In my final project, I decided to return to my twine and expand it, refocus it, and tie it up. I returned to this project because I felt that it presented me the opportunity to reengage the poetic problem of author and reader. I think tools like Twine allow the ‘author –>reader’ exchange to restructured into something more equal. When I started this project, I wanted to create a poem that allowed the exchange to be suggestive of a dynamic ‘author <=> reader’ representation. The power of the Write Yourself Poem Twine is not that it allows users to create their own poem; of course they aren’t writing their own poem. But it does allow them to reflectively pick phrases and images that they relate to or ones that they don’t understand and want to pursue further with the hope of creating something meaningful and interesting

In this final draft of the project, as I’ve previously stated, I expanded and changed some of my links. I’ve also drawn out some of the images and changed some of the phrasing to make the poetic language more precise. Perhaps some of the most important changes that I’ve incorporated into my Twine are the addition of a ‘start over’ and ‘the end’ link in several of my pathways. I included these links because I wanted to give users the chance to go back and explore different poems if they were unsatisfied with their results or to force an ending to demonstrate that their poem, though guided, has consequences that can’t be disregarded. The other major change in this version of my Twine is my change from the default interface to the Sugercube option. I was unsure of doing this at first, but when I saw that Sugercube had offered  save and hard restart options I realized that this would further encourage people to explore their choices through the language and the images.

My Twine can be found and explored here –

http://iupengl-757-857-summer2015.wikispaces.com/file/detail/Write%20Yourself%20Poem%284%29.html

A Voyant word cloud of the language frequency in George Orwell’s last novels, Coming Up for Air and Nineteen Eighty-Four demonstrates that these novels don’t frequently employ or feature dense words and phrases to describe the content they share. 

In fact, when examining the most frequent words in both novels, there are few words that seem conspicuous of a heightened awareness of the consecration of memory and experience in the years between WWI & WWII.

While exploring the relationship between Inter-war memory and experience presented in Coming Up for Air and Nineteen Eighty-Four (Animal Farm is not included because it is a novella and embraces a distinctly different writing style) using Voyant, one thing becomes clear. These novels work together to frame a conversation concerning memory and experience in the late 1930s to late 1940s as the world headed into WWII. Most critics assume that Nineteen Eighty-Four stands alone because of the narrative style that embraces the sci-fi genre, but even though it features many tropes and symbols that would later be adopted into the sci-fi genre, on the whole Orwell’s final novel is very much a novel working with in the same conventions as Coming Up for Air.

While the relationship between memory and experience is not new to me, when examining the textual word graphs, it becomes clear that these novels are working in a dialectical state. What Orwell does in one, he reverses in the other.

The frequency of these words is certainly a very important part in understanding the relationship shared by these novels, but more crucial is the locations of these phrases in their respective novels.

This chart demonstrates that while Coming Up for Air is a novel that is more foundationally rooted in memory, Nineteen Eighty-Four embraces the word more often and earlier in the novel’s respective progression. In a contrasting view of this, Coming Up for Air (though fewer times all together) uses ‘experience’ more.

These two novels demonstrate that, at least as far as Orwell was writing, when rooted in memory, as George Bowling (the protagonist of Coming Up for Air) is, experience is the only thing that can be observed or interacted with. Additionally, when a novel attempts to embrace the societal dependence on contemporary experience and demolish, burn, deny, or erase any hint of memory within the past, as is the world Winston Smith (Nineteen Eighty-Four’s protagonist) lives in, memory becomes cemented in the forefront of the mind.

Digital Humanities applications like Voyant and other text analysis programs are one of the most interesting tools in the toolkit of the scholar in the Digital Humanities. These applications allow researchers to see, understand, and interpret trends in language and other extremely valuable data points to understand the production and modification of language use over time. While it is certainly evident by examining any of the sample figures Sinclair presents that these tools allow scholars and researchers to see literature or the humanities in general on a macro level for, perhaps, the first time in history, the focus on the charts and graphs as relevant data to be mined or studied, over looks a extremely valuable aspect of these word analysis machines.

One of the most interesting tools that Sinclair mentioned is the TextArc interface. This interface “is less about allowing the user to generate different visualizations based on specified parameters and more about representing the text in a novel way” and because of this, I feel that Sinclair is aware of the artistic value of text as representation. It seems that Kelly is also aware of the larger cultural focus on the mathematical or scientific approach to all things, “among the many things I’ve learned form my students … is that they can be pretty persistent in their belief that words have been used in much the same way over time … and that words or phrases that are common today were probably common in the past—assuming those words existed.” Kelly has stumbled upon a reality that prevents many people from seeing the poetry, the art, the beauty of the gathering of words.

I would love to have some of these word charts, graphs, etc hanging from my wall.

The British Museum is a digital humanities project that demonstrates what makes DH an extremely important tool in the cooperative and exploratory realm of the Humanities and art. This project is, in my opinion, so great for many reasons. At first glance the British Museum displays their collection while offering viewers an opportunity to explore, plan, and analyze the content, but with a little digging, the site becomes less of a one-sided website and more of a explorable learning tool.

One of the first things that caught my attention as I clicked around on the main page was the museum’s distinction as a real place with real things, “Free Open Daily,” “Getting Here,” and “Plan Your Visit.” It doesn’t take much scrolling to access the digital gallery, and from there the collection opens up to display “over 3.5 million objects.” The inclusion of the British Museum’s website as a great example of Digital Humanities relies on the curators attention to audience and detail. Because there is a plethora of ways to interact with the pieces on the site, “Search Highlights,” “Themes,” “Kids discover.”

Of course, because the website houses so many different images and pieces, the navigation of that data is complex and can become burdensome when trying to search for one piece. With so many ways into the data, it becomes confusing, distracting, and at least for me, a downer. This doesn’t mean that I am not extremely impressed with the presentation, this means that the British Museum has so many great things that they want to display them all and it becomes heavy.

Galatea is an interactive fiction that presented the context of a ‘narrative’ in a way that fundamentally changed my perspective on the way a narrative works. From the outset of my time with Galatea I had to approach the idea of working with it from a new perspective. I had to not only learn the concepts of the narrative, but I also had to learn how to interact with the narrative. For the first twenty minutes I had to learn the language of the text before I could learn the text. Talking with the statute was, to my demise, like talking to a statue for the first twenty minutes. Only after reviewing the ‘help’ function and learning the basic structure of the language was I able to ‘interact’ with Galatea, but it took me stumbling through the game twice to learn that the game was playing with me. After completing the narrative, I finally explored the cheats page that is described in the help section and realized that the narrative is extremely expansive through the utilization of repeating phrases, responses, and ideas.

Emily Short’s narrative forced me to assess the ways that readers interact with a text to produce their own text through the author’s constructive framework. As I worked through the narrative (after learning of the cheats and subsequent alternative paths of travel), I realized that the narrative was multivalenced through my interaction with it. I got out of it what I put into it.

The 1992 hit Aladdin  was a movie that demonstrated that the world is no longer limited by physical space. Within the lamp, the genie was able to know the world, and in a not so directly connected way Digital Humanities Promises also offers the knowledge of the world, cooperatively working, in a tiny space. Digital Humanities also promises me the world and I plan to collect on it. The information contained in Digital Space is expanding at an ever quickening nauseating pace, but it also allows for greater interaction and cooperation between scholars and readers that has never existed before. This cooperation will dynamically shrink the space between people throughout the world and cause it to widen with the depth and breadth of countless new voices and ideas.