Category Archives: Digital Labs

I thought about writing this blog post entirely with emojis, but I realized how difficult that would 🅱️, so I opted to use standard English (mostly). Many people underestimate the power of emojis to convey ideas, while others may use them too liberally, effectively obscuring meaning, so attempting to write an entire literary piece usingContinue reading “Digital Lab #12 – 😀”

Starting this semester, this was probably one of the labs I was looking forward to the most, as Twitter bots have a great potential for both humor and literary intrigue. While some use them for purposes of harassment and the propagation of harmful ideologies (which is an unfortunate potentiality for many digital tools), they canContinue reading “Digital Lab #10 – Twitter Bots”

Mark Z. Danielewski has become well-known for experimenting with typography in order to provide additional visual meaning and intrigue to his texts. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Chapter IX of House of Leaves, where form, content, medium, and material all coalesce to depict a labyrinthine structure of text while describing the maze-like qualitiesContinue reading “Digital Lab #8 – Typography”

As I alluded to toward the end of the previous lab, I consider all writing to be political, regardless of subject matter or authorial intent. To summarize what I described there, I believe that any form of communication contains inherent biases, which we should recognize and not take for granted. While one’s words may seemContinue reading “Digital Lab #7 – Political Data-Mining”

Jordan Abel’s process in writing “Injun” inspires one to consider and question one’s relationship to the political and ideological undercurrents of historical texts and how they relate to present-day inequalities and injustices. By data-mining novels from and about the “Old West” for instances of such a derogatory term, and then using these texts to craftContinue reading “Digital Lab #6 – Poetic Data-Mining”

Now that we are starting to use data collecting methods in our analyses of literary texts, I have realized how detail-oriented and deliberate the process needs to be in order to discover any meaningful results. While one could take a large amount of text, plug it into some digital tool, and analyze the results, theContinue reading “Digital Lab #5 – Data in Danielewski’s “Clip 4””

As part of this lab, I altered code developed by Nick Montfort. Since I do not know a way to upload my HTML file to WordPress without a paid account, I will link to a page containing the code here. (I also submitted the HTML file with this URL for the assignment.) Additionally, here isContinue reading “Digital Lab #4 – Data and Literature”

The traditional Japanese art of haiku, which as we know it is quite modified from its original structure due to European appropriation, has several inherent links to the world of the digital. Both involve one creating something meaningful within limitations (whether that entails the fixed syllable structure in the former or the specific syntax ofContinue reading “Digital Lab #3 – Digital Haiku”