Syllabus for English 240
Lighting the Page: Digital Methods in Literary Studies

Course introduction and talking drums

• Chapter One of James Gleick, The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood

First (brief) assignment, due by the end of today. (Normally, assignments here are due before class, but because this is the first day, this one is due after class.)

First, go to the Self-introductions document in our class OneDrive folder and introduce yourself.

Then, find your Classwork Document and type "Hello, World!" in the space for the first assignment, so that we can ensure that all the Classwork Documents are up and running.

Information: Gleick and Bishop

• Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art" (PWeb Documents)

Assignment for the classwork document: by 11:00 p.m. on the day before class, write a paragraph about how you might think about "One Art" in terms of information. In your paragraph, cite at least one specific passage from Gleick and at least two moments from "One Art."

Environmental Scan

As a class, we will conduct an initial "environmental scan" of work in the digital humanities, with an emphasis on literary studies. The basis for our scan will be last Thursday's discussion of The Information in relation to Bishop's poem. At the end of that discussion, each of you will have a topic for which to investigate the work being done relating do different kinds of literary information. The groups and then the class will work together to create a wiki-style compilation of the results of our scan, in the document created for that purpose in our OneDrive folder.

As a way of understanding where this kind of work can take you, read Roopika Risam's roundtable essay on Expanding the Digital Black Atlantic, which offers a focused examination of one area of the digital humanities. (If Risam's piece happens to include information useful to your own work on this assignment, you are welcome to draw on it.)

The assignment: by 11:00 the night before class, post at least 200 words about your topic in the environmental scan shared document, with links or citations to at least two things that you discuss.

Wardrip-Fruin's Five Elements

The assignment for today has two components: first, read this chapter, which will provide the framework for many of our conversations about electronic literature:

• Noah Wardrip-Fruin, "Five Elements of Digital Literature" (PWeb Documents section)

Second, by 11:00 the night before class, write in your Classwork Document two notes about the article of at least 75 words each: one that points to something you do not understand or that prompts a question, and one that explains a connection or new idea that the chapter sparked in your thinking.

In class, we will return to affordances and "One Art" in light of today's readings.

E-lit Stories and the Five Elements

• Illya Szilak and Cyril Tsiboulski, Queerskins: A Novel
• "AH," by Young-hae Chang Heavy Industries (as web video)
• Ana María Uribe, Tipoemas y Anipoemas
• Furtherfield, The 27th. El 27.
• CMG, "creak, creak"

Side note: Many of our examples come from the Electronic Literature Organization's collections of e-lit, which you are welcome (but not required) to explore further.

By 11:00 the night before class, write a "Five Elements" analysis of one of the stories assigned for today and post it to your classwork document. Your analysis should list Wardrip-Fruin's five elements, each followed by at least 50 words explaining how you would think of your chosen story in relation to that element.

In class, we will talk about the electronic literature pieces and then get everyone set up with Twine, the software platform used to create "creak, creak." You do not need to use your own computer to install Twine--you can do it on a classroom machine and then share files with yourself--but you can bring your own machine to class if you'd like to. We will be using Allison Parrish's introductory tutorial, installing the software and working at least through "Saving and Sharing Your Game." (Your story/game can be tiny, as long as it works.) You can get started before class if you want to, but it is not required. Be sure that you are working with Twine version 2.x and the SugarCube story format (as the Parrish tutorial will suggest). The Twine interface has changed a little since Parrish wrote the tutorial, so you might need to be a little resourceful in finding information, but the workflow still functions well. In class, you'll have time to ask questions, troubleshoot, and add to your new Twine skillz.

The Request Moment

• Charles Baxter on the Request Moment

This is the first assignment that will lead to the Electronic Literature Project. In Twine, create three separate, short prototypes of a "request moment." Each of them can be short--just enough to make the situation clear--but make sure that your each of them features not just an ordinary question but a true Baxterian request: one forces a choice by the requestee because saying yes will involve doing something they don't want to do, and therefore giving up some autonomy to perform the requested action. As Baxter says, such a request can reveal power relationships and social dynamics in your scene (and then your story).

