English 455: Literary and Linguistic Computing

English 455
Literary and Linguistic Computing
Clai Rice
University of Louisiana
at Lafayette

14 Most Frequent Nouns (by Lemma) from the British National Corpus
time 1833 year 1639 people 1256 way 1108 man 1003 day 940 thing 776	child 710 Mr 673 government 670 work 653 life 645 woman 631 system 619

Office: Griffin 357
Phone: 2-1327
Email: crice@louisiana.edu
Office Hours: MW 9:00-12:00
and by appointment

Homework Assignments and Links | Course Pages

Course Description:

The computer has revolutionized the practice of every humanities discipline. As society in general becomes more reliant on computing technology, and as the forms of human social interaction begin to presuppose computer-readability, all humanities scholars will benefit from being familiar with the many ways to read and write with a computer. The immediate availability of millions of digital texts, at Amazon, Google, and elsewhere, has already begun to transform our basic concepts of reading, scholarship, and reference. Jerome McGann forecasts that “in the next 50 years, the entirety of our inherited archive of cultural works will have to be re-edited within a network of digital storage, access, and dissemination.” Will we be ready to do the job?

This course will introduce students to basic concepts in linguistic and literary computing, and to several tools useful for researching, producing, and delivering electronic text. Students will learn how to plan and create a corpus of electronic text from written or oral sources, use Wordsmith Tools to find, analyze, and display information about a text, mark up a text with XML tags to facilitate finding the information you want, and use some of the text and tool archives already available on the World Wide Web, including the Whitman and Dickinson Archives, the Rossetti Archive, the British Library’s Shakespeare in Quarto, the Proceedings of the Old Baily (criminal trials in London from 1674-1834), and on-line concordances for many authors and publications.

This project-oriented course will be useful for anyone interested in working with a body of text, whether it be a specific literary text or group of texts, a critical edition, data from interviews, collections of folk tales from a variety of sources, or genre-specific language such as political speeches or trial transcripts. Individual student projects may treat literary or corpus-based linguistics topics. Readings and discussion will be heavily supplemented by hands-on computer work with texts and corpora. Only a basic familiarity with everyday computer tools like email and web-browsing will be assumed.

Texts:

Michael Stubbs, Words and Phrases (Blackwell, 2001) ISBN: 0-613-20833-X
Also, all students will need to have their university computer account ID and password.

Daily Syllabus

	Monday		Wednesday
Aug	21	Course Intro. Homework assignment.	23	basic electronic text A Brief Introduction to Humanities Computing and Electronic Text (http://www.ceth.rutgers.edu/intromat/introtext.html)
Aug	28	text repositories HW	30	Unix environment (Telnet, FTP); WordSmith Tools HW
Sep	4	No Class	6	BNC sampler
Sep	11	Stubbs, Chap 1	13	Stubbs, Chap 2 Sinclair: Corpus and Text: Basic Principles
Sep	18	Stubbs, Chap 3, Working with phrases Sinclair: How to build a corpus	20	lexical profiles
Sep	25	Stubbs Chap 4	27	fixed phrases
Oct	2	phrases	4	Mid-term project due
Oct	9	Midterm due; hand tagging techniques Leech: Adding Linguistic Annotation	11	Nested Markup (HTML, SGML, XML) Edward Vanhoutte An Introduction to the TEI and the TEI Consortium (2004)
Oct	16	Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), "A Gentle Introduction to XML" (http://www.tei-c.org/P4X/SG.html)	18	Markup Allen Renear, Elli Mylonas, and David Durand. "Refining Our Notion of What Text Really Is: The Problem of Overlapping Hierarchies." Research in Humanities Computing (1996)
Oct	23	Leslie's Spanish poetry project	25
Oct	30	Darla's rap project	1	McGann and Samuels, Electronic texts and deformative reading
Nov	6		8	Site Reviews Due
Nov	13	Stubbs, Chap 6	15	World Wide Web as corpus
Nov	20	Stubbs, Chap 7	22	Stubbs, Chap 8
Nov	27	Stubbs, Chap. 9	29	Stubbs, Chap 9
Dec	4	Final Project Due	3	Mid-Exam Break

Attendance: This course is cumulative and we will move through the material at a rapid pace. Missing class for any reason usually causes students to fall woefully behind. University policy is that you may miss 10% of the class meetings without institutional consequences. Subsequent absences will cause your grade to suffer. No make-up tests will be given unless you tell me in advance of class that you will be absent for some (important) reason.

Americans With Disabilities Act Compliance Statement
It is the policy of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette to afford equal opportunity in education to qualified students. If you have a disability that may prevent you from meeting course requirements, contact the instructor immediately to file a student disability statement and to develop an accommodation plan. Course requirements will not be waived but reasonable accommodations will be developed to assist you in meeting the requirements.

Percentages of Each Assignment:

Homeworks	10%
Tests (2)	15% each
Midterm Project	20%
Final Project	40%

The tests will be take-home exercise sets. The projects will be your own design, and may deal with any type of corpus you want to work with. Some possibilities include literary, web-based, child language, historical, documentary (such as legal or legislative proceedings), comprehensive, or self-created. Graduate students will be encouraged to create and work with corpora that can serve as the basis for their dissertation study.

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