our laptops in a new way, it allowed me to see how the rest of the “English” discipline adapts in many new ways.

That changed, initially, when COVID-19 became a global pandemic and we were all sent home to wait it out. Because of this, I found myself looking at works like “Walden” deeper and really coming to understand how “English” as a discipline can adapt. I bring up “Walden” because it makes me reflect on my views of the English canon. I always used to think that the works in the canon were there because people forced them to change with the times. But looking at my situation, I found that “Walden” lends itself naturally to the changing times. Because of this new view on “Walden,” I find myself thinking this must be the case with most of the canon. But even with that, “Walden” wasn’t static, Henry David Thoreau revised and edited it several times, changing it over the course of a few years. This discipline is all about adaptation, just as we adapted to light levels of coding, authors and their works adapt to the times they are written in, as well as the changes of time. Even Gleick touched on adaptation as he went through the evolution of communication; from talking drums to the telegraph to the transistor. All around us is adaptation.

Because of our situation, adaptation is all that is on my mind. This view has allowed me to look back on what we have looked at in this class and has also allowed me to look at the discipline as a whole. All we can do is adapt, so it is always good to get the practice and come to the realization that we should. By having us look at our laptops in new ways, this class has allowed me to see how we adapt constantly to new situations. Through the command line, GitHub, Visual Studio Code, the English canon, communication, and more, we are surrounded by adaptation.

To be honest, it has been difficult for me to connect the digital work we have been doing throughout this course to the concepts of literature and “English” as a whole. While I have learned something entirely different from what I was expecting to in an English course, I was unable to see where our work connected to the concepts of English. Since moving to online learning, this connection has been made easier for me to see as my reliance and relationship with technology has changed so dramatically in the span of a couple of weeks. 

Prior to distance learning, I couldn’t understand how the uses of Github, Voyant Tools, Visual Studio Code, and the other programs we have been using throughout the semester connected to my general concept of English and Literature. I was glad to be learning something I never imagined myself doing: coding (on a small level).  At the beginning of the course, I reorganized my documents folder to better fit this course, and this is something that has aided me in all other aspects of my life. Now, after learning online for about four weeks, my understanding of this course has changed dramatically and how I view work in my other courses has changed as a result of this. I find myself constantly thinking how any of this would be possible without “English,” reading, and literature. Knowledge and information, as cited in Gleick’s novel, has been passed down for centuries through literature and language itself. At some point in time, the idea for the internet must have been drawn out and described upon paper, into some form of literature. With every new technological advancement, for example any of Tesla’s recent releases, will be reported on and written about for the rest of the world to know. Many of Tesla’s innovations have changed how many people view electrical power and will surely be something people read about and reference in years to come. None of this would be possible without “English.” In my work for other classes, I am more aware of my word choices, specifically the repetition of words in my papers. I have caught myself thinking about imputing my essays into VoyantTools to track the frequency of certain words and phrases, to then go back and revise. When revising my work, I have begun to use Review/Tracking/Track Changes in Microsoft Word to analyze my revisions and watch how my own understanding of my work can change as I revise. Like Thoreau, I change words, phrases, and grammar in my writing which then go onto to change the overall meaning of that sentence and finally can change the overall meaning of that work. Our work in terminal and VSC, has led me to prefer typing in plain text (although, I wish there was a spell check feature!) and the simple format it provides. I find myself becoming frustrated with formatting issues in other classes and am better able to understand why author’s and online writers choose to prefer plain text, instead of another program. Being able to spend more time, and the majority of my day on my laptop has been able to see how the coursework throughout this semester has affected my daily life and my own meaning of “English” and literature. 

What I have realized is that this all relates back to communication as a whole. Literature was born from verbal communication, and communication has been strengthened by literature. Distanced based learning has taught me how vital communication is to learning, and how much I rely on in person communication to thrive. I have now adapted this need and have learned to work with my technology to best suit me, and I think that being in this course has better prepared me to do so. Ironically, I think that I took this course at the perfect moment and our current circumstances has taught me the real value in literature and “English.” Every day, we (the human race) use “English” to stay connected, and gain information about the state of the world. In doing this, we are a part of history, and this recording of history was made possible by the changed definition of communication and the innovations in “English.” 

Until spring break, I never fully appreciated how communication links to learning. Living and learning on campus, everything is how it should be. I go to class and we all discuss what we’ve learned for homework and how to move forward. Now that there’s a pandemic and classes have shut down, it becomes a little bit more difficult to learn, for a reason I never saw coming; a lack of mass communication.

Now, of course there is still communication. The professors will always have time to meet with the students and discuss any issues. In fact, this class has a two hour period to chat with the professor during the scheduled class hours, a help page to write to the professor for help, a fill-out sheet to request a one on one video chat with the professor, and ti’s willing to help as well. However, there is still a missing out on general communication with everybody. Being on campus, you can talk with other students outside of class, study together, even just try to further understand what was discussed in class. If somebody missed a day, they can still get notes from a friend in the class. Now, you can’t really do that.

