Twine and Bklyn Trash King became my first foray into interactive and hypertext fiction.  Like Kathryn, I had heard of Patchwork Girl, but have not read it.  However, I did hear about it’s quirks and kinks since it is a CD-rom.  Needless to say, I had higher hopes with the stories on Twine since it is internet-based.

I initially set out to read Hunt for the Gay Planet, but just a few sentences told me it wasn’t my kind of story, so it was onto Bklyn Trash King.  At first, I thought something was wrong with my version, or this was just a VERY short story, when I kept hitting the “refresh page” link and got the same page of text over and over again.  Clearly, creator Ben Esposito knows it is easy to trigger the average computer user’s frustration, because I was willing to keep clicking this link until something happened.  And it did.  I was rewarded for my need to make the link work via incessant clicking and taken to the next page of the story.  I had to chuckle at Esposito’s cleverness at having the same page appear for both the narrator and the reader, thereby effectively putting the reader in the role of second person narrator.

What worked well was the continued use of tricks like this.  Esposito included links to outside sources/websites to further place us in his story and give it some validity.  One was a genuine news story about raccoons becoming pests in Brooklyn–the plot of Bklyn Trash King–which acted as a rather long footnote.  I actually took the time to make sure the article wasn’t just Esposito going the extra mile and making a mock news story.

Using the tried and true method of the choose-your-own-adventure tale, Esposito nearly lost me, but alas, it was another of his tricks.  For the first few “pages,” no matter which link I clicked, at the end I was rerouted back to the initial page where you were given options.  I then had no choice but to click the additional options.  Finally, I was taken back to a page where a third option that wasn’t there before has appeared.  Curiosity piqued.

At this juncture, the story truly becomes choose-your-own-adventure.  You are no longer taken back to the starting point with two choices, but are taken along a new path.  Of course, I had to know what happened in the other story I did not choose, so I started from the beginning again.  And here I was disappointed.  It was like a rom-com where you find out Gwyneth Paltrow’s fate is to be with this ONE guy, no matter which course her life takes.  I would have preferred an original ending for each course Bklyn Trash King took.

I’m sure creating these stories takes a lot of time and effort, but a little more attention could have been paid to minor details like spelling and grammar.  Those things immediately take me right out of a story.  Also, the deal between the narrator–you–and the Raccoon King to kiss the butts of three raccoons, plus his, just for a retweet seemed quite juvenile.

Overall, I liked the way the story worked and am curious to read more of the stories on Twine.  I think it will definitely give me some ideas on how I want to pursue my own Twine story next week.

When I first read this assignment, I thought it was going to be a piece of cake for me.  As a TV production assistant–and beyond–I was required to transcribe taped interviews on an almost daily basis.  But trying to decipher Jeremy Bentham’s handwriting is not even remotely close to rewinding a tape to pick up words during Courtney Love’s drunk ramblings.  Bentham’s handwriting has Love’s slurred speech beat, hands down.

After many of the same issues Mary discussed in her post–namely Firefox not being Transcribe Bentham-friendly–I finally was able to view the manuscripts available for  transcription.  After perusing a few that had not been transcribed and seeing the writing was nearly illegible, I opted for an “easy” manuscript.  Of course most of these had already been done, so it was back to the untranscribed category and clicking at random to find one that might possibly fall into the “easy” category if I was lucky.  I chose JB/002/010/001 because it looked user-friendly.  I was wrong.

It seems every other word got a <gap> label, resulting in numerous ellipses in the finished transcript.  Phrases such as the following left me puzzled and the document …

Overall, I think Transcribe Bentham is a great project.  Although I’m still not sure if its intent is to get people like us who think this stuff is super cool to do free work for them.  Perhaps it’s just mutually beneficial.

