A Total Beginner’s Guide to Twine
I’m teaching Twine right now in my Introduction to Digital Humanities class, so I’ve been working on some instructional guides and videos. I’ve begun to collect them on this page: A Total Beginner’s Guide to Twine.
Ugly 90s Webpages
The first assignment for my Intro to Digital Humanities class is a deliberately ugly webpage in the style of 90s personal “homepages.” The idea is to learn HTML and CSS without having to worry much about content, and without having to reign in the desire to use every CSS trick conceivable. I gave ..
Can Indie Music Save the World? A Conversation with Sean Bohrman of Burger Records
In November 2015, I invited Sean Bohrman — co-founder of Burger Records — to talk to my SDSU undergraduate class, “The Social Politics of Indie.” He very graciously accepted, I made a poster, and students came out in droves. It was the best-attended event I’ve been to at SDSU (granted, I’ve only b..
Modernism and the Technologically Distributed Mind
Below is the full text of a paper I delivered at the 2015 conference of the Modernist Studies Association in Boston. My aim was to bring modernist media theorists Wyndham Lewis and Marshall McLuhan into the conversation about distributed cognition (particularly as led by Andy Clark). My point is t..
Cover Design for Literature in the Digital Age: An Introduction
I’ve received the cover proofs for Literature in the Digital Age: An Introduction from Cambridge. I think this book is going to look as good as any academic book I’ve ever seen. Thanks to Craig and Superbrothers for providing the image (a screen grab from Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery EP, one ..
Twine Workshop @ SDSU, March 3rd
On March 3rd, I’ll be leading a workshop on writing electronic literature (aka videogames) on the Twine platform. Like a lot of people, I find Twine incredibly exciting, mostly because it makes digital storytelling accessible to people who have traditionally been excluded from it — i.e., people wi..
Web-Based Version of GutenTag Now Available
We’ve received quite a bit of feedback in the months since GutenTag’s initial launch. One of the most frequent comments has been, “This is great, but downloading a tool and 4+ GB corpus is a huge barrier to entry.” Lots of people weren’t able to get a sense of what GutenTag does, either because th..
Introducing GutenTag
Julian Brooke and I are very pleased to announce the beta release of GutenTag, our free, open-source, multi-platform, pun-friendly tool for computational analysis in the Project Gutenberg (PG) corpus.
GutenTag does two very exciting things for Digital Humanists. First, it makes it easy to build..
Lost Lyrics: The Raincoats, “Off-Duty Trip” and Delta 5, “Make Up”
I’ve had no trouble locating reliable lyrics transcriptions for any of the songs in my course, “The Social Politics of Indie” — until we got to the class on all-female bands, of course. Here are two transcriptions for songs that no one else on the internet has bothered with. As Simon Reynolds writ..
A Tale of Two Fishes: Thoughts on an Index
The final stages of a big project are satisfyingly boring. There is not much thinking left to do. Any opportunity for brilliance has expired. Your job now is to spot typos, double-check bibliographical details, scrutinize fonts, and look out for embarrassing factual errors. Occasionally, there is ..