Communication is central to learning, but it is central to everything else too. James Gleick compares the telegraph to biological wiring. He says “…comparing cables to nerves; the nation, or the whole earth, to the human body”. Without communication, there wouldn’t be life as we know it. Communication expanded society at a much quicker rate. Instead of multiple nations trying to come up with something while having minimal communication, most of that being a messenger that can take weeks to months to arrive somewhere, communication began to be almost immediate. Telegraph stations were set up everywhere to quicken the time it takes for information to spread. Then the telephone got involved, having a voice transmitted across the world within a second like it’s nothing. Gleick describes this as ‘…begin to turn society, for the first time, into something like a coherent organism”. People can work together on the same projects around the world, at the same time, at a pace they’ve never been able to before.

Now that I am stuck with remote learning, it becomes difficult for me to learn, because i cannot communicate with everybody in a real time, class setting. I would love to join the scheduled class time video sessions, but unfortunately I have to work during the week now that I am home. It is not only this class that has gotten more difficult. Every class requires a scheduled class time because communication is a key to learning, so every class is becoming more challenging to learn in. However, every obstacle is something that can and should be overcome. We are still learning how to adapt to remote learning, but the more we do it, the more we find a way or a time to communicate with the right people, and still get the information that is needed to pass the class. After all, we have real time communication methods that are way more advanced than the telegraph.

When coming across the chapter in Gleick titled “Into the Meme Pool,” my mind immediately jumped to the captioned photos and videos blasted across the internet in succession, each changing slightly in form to the next. I did not expect the term “meme” that we commonly use now in pop culture to have first been coined by a biologist. According to Gleick, Richard Dawkins defined a meme as “‘a bodiless replicator'” (312). Dawkins considered memes to be catchphrases, tunes, ideas and images. The memes we see today fit well into this definition crafted in 1976, typically taking the form of a formatted image or video with captioning that is changed to the discretion of each repeater. According to an MIT Technology Review, the modern meme is “a variant of an image based on a common theme that has spread widely on the internet.”

Dawkins described the journey of memes as the replication of “themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain, via a process which, in the broad sense, is called imitation” (312). However, this form of imitation didn’t have the negative connotation of cheap copying — it is instead viewed as a collaboration. With each imitation, the meme evolves. As with the genes that form our lives, memes seek to repeat and evolve, stretching through the human story. The internet memes that have become so integrated into our culture (to the point where they reached the clutches of Facebook moms) are an example of how information and communication has evolved with technology.

Memes are comedic in nature, an inside joke for the internet. Some jokes are more exclusive than others. All memes are built upon a common understanding of the internet community. Memes are a testament to the strange culture and humor that has developed mainly with the younger generations that grew parallel to the internet itself.

According to this article by Brady Gavin, the first meme was a dancing baby used to demonstrate the impressive movement of a new software.

The MIT Technology Review describes how Gianluca Stringhini and colleagues at the University College London developed an algorithm to track how memes go viral across the internet. Their algorithm used perceptual hashing or pHashing to identify similar images: memes. The group found that for a meme to be most successful, one must mass produce various forms of the meme — similar to how genes “evolve through mutation, reproduction, and selection.”

However, not all memes are innocent jokes. As the article discusses, some memes are used to perpetuate racism, and these memes can go horribly viral — as a virus does. These memes seem to act more like a vicious virus, seeking to harm for the sake of its continuity.

In retrospect, it is unsurprising that the pop culture concept of “meme” derived from the observation of a biologist. Internet memes seek to replicate and evolve as genes do. Memes thrive from their replication and evolution, and they have the best rate of survival when mass produced with a spectrum of competitive variants. Memes may be the expression of the internet’s genes, in a constant state of modification, adapting to the ever-changing terrain of the web.

Communication is something I have never really thought of in depth until reading the first couple chapters of James Gleick’s “The Information”, however, the idea that communication is not so different at its core despite the many different ways that people communicate caught my attention immediately. Whether it be in written form, sounds, expressions, or spoken language the way we as people have communicated throughout history has changed drastically while taking on different forms. Knowing more about such differences made me wonder just how similar computing and written language are, especially when thinking in terms of communicating with one another.

Now I know close to nothing about computing, and as soon as any kind of numbers come into play I quite literally do not know what is happening. When I think of communication, coding and computers are not what come into mind at all, unless I am typing out and email or writing an essay. However, even those little symbols in a CSS file have their own meaning, and communicate in their own way just as spoken language or written word does. Although even words themselves do not communicate in the simplistic, more easy to understand way, I thought they did. 

