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To be discussed 2016-02-05.
Questions to guide your reading: Padgett's techniques for "creative reading" are distinctly analogue. Which of his techniques could be adopted for digital text? What ideas about how text work are "built in" to the grep command? What do you think about Glazier's "grep works"? What's more important to the outcome, the procedure or the source text? How to UNIX utilities rely on or reinforce the substance of digital text (ASCII, lines, etc.)? Why is the "line" an important unit in poetry and text in general? What effect does lineated text have that text typeset as prose does not (and vice-versa)?
Exercise A: Command-line text processing
Due 2016-02-12.
Homework #1. Create a Python program that behaves like a UNIX text processing program (such as cat, grep, tr, etc.). Your program should take text as input (any text, or a particular text of your choosing) and output a version of the text that has been filtered and/or munged. Be creative, insightful, or intentionally banal.
Choose one text that you created with your program to read in class.
Bonus: Use the program that you created in tandem with another UNIX command line utility.
To be discussed 2016-02-19.
Do you agree that "all writing is in fact cut-ups"? Consider Hartman's concept of "juxtaposition"—what does it mean for texts to be juxtaposed procedurally? How does that affect the quality and interpretation of the work? Is there a fundamental difference between the analogue/pre-digital techniques of Gysin, Acconci, and Goldsmith and digital "data-driven" techniques?
Due 2016-02-26.
Homework #2: The digital cut-up. Write a program that reads in and creatively re-arranges the content of one or more source texts. What is the unit of your cut-up technique? (the word, the line, the character? something else?) How does your procedure relate (if at all) to your choice of source text? Feel free to build on your assignment from last week.
Your program must make use of at least one set, dictionary, or list.
Choose one text that you created with your program to read in class.
Bonus 1: Use a method of a list, set, or dictionary object that we didn't discuss in class.
Bonus 2: Use a list comprehension somewhere in your program.
To be discussed 2016-03-04
Midterm projects to be presented 2016-03-25.
This project has two steps. You must:
Your poetic form could be something as simple as "Each line must begin with the letter 'A'" or something as sophisticated as Mac Low's diastics.
Your presentation and documentation for this project should include the following:Due 2016-04-01.
Homework #3: Appropriating text from the network. Devise and implement (in Python) a procedure to cut up and creatively re-arrange text. At least one of your texts should come from a network-based source (e.g., Wordnik, the New York Times API, etc.). To consider: How does the presence of data appropriated from the network change the nature of your process and your output?
Due 2016-04-08.
Rewrite some portion of an earlier assignment to make use of functions. For example, you could do one or more of the following:
import your_midterm_module; your_midterm_module.generate("input_file.txt")To be discussed in class 2016-04-22
Note: We will not be holding class on 2016-04-15! That session is rescheduled for Saturday, 2016-04-23.
Natural Language Basics with TextBlob
Final project presentations 1
Final project presentations 2