With our discussions of electronic literature in mind, do your best to use the affordances of Twine to create a reading experience that combines the traditional (pre-digital) request moment with the new ways of writing that the digital format allows. If you are stuck thinking of a starting point, you may wish to use another piece of literature--whether digital or not--as an inspiration or starting point. Just be sure to acknowledge your source and transform the inspiration into something new.

By 11:00 the night before class, in the OneDrive folder for the prototypes, create a subfolder with your name and upload your three prototype HTML files. We will share and discuss your prototype moments in class.

Scene Work

Your assignment for today has two parts, both due by 11:00 the night before class:

First, in your classwork document, write at least 100 words about what you learned from workshopping your prototype moments in class.

Second, create a substantial scene expanding one of your prototype request moments. By 11:00 the night before class, place the scene in the appropriate folder (again creating a subfolder with your name) in our OneDrive Twine area.

Twine Tech Day

Twine tech day! Prepare for today's class by looking at the rest of Allison Parrish's introduction, the Twine wiki, or other people's Twine stories to find an effect you would like to create in your own story, such as changing its appearance or adding a javascript action. Spend about two hours researching and working on this effect. We will use class time to share and troubleshoot your techniques.

So that we can share ideas and techniques, by 11:00 the night before class, everyone will enter a summary of what they are working on in the shared Tech Day document in our OneDrive Twine folder.

Working Versions

Create a working version of your final Twine project. This version does not need to be complete, but it needs to be complete enough to show your classmates how your concept will work in practice. It should include at least three substantial scenes, meaning interactions that are separated from one another by the locations, times, or characters involved. By 11:00 the night before class, put your project in the appropriate folder in our Twine OneDrive area by 11:00 the night before class. Come to class ready to share and workshop your project.

Lightning Talks

Put the current version of your project in the appropriate folder in our Twine OneDrive area by 11:00 the night before class. Also, if you want to display one image on the classroom screen along with your lightning talk, send me the image as an email attachment by the same 11:00 deadline.

Come to class prepared to do a one-minute lightning presentation of your final Twine project. We will spend the second half of class trying out everyone's projects.

Text as Data: We Data

• Kevin Kelly, "One Dead Media" (a short, fun reading, given the project deadline)
• Optional: You may enjoy exploring this page and the linked materials about punch-card technologies

You have no other assignment for today. We will do introductory work on data structures in class.

Text as Data: Data Wrangling and Decision-Making

• Samuel Rebelsky, "A computer scientist's perspective on introductory data science"
• Ali Hamza, "Effectively Pre-processing the Text Data Part 1: Text Cleaning" (also in PWeb Documents)

Neither of these readings anticipates using the methods of data science for literary study, but you will read them with that context in mind. By 11:00 the night before class, post to your Classwork Document one note on each reading, consisting of a quotation followed by at least 75 works of your thinking about the quotation.

In class, we will discuss the uses of different kinds of data, especially in tabular and relational forms. We will also talk about data and metadata in literary studies.

Text as Data: Lost in the City

• Edward P. Jones, "Introduction" and "Lost in the City" (PWeb Documents)
• Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein, "The Power Chapter," from Data Feminism
• Optional: Episode of the Spectacular Vernacular podcast with Jessi Greiser about Race, Language, and Belonging in Washington D.C.

In your classwork document, by 11:00 the night before class, note a specific place where the language of the story strikes you as adding something unexpected--something you would not gather from a summary of the plot. Write at least 100 words explaining what struck you about your chosen moment.

Text as Data: Spatial Data

• Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein, "What Gets Counted Counts," from Data Feminism

In your classwork document, by 11:00 the night before class, enter one observation or question about the reading that you would like to become part of our conversation about data, in continuation of our class discussion from Tuesday. In presenting your observation or question, write at least 150 words about why it interests you.

Text Analysis and Working with Code: The TEI and NLP

• Lou Burnard, Introduction to What Is the Text Encoding Initiative?
• Natalie M. Houston, "Text Analysis", from the MLA Commons
• Geeks for Geeks, "Introduction to Natural Language Processing (NLP)"

Today's discussion will set up our unit on computational text analysis. Do the readings carefully, then, by 11:00 the night before class, enter into your Classwork Document a quotation from one of the readings and a reflection of at least 100 words about a reaction or question it prompted for you.

