What kind of death is most present in teen novels?
wow . . very interesting! In fact, when did death become an important formal/genre element in teen lit? I wonder, as a device, how it develops, and how it's connected (or not) to historical/social developments?
This statement resonated with me throughout the rest of the essay, as I tried to consider different platforms I use today that I’d like to label as ‘communities’.
yes . . I agree . . so much of social media today is wrapped in the rhetoric of "community," yet Shirky shows that in many ways all of this new stuff hasn't moved very far from the old "audience" focused media . . .
whether or not the author felt it was necessary to consistently utilize like as means to illustrate specific feelings or images through the use of these similes
very interesting . . . where does a text (Iron Throat, for instance) get more figurative (e.g. more likes and as's) and where does it eschew or resist similes and metaphors? . . . this could be a powerful tool for reading the form of the text . . .
Morreti brought up interesting ideas of how these maps provide another perspective of textual analysis, free of boundaries, where a map might tell a story that we may not encounter in an in-depth reading.
yes . . in a way Moretti tells an alternative story by connecting different texts, by tracing one history (of texts) and mapping this onto another history (social) . . .
Narrowing it down, we could take surveys of comedic sitcoms and what age groups lean more towards which show, and which show gets viewed more.
true . . but how about this as alternative, Morettian approach: we focus on a device within contemporary sitcoms and then trace its rise from a series of other possibilities? Perhaps, the "family" sitcom . . .from Honeymooners to All in the Family to Full House etc.? Or some device within that subgenre? The "t.v. dad"?
The questions produced are ‘How do people judge and decide what is worthy of an award?’ or ‘How do people judge a show and decide if it’s worthy of being shown for multiple seasons on television?’
e.g. what "survives" and what goes "extinct" . . to use Moretti's Darwinian metaphors?
Additionally there are more social media platforms now that allows for users to comment on forums or posts whether they are offensive, inoffensive, relating to or not to the subject
yes . . . I wonder how many of these new platforms (say Instagram or SnapChat) are one-to-many versus many-to-many, to borrow Shirky's distinction. Has the many-to-many model reached its social limit, as opposed to technological limit?
Using a graph, one look at the number of films shot on traditional film and those shot on digital in the last ten or twenty years.
This is really interesting . . I wonder if there's another dimension (besides use) to consider as well - - to frame the topic. E.g. genres in which digital predominates? box office success and digital vs. film? These and others might be ways of thinking about the significance of your proposed media history.
the development of science fiction
I like this topic, though it's broad. A couple of ways, perhaps, to narrow it: thinking about sci-fi in terms of subgenres and their role in the history of sci-fi (do some die out while other survive?); how about a device, a la Moretti - - for instance, "the alien," or "the space traveler"? etc.
social media
how do the popular forms of social media in today's elections correspond to Shirky's "one-to-many" and "many-to-many" distinctions?
Questions I would have would be: how often does religion and suicide conflict in British literature?
well . . . the comic is good too . . but suicide seems to offer an easier purchase . . . I think you'd have to focus on defining suicide as a "device" . . and that itself would be interesting.
2) Was it socially accepted or did it lead to “extinction”? 3) Was there a period where death and comedy had gained popularity?
This is very interesting! "Sucide" as the device. What would your corpus be - - especially in terms of genre (novel? comic novel?) and period? Particularly interesting to correlate this device with social/historical patterns.
when it comes to the career of Sir Walter Scott. I would follow the same structure that Moretti had used with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s evolution
OK. Is there a particular device you would use to focus your analysis, e.g. like "clues" in Doyle?
Interact might be an understatement as it’s not only an interaction but a whole other world of involvement amongst other human beings that we’ll never see in person.
good . . . it seems that Shirky stresses the "political" or the human over software . . .e.g. software designers et al need to know more about human sociality than coding . . .
Yet I cannot help but wonder why and how an abundance of seriously bad stuff(in my opinion) has massive television, internet, and mainstream radio appeal?
I'm not sure if Moretti can help you answer the taste issues here . . .but distant reading could help to chart where, when, and how devices migrated from one genre to another, or how a prior genre goes "extinct" even as it's "competitor(s)" survive.
Instinctively I am drawn to the rhythmic aspect of music. Perhaps the rhythm, or increasing up tempo rhythms, is a device that yields most popularity?
Very interesting. Is there some particular rhythm or time signature that you could trace? I'm not a classical music person. For me, it might be easier to to make things more confined - - e.g. the diffusion of blues tempos into pop music.
Philip Levine
American poet, deceased. 
created in Scalar
I'm really interested in Scalar for student-authoring . . be great to follow your use of it +hypothes.is . . sending the blog post to my colleague as well . . .a possible scholarly apparatus for him to use . . .
The Waste Land
T. S. Eliot 
IL MIGLIOR FABBRO
Italian
Love Is Not All
Love
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
A quick bio of Gilman.
They Feed They Lion
If one reads the poem as an apocalypse or as a wasteland, this famous poem by W.B. Yeats maybe be a helpful context: "The Second Coming"
wet slate bread
what is "wet slate bread"? . . . black bread, which is usually associated with cheap, coarse bread .. . or perhaps the wet slate is "bread" for the lion's meal?