Assignment Using Twitter: Personify Historical Figures or Characters

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Integrating technology in the classroom in innovative ways (beyond using PowerPoint slides, and Blackboard, for example), can certainly be challenging. Twitter is a fairly ubiquitous and still quite cool social media tool that may be one of the more difficult to use as a means for learning.

There are, however, a number of prominent Twitter accounts that are jokingly “authored” by historical figures of literature (@ShakespeareSays, 13.3k followers), philosophy (@ArtSchopenhauer, 5,400 followers), science (@cdarwin, 19.9k followers), etc. Although most of these are quote-of-the-day accounts (some are more aptly-named, such as @DailyPlato), others are accounts tweeting either in-character, or joking with the material surrounding the figure (as in another Shakespeare account, @Shakespeare).

@ShakespeareSays

It is this in-character tweeting that would be most interesting as a Twitter assignment. Imagine a group-based assignment for literature, using Eugene O'Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night: provide a prompt of a scenario and have each student in the group  tweet as one of the characters in the family. Or, in a computer science class, open a Twitter account for Ada Lovelace with access given to students who will tweet out things she may have tweeted about, including math, lines of code, even about interesting scientific discoveries of her day (she may be interacting with @CharlesBabbage quite a lot). Philosophy classes may take up Kant’s philosophical thoughts and apply them to contemporary issues, like Buzzfeed or drones.

If you will have students personifying Shakespeare or another poet, it would be great to have them tweet in his or her preferred meter and rhyme scheme. Maybe by contemporizing Shakespeare through tweeting, the man and his work will become more relatable to your students.

Machine Learning and the Humanities

Red Vineyards, Vincent van Gogh (source)

This past summer, I gave a paper at the Grief. Language. Art. Conference as part of the Embodiments Research Group of the University of Liverpool, where I discussed natural language processing and some machine learning algorithms to accomplish sentiment analysis. I utilized Stanford’s Java-based NLP tools to demonstrate where we are in terms of sentiment analysis and what we may be able to achieve soon.

My paper, “Parsing Grief through Sentiment Analysis,” was concerned with how sentiment analysis is largely built on social media marketing tools, and does not move much beyond positive / negative polarity at the moment (can a computer parse grief?), though the poetry I was demonstrating, care of Sir Thomas Wyatt, did manage to be assessed as “Very Negative” at times, to the delight of my fellow conference delegates.

Screen shot of NLP on the command line.

A recent paper, concerning both computer science and art history, shows that there is a lot of potential for machine learning to assess art pieces. Babak Saleh, Kanako Abe, Ravneet Singh Arora, and Ahmed Elgammal, the authors of “Toward Automated Discovery of Artistic Influence,” worked in computer vision and pattern recognition to determine whether computers can measure influence between works of art. The results, summed up here a bit hyperbolically, are pretty interesting as the algorithm seems quite capable of recognizing pattern and influence to an extent.

Among the links it made were between Frederic Bazille’s Studio 9 Rue de la Condamine (1870) and Norman Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barber Shop (1950), which the authors claim has not been written about previously. There is certainly a compositional similarity with shared objects and architectural elements:

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I would love to know what Art Historians think about these claims and whether they agree with the assessments. Ideally, there would be more collaboration between computer scientists and humanities scholars to work on these tools that concern the latter’s research.

Certainly, this kind of work can be a gateway to new methodologies to be employed by humanities scholars, and I hope that my colleagues do not fear a singularity will occur, as machine learning is not true learning but only pattern recognition. I think at this stage it can be problematic to be sure, but computer algorithms can do a lot of work over large corpora that researchers will not be able to make a dent in during their lifetimes. It is in this way that we would be able to see the general sentiment of Shakespeare’s texts in comparison to his peers, or look at general influences within an entire century’s work of paintings.

Interfacing With Books: Libraries

New York Public Library’s Rose Reading Room (source)

This past summer, I was fortunate enough to be able to spend several weeks studying in the British Library toward one of my recent examinations, and I was very impressed with its digital integration.

The best part, for my purposes this summer, was the web catalogue that enables users to reserve research texts in advance, and has them ready for you behind the desk when you arrive. In comparison to other research libraries that require you to wait (sometimes for an hour or more), this was a great boon to my productivity since I could begin working with the texts I needed as soon as I got to the library.

The British Library also offers Digitized Manuscripts, as well as digital collections of news media, sounds, Renaissance Festival Books, among others. Even signing-up to use the collection was a quick Internet-based process, and staff members allowed me to use their computers to prove my academic status in order to offer me a library card that would be valid for longer.

The entrance gate to the British Library (source)

My local public research institution, the New York Public Library, also has a number of great digital initiatives, including Digital Projects and NYPL Labs that includes a fun digital humanities project that builds historical maps in Minecraft.

Many public libraries and research institutions offer cardholders access to online databases and other electronic resources that are available to use, often from outside of the library itself. Additionally, many offer ebooks that you can check out from home, which automatically disappear when the are due back.

Pew Research’s recent survery finds that millennials are avid readers and make use of the library, even agreeing that there is a lot of information found in a library that is not available online (maybe they are not only checking out Wikipedia after all). However, these younger readers are less likely to miss a library if it leaves their community, suggesting that they may not be making as frequent use of the library as a quiet place to study and as a community center.

If you or your students are not familiar with it already, WorldCat is a great online library resource that searches for material through university and research libraries, and allows you to make book lists, write or read reviews, and assists you with citations. I wish it would integrate with libraries on a more local level, but maybe this tool will become more robust over time.

My medieval Latin professor took us to the library to do a scavenger hunt during one of our classes, and that is a fun and valuable moment for teaching your students about what is truly available for them in their home institution’s library. Many university libraries have many research tools available for students, including many online, that they are simply unaware of. This would not only benefit them in your class, but throughout their college career, and maybe make them reconsider the worth of their local libraries in the future.