In class, we will talk about the advantages and disadvantages of the TEI and NLP. We will do an exercise using the techniques of the TEI.

Text Analysis and Working with Code: Counting Words

• Heather Froelich, "Moby Dick Is about Whales, Or Why Should We Count Words?"
• Reading from Writing Analytically about word-counting (PWeb Documents)

By hand (without computer assistance), do the Writing Analytically word-counting exercise on Natalie Houston's short essay on text analysis. Bring your results to class.

Text Analysis and Working with Code: Creating Text Files, Setting up CoCalc in Class

• Creating Text Files for Textual Analysis TXT.doc (Class OneDrive Folder)

By 11:00 the night before class, create a plain text file (with the .txt extension, as explained in the reading for today) that contains at least 3,000 words of your own academic writing. Use the handout for today to guide your creation of the file, then upload it to the Class Corpus folder in our OneDrive area.

Text Analysis and Working with Code: Code-Reading

• Code-reading exercise (OneDrive Folder)
• 99 Percent Invisible, The Backward Index (short article and brief video; optionally, you can also listen to the beginning of the "mini-stories" podcast episode, whose first segment covers the backward index as well)

Work through the code-reading exercise and follow the directions for sharing your responses.

Text Analysis and Working with Code: Blatt 1-2 and Voyant Tools

• Ben Blatt, Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve, chapters 1 and 2
• Anne Enright, "Diary"

The Blatt chapters and the Enright piece both address points of literary style and even methods of counting, but they do so from different perspectives: Blatt's method involves computing, for instance, whereas Enright concerns herself with structures of social power. By 11:00 the night before class, make a Classwork Document entry of at least 150 words about one way in which you might merge these kinds of thinking, either by adding an Enright-like concern with social issues to Blatt's methods or by applying something like Blatt's methods to a point that Enright raises. Use at least one quotation from each piece.

Text Analysis and Working with Code: Blatt 3 and 9 and Punctuation

• Ben Blatt, Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve, chapters 3 and 9

By 11:00 the night before class, post in your Classwork Document at least 150 words about one idea of some way to adapt or extend the kind of work you've read about for today. Use at least one specific quotation from the reading.

Text Analysis and Working with Code: Blatt Intro and Stylometry

• Ben Blatt, Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve, Introduction

Stylometry day! Prepare at least two text files or your own writing (without repeating anything you used for the class corpus), of at least 1000 words each, that you would like to contribute to our stock of texts for trying out stylometry. Put some time into the file preparation: make sure they work with our Python interface, for instance, and think about what bits need to be cleaned to make them ready for stylistic analysis. We will spend class time working with different kinds of stylometry scripts. By 11:00 the night before class, upload your files to the stylometry day folder in our OneDrive area.

To name your files, use 240, then the name you use for class (your first name, according to the U.S. convention) and the numbers 2 and 3. So if I used my first name, mine would be

• 240Erik2.txt
• 240Erik3.txt

Text Analysis and Working with Code: Blue Bots

• Episode of the Tech + Art Podcast with Kate Compton
• Article about Pentametron and the bot itself, now reincarnated on Bluesky
• Other blue bots: Newfound planets, Endless screaming, Orcspiration, BTS lyrics bot, Random bread every 10 minutes, and Mrs. Dalloway in Parenthesis (created by ES)
• For inspiration from the history of procedural poetry, check out the practices of Oulipo, the "workshop of potential literature"

Before class, begin working through a Blue Bot-building exercise. The workshop instructions are here. Unless you run into technical trouble, complete the steps at least to the point where you have successfully generated two different outputs on Bluesky. You will continue to work on your bot (or bots) in class.

By 11:00 the night before class, paste a) the web address (URL) of your bot, 2) the latest version of your bot code and 3) two sample outputs in your classwork document.

