What’s Behind Door Number 10101?

Choose one of the below. Or combine two of the below. Ask questions. Do some research. Try an experiment or build something. Then, reflect.

Twitter

1. Set up a Twitter account if you don’t have one already.
2. Do some reading about Twitter. Read (or reread) one or more of these:
   Bonnie Stewart, “Something is Rotten in the State of Twitter”
   Dorothy Kim, “The Rules of Twitter”
   Zeynep Tufekci, “Social Media is a Conversation Not a Press Release”
   Zeynep Tufekci, “Why Twitter Should Not Algorithmically Curate the Timeline”
   Jesse Stommel, “The Twitter Essay”
3. Do some further research on one or more of these topics: virality, trolling, hashtag activism, #gamergate, #notyourasiansidekick. Consider the resources here or here.
4. Finally, do one or more of the following: start a hashtag campaign, attempt to make a tweet go viral, write a twitter essay (or a Twitter thread), create a timeline of the history of hashtag activism (using a tool like Timeline JS or Tiki-Toki).

Coding

1. Start by working through several lessons on Codecademy. I particularly recommend UNIT 1 in “JavaScript” and the first few units in “HTML”.
2. Then, check out the resources and questions here, which will help you move from thinking abstractly about how computers and digital technology have altered the evolution of print literature to experimenting more directly with the relationship between writing code and writing literature.
3. Write a poem or microfiction in code using JavaScript and/or HTML. Your code should be both human readable and machine readable. It doesn’t have to accomplish much when compiled (i.e. read by a computer), but it must accomplish something. But consider the text of the code itself the “poem.” Click around this site for some examples. Or here are some more.
4. For reference, here is a page with sample JavaScript, showing some code and what results from that code. Here is a page with sample HTML, showing some code and what results from that code.
5. Test your code. If you’re coding in JavaScript, you can test your code here. If you’re coding in HTML, you can test your code here.
6. Post your code to Medium. And some reflection on the process. If you’re working with a group, consider making a digital or physical “chapbook.”

Textual Analysis

A visualization of the most common words from every poem by Emily Dickinson

1. Choose a written literary text you’d like to analyze, something you can find online. This can be one of your favorite works of fiction or poetry, something you’ve written, something you’re studying for another class, etc. If you’d like to work with poetry, make sure you have enough data — the more words you have for this activity, the better your results will be. So, don’t just use a single short work. Instead, try using the text from every poem written by a particular author. Or the text from an entire article we read this semester. Or all the text of an entire novel.
2. Cut and paste your raw textual data into Wordclouds.com. Play around with the various formatting options until your word cloud looks just how you want it to. Make careful choices so that both the words in the text and your engagement with the text is highlighted by the finished product.
3. Now reflect. Look carefully at what you’ve created. What do you see? What does the word cloud you’ve created suggest about the original text? What does it tell you about the words, the themes, the character of the language, etc? What personality does the typeface you chose bring to the text? What questions does your word cloud raise for you as a reader?
4. Save or take a screen shot of your word cloud. Then, publish your word cloud and analysis to Medium.
5. Think further about textual analysis. A good next step would be to read Geoffrey Rockwell’s “What is Textual Analysis”. Another piece to read would be Stephen Ramsay’s “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or What You Do with a Million Books.” Or, “In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture” by Patricia Cohen.
6. Tinker with some more tools: Google Ngram Viewer, Textal, or Voyant.

Something Else, Almost Anything Else

Use the above as a template to create your own topic to explore. Some ideas: kinetic typography, mobile app design, Twitter bots, robotics, algorithms, design a font, etc. Research the history, find some reading to do, experiment, reflect, build something.

Looking Forward

Feel free to use one of the above (or one of the other assignments you’ve worked on so far this term) as the beginning for your final project. The instructions for the final project for this class are pointedly vague. In short, do something on the web about the web. You can work on your own or collaborate, but make something that will amaze us. [grin] So start drafting, sketching, wondering, prototyping, etc.