45 Matching Annotations
  1. Apr 2023
    1. The beginning of a novel is, variously, a social contract negotiation, an invitation to a dance, a list of rules of the game, and a fairly complex seduction.

      This metaphor suggests that the beginning of a novel: 1. Sets the stage for the reader's expectations and the author's responsibilities 2. Should be alluring and captivating to make the reader want to keep reading 3. Should be clear and concise to avoid confusion or misunderstanding. 4. Should be seductive and irresistible to make the reader want to keep reading.

  2. Mar 2023
    1. There is a rebel in me—the Shadow-Beast. It is a part of me that refuses to take orders from outside authorities.

      Anzaldua uses a metaphor to describe the part of her that refuses to take orders from outside authorities and hates any kind of limitations. She personifies her rebellion as a powerful and uncontrollable force within her.

    1. Kids barefoot/snotty-nosed        playing marbles/munching on bean tacos        (the kind you’ll never find in a café)        2 peaceful generations removed from        their abuelos’ revolution.

      The word choice and setting here work together to create a vivid image of poverty and tradition. The use of "bean tacos" emphasizes the cultural roots of the community, while the mention of "2 peaceful generations removed" emphasizes how long it has been since the revolution that inspired those roots.

  3. Dec 2022
    1. Like the trickster tales discussed above, the films we are lookingat here do not make animals the focal point, but use them as a means of“thinking with” humans.
    2. qualities of vermin also make thema ripe symbol for resistance. To be like vermin is to be tenacious and to refusethe spatial exclusions that people like Dean would enforce
    3. they’re taking over”—is the samelanguage used by whites resentful of people of color in their neighborhoodsor cities. It’s this logic that finally drives Dean’s exterminatory agenda.
    4. pivotal moment offoreshadowing and metaphorical significance
    5. too many (“like rats”), they are out of place, and they are therefore killablewithout ethical qualm
    6. they’re destroying the ecosystem”—but this rationale seemsso pale in comparison to the intensity of his antipathy toward them
  4. Jan 2022
    1. he page note can function as a general guide. When I teach I use it as a place to share possible instructions. For example, I want to share a close reading of John's work so that we can be a bit better prepared for the meet on #nwpstudio for First Chapter Friday with John McCaffrey. Or as John writes in the short afterword in the story, "If you really want to know the real story: what I felt, why I did what I did, why I didn’t do what I could? Listen. Listen close. It’s the only way."

  5. Nov 2021
    1. 405

      Our close reading passage this week is from Book 10, lines 406-449:

      from: 10.406 "so she spoke, and the proud heart in me was persuaded..." to 10. 449: "...but followed along in fear of my fierce reproaches."

      Instructions: as with last week's passage, pay attention to every detail that catches your attention, or that doesn't seem to make sense. Context matters: the scene in last week's passage was Ithaca, a relatively normal if disorderly human community, but this week's passage deals with events on a magical island where humans are easily changed into animals. Is this island in any way a threat to the homecomings of Odysseus and his men? In your view, does it affect their behavior?

    2. 475

      Hopkins at Home The Odyssey of Homer: a Close Reading

      Sample close reading passage: 5.475 - 5.493 (end of chapter 5)

      This moment occurs at the end of book five, just after Odysseus has escaped the rage of Poseidon by dragging himself ashore on the island of Scheria (likely Corfu), land of the Phaiakians/Phaeacians. Odysseus has just decided to look for shelter in the nearby forest, which despite the danger of wild animals offers somewhat more warmth than the wet shore of the river from which he has crawled. To help with our discussion I’ve divided the text into three parts.

      I’d suggest printing this out and jotting your thoughts down—circle words that strike you as significant, as having multiple meanings, etc. Enjoy! You can send your thoughts to me or just keep your notes handy for our next class.

  6. Jun 2021
    1. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

      I like this concept of deep reading.

      Compare/contrast with close reading and distant reading.

      What other types of reading might we imagine?