Words and language in general play such a vital role in our communication today, especially to me being an English major who loves to write using them. But what we write, alongside the languages we’ve developed for that writing, has been in a way undermined by Plato. Plato is a philosopher I have read certain works of before, though when I think of writing I do not necessarily think of how human beings use it primarily as a reminder, especially when it comes to communicating their thoughts and being. Plato has stated this about writing, that “You have invented an elixir not of memory but of reminding; and you offer your pupils the appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom”. When I first started to think about such a statement, I thought that it would not be entirely true. My only basis for this was my initial belief that myself, along with many others I find it safe to assume have read something externally or personally profound, such as a piece of writing that communicated something that had lasting impact. That I have inherited a lot of wisdom from people I have never met, but I realized this was not entirely true. Writing as a form of communication is agreeably flawed in Plato’s analysis due to its inherent structure. Yes, writing is capable of teaching and communicating many things, but at the cost of us naturally remembering what we learn and taking it in differently. But does that really matter when thinking in terms of how communication is actually not so different at its center regardless of what form it’s in. 

The idea of communication in of itself did not change, whether it was through reading a written novel or how a CSS file does it, it gives information. It gives us all something talk about and even further communication.

Upon reading James Gleick’s, The Information, I found it difficult to draw connections between the computing world and the humanities. For me personally, I was unable to fathom how these two completely different areas could possibly share any connections, or cross paths with one another. However, Gleick’s narration on the various technological innovations over the course of history, dedicated to helping spread information more efficiently, quickly, and widespread has helped increase both my awareness and knowledge of how interconnected these two fields of study are.

Gleick provides various detailed descriptions on multiple ‘information’ inventions. However, the one invention, or technological advance in terms of the spread of information, or communication that I was able identify a connection between the computing world and the humanities was Samuel F. B. Morse’s ‘Morse Code.’ Nearing the second half of the 19th century, Morse was working on designing his own version of percussive code, involving the utilization of electromagnets to “pulse” along a telegraph wire. The complexity of this process was more than Morse initially planned. His objective was to transmit language with the help of a clicking electromagnet. He didn’t want to look at this process with a mentality envisioning code, but rather as “a system of signs for letters, to be indicated and marked by a quick succession of strokes” (Gleick 19).

This quote specifically stood out to me in regards to an interconnection between computing and the humanities, because it reminded me of the significance of the alphabet and the writing system in the humanities. Gleick touched upon this fundamental aspect later on, noting that the evolution of the writing system took the longest out of all communicative inventions to develop. Ultimately, the alphabet itself represented “one symbol for one minimal sound” (Gleick 32). The same complexity of this notion is reflected in Morse’s invention, which he struggled in producing with his design.

Morse’s initial idea was to first send a series of numbers, one digit at a time, with dots and pauses in between. Therefore, each English word would be represented by a specific number. The telegraphists at the end of each line would meet these codes messages with a dictionary in hand to dissect each code. Obviously, this proved to be a time-consuming and inefficient process as the whole objective was to make communication more efficient, accessible, and quicker. With this road block in mind, Morse and his apprentice, Alfred Vail, worked on developing a more efficient form of communication. They constructed a coded alphabet, in which they would use signs in place for letters, instead of numbers. This made it easier so that the signs/symbols would spell out every word, thus making this form of communication much more efficient. An entire language would therefore be “mapped onto a single dimension of pulses” and would adopt the term of the “dot-and-dash alphabet” (Gleick 20).

The broader, more critical connection I drew between the computing world and the humanities in relation to this event was the magnitude of the writing system which plays a fundamental role in not only the humanities, but the computing world, and everywhere else for that matter. Many individuals, including myself, tend to overlook how crucial of a role the writing system/the alphabet plays in all aspects of our everyday lives. The invention of this universal system draws humans as well as all fields of studies from complete opposite worlds to connect on a basic level of understanding.

In addition, it spurred a gateway for a string of new inventions designated to promoting the spread of communication far and wide, like Morse Code. The areas of both code and the humanities seem to be on two opposite ends of the spectrum, but both of them use the alphabet on an everyday basis, pulling their ideas out of the same toolbox. Although Morse code differs from the form of pure writing, the symbols it comprises are representative of the alphabet which is powerful in itself. To me, it seemed as if both worlds, computing and the humanities, rely on each other in a means to stimulate growth in terms of knowledge and further technological advances. Both these worlds rely on the writing system and the alphabet more than they probably realize. Without this universal foundation that is consistently present in our everyday lives, Samuel F. B. Morse wouldn’t have the tools to create his own form of communication, and I wouldn’t be reading about his invention and its significance to humanity. Without the melding of these two worlds, of whom I originally saw as polar opposites, humanity may not be where we are today in regard to our various advancements in communication and technology.

