Assignment: Literary Analysis of Frankenstein or Hamlet Using Digital Corpora and/or Tools
For instance, if your library has subscriptions to specialized databases, you might place a work in the historical contexts in which it was produced, using texts contemporary with Hamlet that you find in Early English Books Online or with Frankenstein in 19th Century Masterfile, respectively, to craft an argument about the way the text reflects and refracts the concerns of its cultural moment. If you need to rely on freely available library sources, use the ones you find via the Text Creation Partnership; you might also search archives––try Internet Archive archive.org), Digital Public Library of America HathiTrust.org––that would help contextualize these works with other works composed around the same time.
Depending on your interests, you might use mapping/Geo-spatial apps; network visualization applications; general applications that enable textual analysis and comparisons between editions or versions such as Juxta or applications specific to Hamlet or Frankenstein, The Quartos Project or the notebooks in the Shelley-Godwin archive; linguistic counters like concordances (such as this one or this one); and other tools to analyze the language or locations or social networks in a text, using digital tools to do the kind of work we see in Franco Moretti’s analysis of character-networks in Hamlet.
For this assignment, you need not use a single tool or archive exclusively; you may consider using multiple tools and performing multiple readings within your paper. You might also examine more than one of the three works in the same paper and contemplate why some tools work best with one text over another. Think both critically and creatively about how to read and the benefits afforded by the resources you have available to you––but also show how carefully you’ve read without the aid of these tools.While you may find information published on the web useful as well, you should be careful citing that material and must think critically about its credibility for use in an academic paper. For help evaluating the quality of that material, meet with your professor. Remember that any source, corpus, or tool you use must be documented and acknowledged properly in in-text citations as well as a works cited page.
Alternate Creative Option
Those who are interested in the potential for digital tools to create literature as well as analyze it can explore another option: you may create a new literary work that draws on one of the three major texts for the class using these tools. If you choose this option, in addition to creating your work, you must write a critical analysis of your text to go along with your creation; this analysis should explain what you aimed to do in creating it and describe how, specifically, your creation draws on (and shows your mastery of) the material you’ve read and learned over the course of your class.
Additional Requirements
Regardless of what you decide to use for this paper, your final paper must include a methods section that describes both how you intend to use tools or archives to read as well as the benefits of doing so. That is, what does your approach—your deployment of tools or archives––illuminate about the text that close reading does not yield on its own? Additionally, you must “show your work,” so to speak by taking screen shots of your data and visualizations, or by providing links to your data that demonstrate for your readers how you produced your findings.
You should be prepared to present your findings to your class and will submit the assignment according to instructions and deadlines suggested by your professor.