  7. Mar 2021
  8. Dec 2019
  9. Nov 2019
    1. For those not familiar with GPT-2, it is, according to its creators OpenAI (a socially conscious artificial intelligence lab overseen by a nonprofit entity), “a large-scale unsupervised language model which generates coherent paragraphs of text.” Think of it as a computer that has consumed so much text that it’s very good at figuring out which words are likely to follow other words, and when strung together, these words create fairly coherent sentences and paragraphs that are plausible continuations of any initial (or “seed”) text.

      This isn't a very difficult problem and the underpinnings of it are well laid out by John R. Pierce in An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise. In it he has a lot of interesting tidbits about language and structure from an engineering perspective including the reason why crossword puzzles work.

      close reading, distant reading, corpus linguistics

  10. Sep 2018
  11. Jul 2018
    1. like a picture in the newspaper

      I have noticed a lot of similes in this text. I think it would be interesting to create a function to help of find them and then do an analysis on what each simile refers to. Then we could derive a pattern from the out put. We could do this be creating an Ngram function to parse them out and then close read them for analysis. Or maybe a coordinates for the words "like a"?

  12. Jun 2018
    1. The first part introduces what Marjorie Perloff calls “differential reading,” which positions close and distant reading practices as both subjective and objective methodologies.

      Is New Historicism close or distant reading? The latter, right? But nonetheless deeply human, perhaps more so than "close reading" criticized as privileging text over lived reality.

  13. Oct 2017
    1. COMPETENCY-BASED LEARNING

      Close reading is basically standardized in Common Core--it's referenced in the first ELA anchor standard for reading. Hypothesis is a means to assess competency in that standard by recording, measuring, and allowing feedback on

  14. Sep 2017
  15. Jun 2017
    1. Don’t we have to actually read the books, before saying what the patterns discovered in them mean?

      Yes, of course. But it's ironic that this three post tirade begins with a rather distant reading of the MLA program.

    2. But does the data point inescapably in that direction?

      In the above performance of close reading, is the evidence more "inescapable"? Isn't is always in the fullness of the argumentation no matter where the data comes from?

  16. May 2017
    1. Now one feels blithe as a swimmer calmly borne by celestial waters, and then, as a diver into a secret world, lost in subterranean currents. Arduously sought expressions, hitherto evasive, hidden, will be like stray fishes out of the ocean bottom to emerge on the angler’s hook;

      This section of Lu Chi's text explains that only after we accept the tranquil inner depth of the mind, will the hard work of searching for inspiration payoff and wild creativity finally emerge to the surface. We see this in his use of words such as “Blithe,” “calmly,” “secret,” “lost,” “subterranean,” “arduously,” “hidden,” “out,” “bottom,” “emerge,” and “hook.” Going from a place of being carefree (blithe) and reaching below the minds surface (Subterranean) will the writer come out the other side (emerge) victories (angler’s hook). He uses the juxtapose of “celestial” and "Subterranean" as a metaphor of going from a "celestial" place of security above and being conscious, to “subterranean” as going to that unknown place below, the subconscious to find oneself. Also he uses “water” as referencing to the limited and small mind, “Current” as the mind breaking free and drifting, to the “Ocean” to become a massive and unlimited force of creative energy. Lu Chi also uses the transformation of the writer as the “diver,” who enters this unknown water and becomes the “fish” searching and finally metamorphosis into the “angler” who has found what he is looking for and pulls inspiration and creativity with "hook."

    2. Let the full-blown garden flowers of the ancients in their own morning glory stand; to breathe life into late blossoms that have yet to bud will be his sole endeavor.

      In this section of Lu Chi’s text, he is describing the most important task and responsibility of a writer is to teach future generations present and not yet born the importance of proper writing. We see this with his use of words such as “Let,” “full-blown,” “morning,” “ancients,” “own,” “stand,” “life,” “late,” “yet,” “bud” and “endeavor.” Lu Chi uses the metaphors of a garden and its plants to illustrate this with “full-grown garden” who are a group of mature writers in all their “glory,” who give clarity on how to write with the word “morning” and are beacons with the word “stand,” for present and future writers that will come after they are gone and he demonstrates this with the use of “late blossoms” and “yet to bud.” The words “full,” “late” and “yet” is the juxtapose of past, present and future. Lu Chi use of garden also exemplifies how proper writing are order, beauty and neat, because he doesn’t use words like jungle or forest, which grow wild. Also “Ancient” means that history will prove which writers will stand the test of time to teach others in the future.

