For this assignment, I decided to focus on the study of several translations. The subtitle of my blog post is actually a reference to a subtitle to one of the translations. Can we understand the translation or more broadly a text if we don’t read the original — that is, can we understand a text if we use distant reading, not close reading?

Voyant Tools helped me understand if it’s possible to see if (and how) a target language—i.e., a language into which work is translated—changes through the centuries. How does the language actually change? And what kind of influence does it make on the translated text? Do the vocabulary of those translated texts differ and if yes, then how? What are the actual differences? Is it even possible to ask these questions without closely reading the texts or this distant reading is the way to start thinking about these problems?

To investigate a set of these research questions, I concentrated on English-language translations of Homer’s Odyssey. This should be a good example to try to answer those questions because we have many translations of this classical work into English and, as we know from readings, the richer our dataset is, the more interesting our outcomes might be.

Thanks to Gutenberg Project, I was able to locate as many as seven translations of Odyssey—and these constitute the core of my project. There are many more translations of this work—a Wikipedia page about Odyssey, for example, lists published translations of the work and its number is around one hundred. Thus, it could be material for a large research project.

First, I located the five translations through Gutenberg Project—copied and pasted the texts into different Word files. I did this because the files on the website contain some information produced by Gutenberg Project, translators’ notes on translations, notes to their translations, notes to the text, various additional materials—i.e., those parts which are not in the original literary work. And I wanted to focus entirely on the literary text, those had to be excluded. This way the additional materials won’t interfere and make any influence on my research.

After I uploaded five translations, here are some of my findings. Thanks to Cirrus, it was possible to see a word cloud that visualizes the top frequency of a corpus—in this particular, case of all five translations combined. The top 55 word frequencies are depicted in this word cloud.

I wanted to explore and get more information about words in the whole dataset. A function called summary came up with the total number of words in all files (611,788) and the number of unique word forms (28,282). In addition to that, one of the features of the summary is that it could provide distinctive words in all five words. This demonstrates the changes in five translations and underlines to need to study the question of why these texts show so many different distinctive words. The summary provides some interesting information about the whole corpus which consists of five translations of the same text. We can study the longest texts (number included), and the shortest texts. It’s also possible to observe vocabulary densities and distribution of density across the whole corpus. Finally, over interesting information: average words per sentence, frequent words, and distinctive words.

The next question I delved into was how particular words trended and how these could be depicted through a line graph. We already have the five top words in the whole dataset and could be the ways these five words appeared and were used in the respective translations. Curiously, the use of the word “spake” in the translations increased tremendously when you compare the translation produced in 1614-16 and 1726 with those in 1879. Also, quite unsure of what happened with the use of the word “Ulysses” in one of the translations in 1879. Interestingly, both “son” and “shall” were used more or less on the same level.

The most widely used word in all these translations is “Ulysses,” and therefore I became interested in how it is used within certain terms. Microsearch visualizes the frequency and distribution of the word in all five texts—you can view the “map” of this word in all five texts and think about if its frequency changes. If it does change, then what might be the reasons for that?

Conclusions. Without knowing a source language, it’s always tricky to work with translated works. However, if one intends to compare just the translated texts, these results might be of certain interest and might help to pose further research questions which one can solve with the help of traditional close reading. Distant reading can certainly diversify the study of literature.  

Very often one sees the words “games” or “gaming” in phrases along with the words “learning” and “education.” Gaming is no longer a synonym to entertainment (or least, no longer one of the synonyms) but an area that has become a significant tool in (digital) pedagogy. Teachers, scholars, and practitioners of gaming who use it as a scholarly instrument typically are affiliated with English departments, Media studies, Communication studies, or Journalism. (Apparently, one can also get a Ph.D. in gaming now, too.) It’s fascinating to observe how and which games might be used in the classroom, library, or school programs–useful books are written on this topic including, for instance, the recently published volume Learning, Education and Games (2019), edited by Karen Schrier. It’s already the third book in the series and is available in open access here.

