Teaching French and the Digital Humanities at a Liberal Arts College
In Summer 2023 I attended the Electronic Literature Organization s conference in Coimbra, Portugal to present a bot that generates aphorisms on social media. The bot is also featured in the virtual gallery for IMPEC 2024. The code repo is here, and you can read all the generated aphorisms here. I initially used Twitter X but [ ]
Last month Taper #6 was published, featuring two code poems I wrote on the theme of a throw of the dice, in reference to Mallarmé s poem Un coup de dés. In a version that includes results from my experiments with anaglyphic text, I modified Des coups d Un coup de dés so that sequences of nouns [ ]
In the Oulipo s La littérature potentielle (Gallimard, 1973), François Le Lionnais brainstorms several ideas for new literary forms that would depend on computer technology. One of these forms is what he calls anaglyphic text: Literary texts are always planar (and even linear, generally speaking): that is, they can be represented on a sheet of paper. [ ]
Is it possible to make a sonnet based on a theme without having to attend simultaneously to form? Can one focus on inventio to generate a poem and leave much of the elocutio to algorithms? Below is a web prototype for generating sonnets in French, English or Spanish using verses from the Théâtre Classique s collection [ ]
In his 1966 essay “Rhétorique et enseignement,” Gérard Genette observes that literary studies did not always emphasize the reading of texts. Before the end of the nineteenth century, the study of literature revolved around the art of writing. Texts were not objects to interpret but models to imitate. The study of literature emphasized elocutio, or [ ]
In the Atlas de littérature potentielle (1981, rev. 1988) the Oulipo mentions a number of experiments with computers as tools for exploring algorithmic constraints on writing. One example is the complete text of a computer program written by Paul Braffort that generates aphorisms (311-315). Today such programs are textbook exercises for learning computer languages, but Braffort [ ]
For the DH2014 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland I prepared an interactive visualization of the small corpus of seventeenth-century French plays I had analyzed using Raymond Queneau s matrix analysis of language. The visualization shows that Queneau s matrix analysis can distinguish verse from prose fairly well by syntax alone, without any direct measurement of meter, rhyme or [ ]
Lately I have taken an interest in stylometry. After attending some very interesting panels on stylometry at DH2013, I wondered if I could further develop my experiments with Raymond Queneau s matrix analysis. I had already applied a method using Markov chains to reduce texts to a simplified representation of their syntactic structure according to the schema [ ]
This fall I will teach a First-Year Seminar on computer-assisted methods of text analysis. Students will experiment with various digital tools to discover patterns in texts and use the results to inform their interpretations. Students will first read the novel Candide by Voltaire in print or in eBook format. They will then write and use [ ]
In January 2014 I will offer a language immersion program in Tours, France. Students will use the French they learn as they step outside the classroom and interact with their host families, other international students, and local merchants in the royal city of Tours. Students will also travel to Paris and be able to explore [ ]