Caleb in the Chipper
Posted by on Wednesday, April 11th, 2012 at 10:41 pmI don’t have a whole lot to say about these images (yet)–I just thought it would be fun to show them in time for the Caleb Williams class. You’ll see that many of the topics the woodchipper shows are expected, such as the ones dealing with criminality, existence, grief, and nature/character. I find the positive topics more surprising, like the ones that include “good” and “hope.”
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I mentioned I was surprised to find such a strong “hope” topic in Caleb Williams. I can think of three reasons it might appear so strongly
1. Caleb Williams really is a novel about hope.
2. Wood chipper is picking up negative instances of hope: “There is no hope” and such.
3. The novel deliberately toys with us, setting up moments of hope, just to dash them.
Further analysis (digging in to the passages wood chipper has identified) could determine which of these three it is, or the hope could be explained by an entirely different theory that I would find once I started digging in.
This is a rather simplistic example, but I think it illustrates a way that wood chipper can be helpful.
The simple example in this post also illustrates the way my mind works. I research at night, think “that is weird,” get frustrated and go to sleep. Then I wake up with theories for the weirdness. Of course, this example is not that weird. But using DH methods to find instances of “weirdness”–that’s a good way to trigger those theories I might wake up with in the morning.
Ally–The image doesn’t seem to be here.
Hmm. Just tried again, but I guess it still didn’t work. (I see them.) I’ll give it another go after class.