An experiential graduate course in the English Department at Northeastern University https://s19rm.ryancordell.org Fieldbook Prompt We began this semester working with historical, analogue textual technologies. In the past few weeks we’ve moved into the digital space, working with code in the R programming language. While we often talk about computers as if they are immaterial—talking about “the cloud” for instance—they are every bit... Wed, 10 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0700 https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab11-ElectronicTexts/ https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab11-ElectronicTexts/ As we did for Lab #8, I encourage you to experiment with this code in a new RMD file. Copy, paste, adapt, run, revise, run again. Can you import a different genre of literature from Project Gutenberg, for instance, and analyze it in the ways we did for science fiction?... Wed, 03 Apr 2019 00:00:00 -0700 https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab10-TextAnalysisII/ https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab10-TextAnalysisII/ Open response, drawing on the lab and readings. Thu, 28 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0700 https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab9-DataAnalysis/ https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab9-DataAnalysis/ Your fieldbook for this lab should include some of the code you found most interesting/enlightening/infuriating. You can copy and paste from the RMD files we used in class. Make sure you code blocks are separated from your text. They should look like this, but with code in between: You should... Wed, 20 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0700 https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab8-TextAnalysisI/ https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab8-TextAnalysisI/ Most of today’s lab materials will be found in the DSG’s R Studio Server installation. I will provide log-ins for you each in class. Fieldbook Prompt Our readings this week focused on histories of circulation, including historical modes of remix and reuse. Though we read it weeks ago, we could... Wed, 13 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0700 https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab7-BuildingABot/ https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab7-BuildingABot/ In this final letterpress lab report, I want you to think about our work with type and the press in the context of our course’s ongoing discussions of media, book history, and technology. How does physically working with this historical technology change your view of the handpress period and its... Wed, 27 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0800 https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab6-LetterpressIII/ https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab6-LetterpressIII/ Let’s leave the response for today open, but keep a particular eye on the week’s readings and ways you can connect our ongoing work with type to those historical and literary touchstones. Wed, 20 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0800 https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab5-LetterpressII/ https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab5-LetterpressII/ For today’s lab you will set as much as possible of the following poem, which was widely reprinted in nineteenth-century newspapers. This version appeared in the *Winchester Home Journal on May 6, 1858. A Printer’s Epitaph Here lies a form, place no imposing stone To mark the head, where weary... Wed, 06 Feb 2019 00:00:00 -0800 https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab4-Compositing/ https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab4-Compositing/ This week’s readings were an interesting mix of arugment, form, and content. In Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maid,” he explores the settings of two very different forms of culture and production: the all-male club of the Temple Bar in London and the almost all-female run... Wed, 30 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0800 https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/models/week4-bibliographic/ https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/models/week4-bibliographic/ For this lab, I have selected books from Northeastern University’s Archives and Special Collections for us to investigate. As when we looked at Harlequins on the first day, this lab is an exercise in close looking. I’ve arranged the books in pairs, each designed to illuminate a particular textual contrast:... Wed, 23 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0800 https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab3-Archive/ https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab3-Archive/ Lab 1: Encountering the Unknown Our first lab for Reading Machines was a two-fold introduction to Markdown: a) an opportunity to learn about the platform and medium in which we will be required to compose this semester and b) an opportunity to experience/experiment with the meta-narrative of the “new media... Tue, 22 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0800 https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/models/Lab1-markdown/ https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/models/Lab1-markdown/ #Lab Proceedings When we walked into the classroom, seven candles floated in the dark. As my eyes adjusted, I took in the table, where the candles stood by leather-bound books, printed letters, and blank pages of cardstock, casting a glow across the surface of the table like little islands. Professor... Wed, 16 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0800 https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/models/week2-illumination/ https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/models/week2-illumination/ Let’s start with a quote from Marshall McLuhan, which we discussed last week: The electric light escapes attention as a communication medium just because it has no “content.” And this makes it an invaluable instance of how people fail to study media at all. For it is not till the... Wed, 16 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0800 https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab2-Illuminating/ https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab2-Illuminating/ Lab Overview Your fieldbook assignment constitutes the central, ongoing work of your semester where you will record your ideas about our readings in bibliographic annotation entries and think through the work of our humanities laboratories in lab report entries. You will gather all of these materials in a repository on... Wed, 09 Jan 2019 00:00:00 -0800 https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab1-Markdown/ https://s19rm.ryancordell.org/labs/Lab1-Markdown/