In our readings thus far from The Information by James Gleick, this passage found in the second chapter stood out to me the most. Here, Gleick describes how Chinese script worked:

Because the basic unit was the word, thousands of distinct symbols were required… One device is simple repetition: tree + tree + tree = forest; more abstractly, sun + moon = brightness and east + east = everywhere. The process of compounding creates surprises: grain + knife = profit; hand + eye = look. Characters can be transformed in meaning by reorienting their elements: child to childbirth and man to corpse. Some elements are phonetic; some even punning.

– Gleick, 32-33

As Gleick discusses in this chapter, Chinese script was one of the most complex and large scripts in ancient times. This was due to the fact that it had the largest set of symbols, and the fact that each symbol itself, individually, carried a copious amount of meaning.  However, by combining these symbols, they were able to create new words and phrases.

Perhaps this is too literal of a connection, but this process of constructing a language reminded me of the process of coding. When you code, each minuscule detail is just as significant as the end result you are trying to achieve. An example of this would be our recent class activity of creating a .html webpage using Visual Studio Code. In doing so, it was necessary to input the different elements of the webpage (such as the title and body paragraphs) in order for the page to work correctly. It was not as simple as typing the text directly into the VS Code file, though. Every element required a command line before and after it.

As Gleick also says:

The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts.

– Gleick, 33

Despite that it may require more effort to communicate properly, as you have to move from letters to words to sentences, the alphabet truly does make communication simpler and more accessible for everyone. It is difficult to imagine a world today the same as when Chinese script was used. Communication would take much longer, and you would run the risk of accidentally saying/writing the wrong thing.

I believe that this idea of the part versus the whole found in computing carries over to the humanities, or more specifically, language. Similar to coding, words do not always make sense on their own. We need context – or more words in conjunction to create commands, questions, stories, etc. If we go one step further, and break words down into letters, then we can really see how alike the two are. Random letters thrown together do not work – they need structure and meaning. By sequencing and weaving together different parts, the overall whole is more clear and precise.

By: Emilio Garcia, Cindy Castillo, Nicole Logrieco, Mallory DelSignore, and Anonymous

Our Project, Encoding Thoreau aimed at inquiring deeper into TEI, the markup language most commonly used for scholarly digital editing. Briefly covered in class, our group heavily focused in understanding TEI more thoroughly as well as using it to encode two of Thoreau’s journal entries using TEI. The purpose of our project was to not only transcribe the text into TEI, but to add more dimension to the text itself. By identifying locations, we were able to make a map, and through the tags, add more detail into our files about Thoreau’s journal entries. Together, we produced a journal entry in TEI code in an effort to not only better understand many aspects of TEI, but also Thoreau and his life.

As a whole, we had to decide what pathway we wanted our project to take. We initially rolled around with the idea of tracking changes through manuscripts, but eventually settled on taking two entries and encoding them into TEI using the software, Oxygen. After the long journey of finding our focus, it easily fell into place shortly after. We broke down the tasks into two teams: The Research Team and The TEI Team. To begin, one of us created a Google document and shared it with the team, as well as typed up our two chosen journal entries, January 30th and May 14th. Mallory and another group member marked up and color coded the text, using different colors to identify proper nouns, nouns, real, and artificial nouns. From there, Nicole took those nouns and properly tagged them. Emilio then used those tags in Oxygen to complete the actual encoding itself and tasked Cindy into looking over the files created to make sure everything looked in order as well as edit and format the groups blog post. As central as the process of encoding was to our project, there was also a great deal of research conducted in order to grasp a deeper understanding of the actual content we were looking and marking up so meticulously. For this mere reason, we were very much interested in researching on Thoreau and the locations he’d mention via his journal. In order to help our viewers conceptualize this even more definitively, one group member went a step further and put together a map of all the places mentioned in the journal entries we encoded using Google Maps.

As we take a step back now and reflect on the areas in which we felt we excelled and the areas in which we had the most difficulty, we all came to the mutual agreement that perhaps our first initial challenge stemmed from the utter fact that we did not fully grasp the task of our own project and just the TEI language overall. As we all identified ourselves as novice level regarding how comfortable we felt with TEI, having never worked with TEI or tasked with a similar project as the one proposed by this course, we were all a tad flustered in the beginning–probably more than just a “tad.” In fact, when we were first assigned to this project by Professor Schacht, we toyed with the idea of using fluid text, however, we eventually split ways with this approach as we could not locate enough versions of the journal entries that varied from the original one we had in order to complete that. As we internalized the reality that this approach was not exactly feasible, we went back to square one. From there though, we decided to regroup and focus on just picking out and identifying the nouns in the journal entries we had all agreed on so we could encode them. Although this was a step towards the right direction, we ran into the issue of marking up nouns that could not be encoded because we did not have enough knowledge of the TEI guidelines at the time.

Continue reading “Project: Encoding Thoreau”