Than of your graces and your gifts to tell;
Which borrowed from this holy fire of Love,
That they elsewhere might dart their injuries:
I do believe her though I know she lies,

Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
But when she saw my woeful state,
How like Eves apple doth thy beauty grow,
Therefore my verse to constancy confined,

That they elsewhere might dart their injuries:
Loves fire heats water, water cools not love.
Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,
With Times injurious hand crushed and oerworn;

Nay, if you read this line, remember not
That thy unkindness lays upon my heart;

Source: http://www.languageisavirus.com/sonnet-generator.html

Lady EllaMaxwell

Dark and glowing under the light

Strangely misty on the gods
You breathe dull virgins about the towers
Beware! The pleasure is fleeing
Sinister and invisible beneath the rain
I speak to luminous symbols beneath the sea
Alass, Alack! The life has vanished
Dark and glowing under the light
I squeeze hot elves among the flowers
Heavy! The devil will come
shifting unseeing
saying goodbye
a broken promise
With what hopes
the other
make his way
trying to remember

Yours truly,

Lord Meriwether Penistone

Like most of the tough questions we have attempted to tackle so far this semester, I think the answer is both yes and no when it comes to the issue is literature data. The first thing that needs to be done when addressing this question is defining what exactly we mean when we say data. Our discussion in class today revealed that there is even some discrepancy amongst ourselves about how we should define data in this context. I think  data in this consideration should refer to information (raw material) that is capable of being inputted into an algorithm, or in other ways be systematically processed, so that generalized conclusions about a set can be reached.

I think the Google Books services alone are enough to prove that literature must to some extent be data. Digitizing books has allowed Google to analyze large amounts of literature in complex ways, revealing all kinds of interesting trends. One of the more basic examples, which we have talked about extensively in class, is the Ngram Viewer. Ngram quantifies writing and allows users to investigate the frequency of a word’s usage in books over time. This tool is useful because it can assist in analyzing all sorts of historical events and trends. However, Ngram is really only turning words in isolation into data, not literature per se.

The forensic analysis of J.K. Rowling’s secret book provides better examples of how literature is data. Two forensic linguistic experts examined the book in question, one of Rowling’s known works, and three other British crime novels and then compared the results. They used a generic word frequency test, similar in idea to Ngram. However, the experts also employed more complex tests such as ones focusing on concepts and syntactical style. The ability to run literary elements like these through a computer algorithm is evidence enough for me that literature has to be thought of as data in ways. This kind of technology could augment scholarship in the future by giving us the potential to assign new sorts of quantified characteristics to writers. For example, rather than just saying, “this writer is known for his gloomy style, long prose, etc etc” we will be able to say, “this writer falls into this particular category because he uses this certain arrangement of related words with x frequency”.

At the same time, I don’t think that computers will ever be capable of fully analyzing the more sophisticated elements of good literature. Computers might become good predictors of symbolism, for example, just by analyzing past associations and running probabilities. But they will never be able to output anything that can represent the aesthetics and more intangible qualities and emotions of deep writing or poetry.

In reading the debate over whether or not literature is data I was very confused, possibly because the answer to that question seems so obvious to me.  If we think of a book, for example, as being a work of literature, then we have to acknowledge that literature is at least sometimes data, since we can store all the relevant information about the book on a computer*.  In fact, any piece of literature that can be kept on a hard drive is data.  The real question is whether we can create computer programs that provide meaningful and relevant insights about the works we feed them.

That an algorithmic analysis of literature can be fruitful has already been demonstrated by distant reading, which has already revealed, for example that the frequency of the word “the” changes throughout literary periods^[1], or that in the 19th century, the Irish were four times more likely than the English to appear in court on trial for their lives^[2].  Insights such as these are certainly relevant to their respective fields, so they augment research in the humanities, and by extension augment reality.

*Ok, we can usually store all relevant information about the book.  If the physical structure of the book is important, then things become more difficult, but I would argue that even in these special cases we either can or will soon be able to fully digitize them.

Sure. But it isn’t just data. Literature, like anything that can leave an impression on someone, is greater than the sum of its parts. But as powerful as it is, literature is certainly made of information, in the same way that people are made of cells. A novel is just a sequence of words and symbols, information that was printed and distributed so that someone could read it and be moved by it. It wouldn’t even be fair to say a particular book is a novel in the truest sense. When my friend talks with me about The Hobbit, he isn’t referring to the battered tome gathering dust on my bookshelf back home. He is referring to the story those weathered pages conveyed to me, as another set of pages did for him. The Hobbit itself is just a very specific idea, an object without a body. Transmission of information is literature’s modus operandi, its only way to exist.

So of course data is an integral part of literature. We can study literature as information without compromising its deeper meaning just as we can study biology without compromising our identities as people. New ways of viewing literature, like distant reading, allow us to view this information in ways that are only just now becoming possible. We can observe trends across entire genres, which has already been attempted has never truly be feasible before. Even the most well-read scholar could only possibly have personally read a fraction of any major genre. This scholar can only claim to know about the genre in general by learning what other scholars think about its remaining items, filtered through all of their biases and misrecollections. This isn’t true knowledge of the genre, just a copy of a copy of a copy. Scholars make their best inferences based on what they know. When they are drawing from a sufficiently large data pool, we can assume that their conclusions are reasonable enough. But with distant reading we may at last be able to conclusively say what characterizes a gothic novel, or the zeitgeist of the 1920’s, or the answers to any number of other questions that we can’t properly conceive of just yet.

We can now identify an author as a pen name for J.K. Rowling through forensic analysis. This probably seems cold and calculating to some, but it is just a new way of looking at information that people notice all time. Most people can do an impression of a friend’s style of speaking, or correctly identify a book’s author by reading a few passages. We recognize linguistic trends.  We don’t do this in an effort to break the world down into data, but there are patterns in language that we notice without any particular effort. Now that we are casting a more rigorous analytical eye to literature, we may be able to finally put a name to those ineffable qualities that make up style.

The process of distant reading may seem inane now, since it’s producing things like statistics on the usage of the word “the”.  But it shows that patterns exist which we have not been able to see before, and that we can develop the tools to make sense of them. As we get more familiar with the process of examining large bodies of literature, we should expect to find fascinating patterns which we may not have thought to look for 15 years ago, or even have the vocabulary to describe today. The conception of literature as data is not a threat to literary tradition. It is a tool for augmenting reality.

I recently downloaded a really, really cool game pack from LA Game Space, a nonprofit, interdisciplinary center for art, design, and research. They got some great developers, artists, and creative minds (including Pendleton Ward, the genius behind Adventure Time) to help develop some really cool independent games that I think fit really well with this course, or at least the types of games we tried out in class. They are all over the place, and mess with perception, perspective, and even how you input controls . 30 different games were released in a game pack that was supported by a kickstarter campaign.

Experimental Game Pack 01

This video is the promotional teaser for the games, and the second link shows some videos of a few games as well as descriptions of the others:
Experimental Game Pack 01

Game Pack Description

If any of these games interest you, or you want to try them out, let me know. They’re definitely worth playing around with.