  17. Aug 2016
    1. Page 8

      Jockers talking about the old approach in the 1990s to anecdotal evidence:

      … in the 1990s, gathering literary evidence meant reading books, noting "things" (a phallic symbol here, a bibliographical reference there, a stylistic flourish, an allusion, and so on) and then interpreting: making sense and arguments out of those observations. Today, in the age of digital libraries and large-scale book-digitization projects, the nature of the "evidence" available to us has changed, radically. Which is not to say that we should no longer read books looking for, or noting, random "things," but rather to emphasize that massive digital corpora offer is unprecedented access to literally record an invite, even demand, a new type of evidence gathering and meaning making. The literary scholar of the 21st-century can no longer be content with anecdotal evidence, with random "things" gathered from a few, even "representative," text. We must strive to understand the things we find interesting in the context of everything else, including a massive possibly "uninteresting" text.

    2. Pages 7 and 8

      Jockers is talking here about Ian Watt’s method in Rise of the Novel

      What are we to do with the other three to five thousand works of fiction published in the eighteenth century? What of the works that Watt did not observe and account for with his methodology, and how are we to now account for works not penned by Defoe, by Richardson, or by Fielding? Might other novelists tell a different story? Can we, in good conscience, even believe that Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding are representative writers? Watt’s sampling was not random; it was quite the opposite. But perhaps we only need to believe that these three (male) authors are representative of the trend towards "realism" that flourished in the nineteenth century. Accepting this premise makes Watts magnificent synthesis into no more than a self-fulfilling project, a project in which the books are stacked in advance. No matter what we think of the sample, we must question whether in fact realism really did flourish. Even before that, we really ought to define what it means "to flourish" in the first place. Flourishing certainly seems to be the sort of thing that could, and ought, to be measured. Watt had no yardstick against which to make such a measurement. He had only a few hundred texts that he had read. Today things are different. The larger literary record can no longer be ignored: it is here, and much of it is now accessible.

  18. Jul 2016
    1. But the passage from de man does disservice to the discussion of close reading in one important respect. It makes it sound as though all you need is a negative disci-pline, a refusal to leap to the kind of paraphrases one has been led to expect, so that effective close reading requires no technique or training, only an avoidance of bad or dubious training. The suggestion seems to be that if one strips away these bad habits and simply encounters the text, without preconceptions, close reading will occur. If, as de man puts it, you are “attentive” and “honest,” close reading “cannot fail to respond to structures of language” that most literary education strives “to keep hidden.” atten-tion is important but not, alas, enough. Readers can always fail to respond—though then de man might not want to dignify the practice with the name of reading.

      Discussion of the methodological difficulties involved in close reading: i.e. there is no such thing as "just reading."

    2. Culler, Jonathan. 2010. “The Closeness of Close Reading.” ADE Bulletin, 20–25. doi:10.1632/ade.149.20.

    3. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contempo-rary Poetry, Peter middleton calls close reading “our contemporary term for a hetero-geneous and largely unorganized set of practices and assumptions”

      Discussion of the methodology of close reading: middleton, Peter. Distant Reading: Performance, Readership, and Consumption in Contemporary Poetry. Tuscaloosa: U of alabama P, 2005. Print.

    1. Page 16

      One benefit of traditional hermeneutical practices such as close reading is that the trained reader need not install anything, run any software, wrestle with settings, or wait for results. The experienced reader can just enjoy iteratively reading, thinking, and rereading. Similarly the reader of another person's interpretation, if the book being interpreted is at hand, can just pick it up, follow the references, and recapitulate the reading. To be as effective as close reading, analytical methods have to be significantly easier to apply and understand. They have to be like reading, or, better yet, a part of reading. Those invested in the use of digital analytics need to think differently about what is shown and what is hidden: the rhetorical presentation of analytics matters. Further, literary readers of interpretive works want to learn about the interpretation. Much of the literature in journals devoted to humanities computing suffers from being mostly about the computing; it is hard to find scholarship that is addressed to literary scholars and is based in computing practices.