To start this week’s exercise, I decided to have a little fun. Kind of like stretching before a big work out. Using Google’s Ngram Viewer, I compared the heroine of my chosen text, Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet, to her modern-day counterpart, Bridget Jones, with whose diary we are intimately acquainted. Because Helen Fielding has openly admitted to basing her characters on Jane Austen’s—especially Mark Darcy on Mr. Darcy—I thought it would be interesting to see how else they compare. I was surprised to see how Miss Bennet’s popularity waned for so many years and then, at the turn of the century, increased and hasn’t stopped since.  Additionally, I was surprised to see that Bridget Jones’ popularity peaked higher than Elizabeth’s ever did.

Then onto the hard part of the work out—creating a definition for digital humanities. And not just any definition, one with strict boundaries. My humble result below.

Wordle vs. WordItOut

While I generally consider myself a hands-on learner and quick on the uptake when it comes to basic computer programs and technologies, I found this week’s exercise to be more than a little frustrating. Wordle would not allow me to insert the Project Gutenberg (or any other) link to get my word output, which resulted in me copying and pasting the book in its entirety into the “Paste in a bunch of text” box. Oh, I pasted in a bunch of text alright! Finally, I got this beauty:

Then it was time for WordItOut, which was a much quicker task after figuring out Wordle’s quirks.

I actually took the time to try to make the two look as similar as possible in coloring for easier comparison. I think Wordle has WordItOut beat in basic aesthetics, but otherwise the results were nearly identical. I was very surprised to see “Mr.” was the word most used throughout Pride and Prejudice. Despite being the nineteenth century’s chick-lit by a female author, it is clear that it was still a man’s world at the time of writing and publication. However, the word “Elizabeth” does run a close second, which is a bit refreshing.

Up-Goer Five Text Editor

Next up, the commonality of words. It appears things haven’t changed much in 200 years since Miss Austen put pen to paper. In fact, other than proper names, only four words she used were not in the top 1000 words of Up-Goer Five: indeed, pleasure, till, and manner. However, this made me curious what the results would be if basic words like came, made, most, and go were not allowed to be analyzed. I was surprised at pleasure being so widely used. It’s not a word I hear used often, and it seems the connotation has changed over the years.

CLAWS

CLAWS was my least favorite of all the sites. To me, it did not lay out the results in a clear, easy-to-read manner. It was also counterintuitive that the key wasn’t listed on the same page as the results, so that you had to toggle back and forth between pages. Additionally, this seems more like it would be useful for grade school children learning grammar than it would be for any other purpose.

TAPoR

When it came to TAPoR, I wasn’t nearly as interested in the HyperPo abilities as I was with the program’s ability to run lists of words and compile how many times each word occurs in the text. The word “Elizabeth,” which appeared to be a close second to “Mr.” in the Wordle, is actually used 200 times less than “Mr.” Futhermore, I was particularly interested in the listing ability for two reasons. First, Stephen Ramsay writes extensively on the tf-idf formula and how its findings affect critics when looking for patterns in a text, which I found intriguing. Second, in Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, a character tries to categorize and determine the genre of books based solely on the words that recur and appear the most in a given work. It’s an interesting thought, trying to decide what a book is about without having read it for its sentences, but for the words it features.

While all of these sites were fun to play with and produced interesting results, I think they ultimately take away from the true meaning of what a book is hoping to convey. Making a book a thing of quantitative results removes the reader’s ability to interpret the text for himself and to engage in the nuances the author has created with grammar, punctuation, and voice. The only work that comes to mind that would benefit from these results would be Gertrude Stein’s “Portraits and Repetition,” where her goal is to use the same words as many times and in as many ways as possible. As Ramsay himself writes:

“It is one thing to notice patterns of vocabulary, variation in line length, or images of darkness and light; it is another thing to employ a machine that can unerringly discover every instance of such features across a massive corpus of literary texts and then present those features in a visual format entirely foreign to the original organization in which these features appear” (Ramsay 16).

I couldn’t agree more. Just as Project Gutenberg states that anything may be done with a public domain text, which may result in the text being changed in ways that dissolve its power and purpose, stripping it to just its words changes it too.