So one of the big, fascinating ideas being presented to me this semester is that as an english major guy, I focus on the importance of language use, language choice, word choice, the construction of our stories. In the digipub tract, I’m studying coding, XML, HTML, Python, TEI, markup, metadata, and all the intricacies that go into computer languages. It’s complex and honestly, even though I played around with my own personal website back in 2005, it’s quite foreign.
My final project this semester, for one class, is I’m plugging freesource novels from Project Gutenberg into CATMA, an annotation and text analyzer, to study the frequency of use of “he said she said” tags and exclamation marks. I then compare those books to the novel I’m currently writing to see how similarly (or dissimilarly) frequent I use the same tags. Once I have that data collected, I’m using the “blog” site Scalar and in conjunction with data graphing tools like Voyant to present the data in an easily understandable fashion. It’ll be a tedious process–one filled with long nights plugging as many Gutenberg free texts into CATMA as I can–but the end result should be spectacular.
Exciting, I know. All this came from a few articles, and a running Twitter feed of fav novelists and agents in the writing industry talking about the systematic removal of exclamation marks and “he said she said” tags from dialogue. How it’s important one removes them due to redundancy issues. I found the push odd and possibly unwarranted, so I’m researching how the “greats” did it and comparing the info to my own work. Note: I can only use my own work because using other contemporary works would constitute copyright infringement without express written consent from the authors; though this could be a much larger project for a later date. I’m not sure what the outcome will be, but it’s a great exercise in using a bunch of data collection/distribution/filtering programs.
The other class I’m taking has me focusing on limitations toward specific online writing programs. I’m writing my next project on Prosebox; partially because I’m interested in the way it works and doesn’t, partially because it’s simple and straightforward and very functional, and partially because it has a strong community.
Loading comments...