"Nothing can come of nothing"-Social Proof 3

Okay,

I warned you that I had a lot to write about but that I've been ill this week. So here's yet ANOTHER post for your enjoyment.

This time I have a few more bits of information to share with you.

The first?

Well it's a blog by some students in New York who are studying Shakespeare simply through studying the texts (or that's how it appears to me). The lovely Mikhaela is actually the one who found this awesome, yet confusing blog, so let me first give credit to her! Thanks Mikhaela!

Here's the link to the blog:

New Paltz Shakespeare

*TARA* this is the link that I promised you! I hope that you find it interesting.

I'm hoping to hear back from the professor, Cyrus Mulready, to get more information about his teaching method as well as maybe setting up a discussion with his class and ours if at all possible. I think that would be awesome! Don't you? Plus their blog is very interesting and I enjoy the insight that they bring to the texts themselves.

Second....

I talked to a professor about pursuing researching the digital humanities and connecting that to Shakespeare and grammar (hopefully!). You guys probably know him....his name is Gideon Burton.

Does this even count as social proof? Maybe it's cheating just a little bit...

Anyway, we discussed the importance of the digital humanities movement and how is has had a great impact on how people study and comprehend things, as well as how there is still a large debate going on between whether or not it is effective to the extent of traditional research. Professor Burton gave me the link to a website that I thought I'd share:

https://dhs.stanford.edu/algorithmic-literacy/infoviz-and-new-literacies/

I'm just starting to get through the information but one little quote stuck out to me that I thought I'd share with you:

" I hope that the digital humanities can act as an impetus to demand better and more varied forms of literacy from our general academic (and by extension, public) audiences. The communication of information should not start by assuming poor visual literacy, network literacy and spatial literacy but rather should foster and demand increased levels of each. "

"Nothing can come of nothing,"-Social Research 2

Alright! Another post for you...

I mentioned in my last post that I contacted Stanley Fish...yeah...

Well I've contacted a few other people along side of him.



One person that I've contacted is Dr. Jonathan Hope. I mentioned his blog earlier. It refers to researching the works of Shakespeare, specifically the grammar. He is also the one referenced in the Huffington Post comment.

Here's his website/blog again: http://winedarksea.org/

When I stumbled across his website, I went to Twitter to see if he was available on there for contact. SURPRISE! He was! Hooray!

So I started stalking him (creepy right?) And he actually responded! He asked to e-mail him and that he'd love to talk more with about his reasearch. He also mentioned Stanley Fish  in one of his posts, so I inquired about how he felt about the criticism that Fish has with the digital humanities.

I'm just waiting to hear back from him!

"Nothing can come of nothing"-Social Proof

I realize that I've been sort of MIA for the last few days. Please forgive that. I've been battling a nasty cold that's completely knocked me off my feet. However, I have been pursuing several avenues of research and I'll relate them to you in the next for posts.

First though, I think I should modify my research topic and enlighten you to the current path that I'm on at the moment. Instead of merely looking into the grammar of Shakespeare, I've started thinking about the whole 'digital humanities' aspect of literary study. I think that I'd like to study how people have been applying these digital studies to understanding the grammar of Shakespeare and whether or not it is more beneficial to pursue study in this manner or to go a more "traditional" route.

Interesting?

At least I think so.

After concluding this to be a topic of interest, I began to hunt, twitter-stalk, and blog-stalk several different people. And I've found a few people that I'm attempting to contact, who can hopefully give me more insight into their understanding of the digital humanities.

The first one I'd like to share is my attempt to contact an amazingly profound literary critic who currently is opposed to using the digital field.  He has a few articles in the "New York Times" that you can view: Article 1 Article 2.  These articles detail the reasoning behind using more traditional approaches to studying the humanities. They are very interesting to say the least!

So I decided I needed to contact him. *Gulp* This is the conversation I had with myself (not out loud mind you, but it's still just as amusing):

Optimistic Me: You can do this! It's not so bad. You're intelligent!

Cynical Me: Yeah right! You can't do this. This is crazy! He'll never respond!

Optimistic Me: You never know what could happen. He may be impressed with your questions.

Cynical Me: Oh come on! It's STANLEY FISH! He could writing a scathing reply to you or worse post something in the "New York Times" about the stupid girl who decided to send him an e-mail. How awkward would that be?

Optimistic Me: Well at least I'd be famous! I don't know I think I can do this.

Cynical Me: Can't!

Optimistic Me: CAN! I'm typing it right now! Ha!

*click click clickity click*

Optimistic Me: Done! I've sent it!

*Pause*

Me (out loud): Ah! I just wrote an e-mail to Stanley Fish! Stanley Freaking Fish! What was I thinking?!

Yeah, I may or may not be a little intimidated by Dr. Fish. He's a pretty powerful guy. And I may have just shown all you readers just how crazy I am.  However, I actually sent the e-mail despite all the inner bantering. So, I hope he writes back! How awesome would that be?!

"Words Words..."-Social Research Outreach

Alright! I've been working diligently (cough cough) on getting together sources and contacting people for my research paper. I've decided to look into the grammar aspect of Shakespeare an see how he has affected our linguistics and grammar today.

Interesting topic?

Anyway, I've found a blog and a newspaper article that actually discuss these facets of Shakespeare's works so I thought I'd share them with you!

The first thing I'd like to share is this awesome blog: Languages of the World which posted information on how words were "originally" pronounced during Shakespeare's time. The post talks about how modern American English is actually closer to what was spoken during Shakespeare's time. I'm not sure how reliable this source is, so I'm in the process of contacting the creator of the blog and getting more background information from her.