With that in mind, I registered for the workshop “Intro to Educational Game Design” facilitated by Zachary Loyd and offered by GC Digital Initiatives at CUNY. The workshop was based on several main goals. First, it was decided to discuss how games can lead to new learning outcomes; (2) explore some of the foundational concepts of game design for educational purposes and its implementation; and (3) provide an overview of the game design landscape–meaning, tools and software used for this.

One of the first questions discussed gaming is its relation vis-a-vis education and entertainment. Apparently, even when one plays for entertainment, one is still learning to do things–i.e., learning how to play and also develops a sense that allows one to retry, keep making efforts, and not to give up immediately (almost like a famous Samuel Beckett motto: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better”). Another important component is that one is also learning to navigate and use skills in one system (for instance, video games) that can have a beneficial effect on one’s learning in other areas, like history, literature, or science. 

When discussing the approaches to education game design, two significant areas were pointed out: gamification and game-based learning. The key conceptual differences between the two are the following. Gamification is about adding to a scenario that can be called a non-game; game-like elements are there to improve a lesson. Whereas game-based learning makes use of games to construct the course from the very beginning. In other words, with gamification, as summed up by Michael J. Cripps elsewhere, one establishes Experience Points (XPs), badges/levels, and leaderboards whereas game-based learning usually embeds learning with game-like structures. While teaching and choosing a particular direction, both approaches might be considered and could be fruitful; things to think about in advance include one’s interest in the students’ specific learning outcomes as well as how an assessment can be incorporated. Not to forget: accessibility — are all students able to find tools, access, and work with them? 

In 2013, James Gee published a piece “Good Video Games and Good Learning.” In it, the author pointed out sixteen principles of game-based learning: identity; interaction; production; risk taking; customization; agency; well-ordered problems; “just in time” or “on demand”; situated meanings; pleasantly frustrating; explore, think literally, rethink goals; smart tools and distributed knowledge; cross-functional teams; and performance before competence. 

While talking about tools and software, the following are suggested for interactive stories (both have pros and cons): 

— Ren’Py

— Twine

As for virtual spaces:

— Mozilla Hubs

— Second Life

Computer games: 

— GameMaker Studio

— Unity

— PyGame

It is believed that Franco Moretti, a philologist, and literary scholar, came up with the term “distant reading” sometime around 2000 when he published a piece in one of the academic journals. “Distant reading” is an antonym to “close reading.” If you need to provide a very brief definition of both phrases and underline their difference, it is probably safe to say that “close reading” means one deal directly with a book, they attentively (closely) read the book to figure out the meanings of a literary text, define its metaphors, unearth hidden linguistic riddles, decipher the key idea—anything while working on, or with, a text. “Distant reading,” on the other hand, can be defined as a process of working with a text without reading the text. You don’t need to read the actual text, all kinds of digital toolkits and software will do that for you.

After Moretti’s published his initial article, he kept developing his ideas, first and foremost, in Graphs, Maps, Trees and, after a few years later, in Distant Reading—these works have been regarded by some as path-breaking as well as widely used and discussed in the scholarly fields other than DH. In addition to Moretti, another significant volume on “distant reading,” titled Macroanalysis by Matthew Jockers. On the other hand, there are scholars who have a different take on the history and timeline of “distant reading” and question its inception just some two decades ago advocating that earlier models of “distant reading” were created in the past, but of course not called that way yet.

In his piece, Ted Underwood discusses the history and trajectory of the term “distant reading” and—while relying on some previously published scholarship—poses questions about when the studies of “distant reading” really began. The scholar also asks what parallel, related fields were—and mentions the concepts spearheaded by others: “textual interpretation (reading)”; “sociology of literature”; or “cultural analytics.” Underwood points out that Moretti’s works are important, “not because they invented the idea of macroscopic literary inquiry, but because they galvanized an existing project by infusing it with a new sense of possibility and a new polemical rationale.” Indeed, Moretti’s concepts and approaches to a history of British novel and its classification and division into subgenres, in one of the chapters in Graphs, Maps, Trees, seemed novel. The question some scholars keep asking is related to Moretti’s dataset—all details about datasets (most likely, the most important part of any DH project)—their origin, fullness, etc.—were not shared or revealed. In general, it seems that the question of researching, aggregating, composing, editing, and sharing datasets is yet another fundamental point as we discuss “distant reading”. What also seems especially appealing is that this whole concept of “distant reading” is being discussed from various standpoints, it’s interesting to observe that its pre-history may be dated before the year it was actually coined, it’s being discussed as well—which only means that the field keeps breathing and is far from being fully understood.