  19. Jan 2016
    1. We can deflect the penalties of those who have done ill and throw them on those who have done better. We can take the rewards from those who have done better and give them to those who have done worse

      At first glance, Sumner seem to be saying: Let's punish those who are successful and reward those who are not. I think what Sumner really means by "penalties" is the consequences that come with not being successful (e.g. poor living conditions). Similarly, when he discusses giving the "rewards" to the less successful, he means that we should share the benefits of success (e.g. money) with those who may not have had the opportunities to succeed like their counterparts so that they may live better, healthier lives. For example, Carnegie had libraries built for the public so that they could access books for knowledge and entertainment, whereas they may never have had access to readily available, free books before.

    1. unlawfully assembling themselves together

      in other words, if you are black or mixed-race you have to have permission to gather in a group. Did they have permission to gather in churches? Might this be one way they "legally" gathered and help explain the prominence of black churches in the Civil Rights Movement many years later?

  20. Dec 2015
    1. “distant reading”: understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.

      Nothing against this, but it's not the game I'm in.

      Question is, though, can the same tool be used to do both distant reading and close reading?

  21. May 2015
    1. The focus on "decoding" should send shivers down the spine of every English teacher who has ever had a student demand they just tell them what the poem means.

      I think Billy Collins captures this tortuous pedagogy well in "Intro to Poetry":

      But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope<br> and torture a confession out of it.

      They begin beating it with a hose<br> to find out what it really means.

    1. I first discovered the power of collaborative annotation

      Collins actually imagines a moment of shared marginalia in his poem. In a copy of A Catcher in the Rye that he borrows from a library as a boy, he finds the following: “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.” The young Collins imagines the note to be written by a beautiful girl and feels himself in a sense falling in love with that other reader. Though we need not develop a dating service out of the modern technologies that allow for social reading, we can at least see the humanity that can be shared in the margin of a digital page: the teachable moments, the conversations that might occur. We have glimpsed such moments on other social media like Twitter and Facebook, but I argue they lack the depth of annotation, which brings together text, comment, and now, readers.

    2. it slows the reader down,

      It's interesting to think about this idea of "slow reading" in relation to collaborative online annotation. So many traditional humanists complain of the cursory of the digital--hashtags on Twitter replacing sentences, Wikipedia summaries are replacing "actual" research. But web annotation requires readers to pause and consider in the very ways we have always taught our students to do in English classes.

    1. undetermined momentousness

      Such an ambivalent phrase. The narrator seems to be claiming that this is a "moment" unparalleled in its significance. Yet this significance is "undetermined"; it remains unclear exactly how the moment is significant.

    1. words and phrases

      Digital annotation powerfully visualizes this process, as the application allows the user to isolate a particular word or phrase, and then create a comment specifically on that piece of textual evidence.

    2. Read closely

      Image Description

      Close reading is a major emphasis of the Common Core Standards, though most English teachers since New Critic I.A. Richards would probably agree that is it essential to any humanities curriculum. As the "Introduction" to the ELA section states:

      Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying great works of literature.

      Digital annotation, though, is close reading 2.0. The major activity of a service like hypothes.is is "annotation," the highlighting and noting of words, phrases, and sentences, which demands that students keep their thinking and writing "close" to the text and its evidence.

      Moreover, because digital annotation has the potential to be collaborative. It links this mandate for close reading with later calls in the Standards for collaboration. I like to think of hypothes.is as a "A Social Network for Close Reading." Could we make students obsess with annotations on the web like they obsess with Facebook and Twitter posts?...

  22. Mar 2015
    1. SCENE I. Elsinore. A platform before the castle. FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO BERNARDO Who's there? FRANCISCO Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.

      Image Description

      This has to be one of the most intense opening scenes in all of literature. We are immediately thrown into a moment of panic as each guard responds wearily to the other's approach. In general these opening lines set the tone of the play to be one of apprehension.

  23. Nov 2014