Text Analysis and Working with Code: Chatbots and Markov Chains

• Aatish Bhatia, Watch an A.I. Learn to Write by Reading Nothing but Jane Austen
• Optional bonus content: two-minute introduction to AI and animal language by Sean Patrick Farrell, along with the "Roz Becomes One with Nature" sequence from DreamWorks's The Wild Robot
• Yet another bonus: Instagram reel on the talking tree project
• Stephen Wolfram, "What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work?" (Note: this is longer and more technical than many of our other readings, but it is well worth going through to understand the basics of how Large Language Models function.)
• Optional bonus content, featuring awesome Grinnellian Hillary Mason, especially recommended if you're struggling with the technical side of Wolfram's piece: "Computer Scientist Explains Machine Learning in 5 Levels of Difficulty"

In your classwork document, by 11:00 the night before class, enter a response that begins with your own explanation of how AI text generation works, in no more than 70 words. Use your own words exclusively, and make your explanation as non-technical as possible; think of your reader as someone who has heard about AI but has never used it. Then, offer one point of confusion or exploration that you would like to include in our class discussion.

AI and Text Analysis: Issues and Ethics

• Lauren Klein and Catherine D'Ignazio, "Data Feminism for AI" (PWeb Documents)
• Sonja Drimmer and Christopher J Nygren, "How We are Not Using AI in the Classroom" (PWeb Documents)
• Tom McAllister, "I Teach Memoir Writing. Don’t Outsource Your Life Story to A.I."
• Victoria Turk, "How AI Reduces the World to Stereotypes"
• Madison Malone Kircher, "People Love Studio Ghibli. But Should They Be Able to Recreate It?"
• Optional bonus content:
• Margaret Mitchell, Avijit Ghosh, Sasha Luccioni, and Giada Pistilli, "Why Handing Over Total Control to AI Agents Would Be a Huge Mistake"
• Karen Hao, A New Vision of Artificial Intelligence for the People
• Sophia Galer, Instagram reel on the relationship between the em-dash and ChatGPT

In your classwork document, by 11:00 the night before class, enter one observation or question about the reading that you would like to become part of our conversation about AI, in continuation of our class discussion from Tuesday. In presenting your observation or question, write at least 150 words about why it interests you.

AI and Text Analysis: Experimenting with AI

• Noah Wardrip-Fruin, "The Eliza Effect," from Expressive Processing (PWeb Documents)
• Try ELIZA! Play with this recreation of ELIZA to see how it feels to interact with it.
• Optional bonus content: a reconstruction of the original Markov chain procedure

For this assignment, if you want to create an account to use a chat interface with a large language model, I recommend HuggingChat by HuggingFace, which has at least more of a commitment to ethical practices than other companies. You may use a different model if you prefer or are used to another one. Whatever you do, please do not do anything that involves sharing personal or protected information with the interface.

In the first stage of the assignment, have the model take three steps. 1. Ask it to create a work of literature (poem, story, flash fiction, memoir, anything else you prefer) about the subject of your choice. 2. Then have it perform some analytical operation on the work it has composed. You can use whatever task you like, but you can think of the various things we've done and read about, such as Blatt's experiments. Have the model perform the operation itself, then give you the results. 3. Finally, have the model write Python code to perform the same operation you requested in the previous step. Have it run the code, using the work of literature it wrote as the input, and tell you the output.

In your classwork document, by 11:00 the night before class, enter the output of the three steps, along with a reflection on your experience. Write at least 150 words on some or all of the following questions. What did you think of the model's literary output? Did the request to analyze the output directly go as you expected, and if not, why not? How did the final step of writing and running code compare to the direct analysis? How did the whole interaction compare with your experience of ELIZA?

In the second half of class, we will do an exercise aimed at generating ideas for your final projects.

Final Projects: Prototypes

Project prototype day! By 11:00 the night before class, write in your Classwork Document at least 100 words each (at least 300 total) about three ways you might approach your final project. You can try out more than one entirely different ideas for the project, or you might try out multiple approaches to the same project. However you approach the prototyping, make sure you use this opportunity to be creative and to give your classmates a range of ideas they can respond to. We will workshop your prototypes in class.

Final Projects: Work Day

Project work day! By 11:00 the night before class, write in your Classwork Document at least 100 words about the current state of your final project and how you hope to spend our Tuesday class time making progress on it.

Last day of class! We will gather to reflect on the semester and lament the lack of more class days.

FINAL PROJECT DUE BY NOON