This is quite different, I think, with respect to the way most of the community is using Observable but I thought I’d let you know that I’m giving this talk today about a notebook on which I’m continuing to work:
Datafied Close Reading: Reading a Novella with a Live Coding Notebook
Abstract:
For a collaborative, interdisciplinary – literary/CS/Machine Learning – project, the presenter, John Cayley, found himself reading, analysing, and ‘mapping’ Joseph Conrad’s novella, Typhoon. Cayley took Project Gutenberg text, fed it into an online platform for live coding notebooks – Observable <observablehq.com> – and set to work. He ended up thinking of what he was doing as ‘datafied close reading’. Initially this was a matter of assigning metaphorically-scaled numeric values to the structurally recognized paragraphs of the text, in order to be able to pass these values on to intermedia processes tracking it (the text) in live reading. But in itself, the procedure seemed likely to yield or support the kind of statements made by literary criticism as a function of traditional close reading. There was also the curious fact that simple speculative/interpretive readings were being value-quantified by hand, and arranged to compose, automatically, semantically and syntactically larger readings. Moreover, this was being done in a flexible live coding environment – one that also has built-in language model assistance – able to engage and integrate the more familiar natural language processing (NLP) that offers quantitative analyses, such as word or word-category count and relative frequency. Datafied close reading in these ways has been demonstrated to be giving us what we need for our specific interdisciplinary project of literary artistic practice-based research. Introducing it at this salon will, Cayley hopes, suggest other literary critical DH outcomes for this kind of reading and the underlying techniques and platforms.
The notebook in question is https://observablehq.com/@shadoof/typhoon-analysis
and – shout out to the amazing @jwoLondon I’m using a fork of my notebook for the presentation, one that makes Very Basic use of his super-elegant https://observablehq.com/@jwolondon/observable-embedded-slideshow :
https://observablehq.com/@shadoof/typhoon-slideshow
Which is all to say, thanks Observable!