Project description:

For my project, I wanted to create a map depicting a story of a particular copy of the book that was published in the late 1840s in Imperial Russia. That copy is a unique one in the sense that it has stamps and inscriptions of previous owners and institutions this copy was part of. Thanks to these stamps and inscriptions, it was possible to recreate, in part, the way the copy travel through the times, the countries, and the people and institutions. It should be also pointed out that this story has blank spots–it’s unclear who owned the copy at a certain point, and this is something that still could be researched and analyzed.

Platform:

I decided to choose Palladio as a tool to illustrate the book’s itinerary. First of all, I jotted down all the places that were known to me–two cities in what now Russian Federation is (back then, it was Imperial Russia), one city in what is now Ukraine (back then, it was the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and two cities in the United States (both in New York state). The first city in Russia is the city the book was printed in; the other city in Russia is a place where one of the owners of the copy lived; the third city on the map is a city where a library received this copy as a donation; the fourth town in the US in a place where this book was; and the fifth, the city it ended up in. 

I found the exact geographical locations of these places and included latitude and longitude the way it was recommended. For that, I used an Excel spreadsheet. I followed the guidelines the tool has about datasets and it took me lots of time to finally come up with a dataset that the tool would accept and turn it into a map. Although I prepared the dataset initially in a way it was recommended in their guidelines, it did not work and that was really confusing.

Outcome:

The map I came up with could have been more clear: for example, it could have mentioned the approximate dates (when known) the copy “spent,” so to say, in a certain place. It could also show the trajectory of its itinerary: how did it move from what place and when. To make it even more interactive, it could have included the images of the institutions which had or have the copy in their possession. To better present this information, a different tool could have been used. 

A different avenue:

I would probably want to have a map or a set of maps that could clearly illustrate the itinerary of that copy, on the one hand. At the same time, on the other hand, I would want these visualizations to work in a way that could be treated as illustrations to a write-up or essay about this story. This means, the data set may need more data to be found, analyzed, and included, so it could be reproduced well enough on the visuals.

The realm of DH is appealing for a few reasons, and I would like to outline the following few below. Like any discipline that is going through the process of shaping and constant re-shaping, its frontiers are still fluid and therefore new features or, rather, values are being added and accepted. This is one of the strengths of the discipline: to be open and easily shift to explore novel fields and themes and possibilities—in other words, be inclusive. This philosophy, on the other hand, may lead to having troubles because enduring everything is not probably the most ideal take, and at one point you do need to say: “That’s not fitting in here.”

The field of DH, it seems to me, might benefit when keeps being open but, at the same time, consider establishing some visible boundaries. In this respect, I agree with Matt Kirschenbaum who argues that “the digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed, a scholarship and pedagogy that are bound up with infrastructure in ways that are deeper and more explicit than we are generally unaccustomed […].” Interestingly, this was written all the way in 2010 but his points still remain cohesive and valid.

Another feature that is of special note is that DH can quickly react to ongoing debates, unrepresented fields and effectively create responses – i.e., open new platforms – in terms of scholarship and pedagogy. Unsurprising that many ground-breaking projects emerged in recent times and were well-received, these projects were implemented, in part, thanks to DH.

While looking at the digital projects assigned for our next class, all of them feature something special and unique. Torn Apart/Separados is probably the most sophisticated from a technological standpoint, a project that requires lots of attention in terms of tools, but also the research conducted to present this project requires a special note. Early Caribbean Digital Archive is an example of decolonization studies; it effectively combines the work from the past and serves as a library and exhibit but also presents these materials in a way that could be easily used both by scholars in the area but also students. The same concerns Colored Convention Project – and both are open to submissions – meaning, anyone who has any ideas or knowledge in those areas could contribute and share their findings with others. Finally, Digital Humanities in Review is as important as anything else on this list: someone must keep an eye on all novel projects and developments in the field and offer a springboard for constructive feedback and to be able to have a dialogue.