Augmenting Realities

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.