The other thing I have to share is an article by The Huffington Post. This was written just a few weeks ago and it discusses how the grammar of Shakespeare may have been more impactful than just his word creation. I'm also going to see if I can't contact Jonathan Hope, the researcher and professor mentioned in the article and see what his whole research is about. He has a website/blog, http://winedarksea.org/ , that goes into detail about some of his research, but I'd like to get more information from him about this as well and look into all the research they have done and are currently doing on the project.

I'm also reviewing scholarly articles and the references that were given to me early by my e-mail contact. I've got a lot to do!

Sound like a plan guys? I'm pretty excited!

"A rhapsody of words"-Renditions of Shakespeare

Like I said with "The Merchant of Venice," I love love love listening to people perform Shakespeare! And Hamlet is a dear favorite of mine. So I was excited to listen to the rendition we were required to hear.

What I'm in love with, in regards to audio performances, is how your really get a better sense of the characters and emotions that Shakespeare was trying to convey. It makes the play much more relatable and understandable (at least to me). I appreciate the inflections and the shifts in intonation that take place. I really become acquainted with the characters that way.

And this got me thinking about all the different performances of "Hamlet" and Shakespeare for that matter and how people might prepare to perform such pieces. What sort of study do they employ (if any) in preparing to become another person? Do they attempt to mimic other performances? I know that when we were performing this particular play in high school, we studied the Mel Gibson version, noting the movements and emotional tensions between characters. This aided our production.

But is it the same for all performers? And if so, why do we each interpret Shakespeare so differently?

For instance, I have three performances of the famous "To be or not to be" soliloquy by three exceptional actors. However, each performance is different in regards to inflection, intonation and emotion.

Mel Gibson Kenneth Branagh

David Tennant

But, is there one actor that stands out above the others? Is there a superior performance of "Hamlet?" Seeing that there are so many different interpretations for Shakespeare, what do you think denotes an exceptional performance? Or, are there strengths in every performance of Shakespeare?

Weigh in and let me know what you think!

"As good luck would have it,"-Research Update!

As promised I have an update for you! I've been researching, pretty heavily, grammar changes due to Shakespeare. Originally, I wanted to see if there was a corpus specifically tailored to Shakespeare. During this search I came across a few things. The first, are several articles that go into the grammar of Shakespeare. I'm still working my way through them and I'll post them when/if I find something of interest. The other thing I found was a website, "The Shakespeare Resource Center,"  http://www.bardweb.net/ which goes into details concerning Shakespeare's life and works. What piqued my interest, though, was the section detailing Shakespeare's grammar and speech. My initial reaction was 'JACKPOT!' I thought I had found my golden goose, so to say. But, it wasn't exactly what I was hoping to find in the way of a corpus. The information provided is exceptional and extremely informative and I find that it aids in my understanding of just how complex Shakspeare was. For instance, when detailing the SYNTAX  of the Shakespeare's language, it states that:

The most common simple sentence in modern English follows a familiar pattern: Subject (S), Verb (V), Object (O). To illustrate this, we'll devise a subject (John), a verb (caught), and an object (the ball). Thus, we have an easily understood sentence, "John caught the ball." This is as perfectly an understood sentence in modern English as it was in Shakespeare's day. However, Shakespeare was much more at liberty to switch these three basic components—and did, quite frequently. Shakespeare used a great deal of SOV inversion, which renders the sentence as "John the ball caught." This order is commonly found in Germanic languages (moreso in subordinate clauses), from which English derives much of its syntactical foundation.

This information got me thinking. I wondered if perhaps the creator of the website would have any information about a possible corpus referencing Shakespeare...or anything really that would help in my research. Soooo I took a gamble and decided to e-mail the creator of Bardwed, J.M. Pressley, and bombard him with my various questions. I was hoping, but not really expecting to hear back from him.

After a few days....

HE ANSWERED ME!

I know I was shocked and surprised to see a reply to my e-mail sitting in my inbox.  I may or may not have squealed and jumped around happily for a few moments, feeling smart and important.

Sadly, though, he didn't have any link or reference to a corpus for Shakespeare. However, he did have interesting suggestions. This is what the e-mail stated:


Hi, Kaleigh,

I think I get what you're looking for, and that may be a tall order for one
source. Trying to diachronically sum up over 400 years of linguistic changes
is a challenge in itself, and estimating usage frequency and impact could be
highly subjective on top of that.

There are a number of valuable resources, however, that may provide at least
parts of what you're looking for:

* The Unabridged Oxford English Dictionary
* World Shakespeare Bibliography (James L. Harner, editor)
* Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary (Alexander Schmidt, 1902)
* The Harvard Concordance to Shakespeare (Marvin Spevack, 1973)
* The Language of Shakespeare (G. L. Brooks, 1976)

Cool! While I didn't find a corpus, I did find possible links to researching the grammar of Shakespeare thanks to Pressley! This man has certainly done his homework and his suggestions seem like exceptional ones. Right now I'm looking at the "Shakespeare Lexicon" by Schmidt and things are getting pretty interesting.

I think I'm going to write him back to get more information on his research and understand his method for creating Bardweb just a little better.

Wish me luck!

"O horrible, O horrible, most horrible!"-Hamlet Quote

I think the title says it all! I've been horrible this week in blogging! I shall not waste your time by making excuses as to why I've been out of the loop. Just rest assured that I'm back writing my posts! And......I have several blog posts in the works that should be up soon! Until then, here's a small update on the reading. I LOVE HAMLET! There I said it. Ha! Hamlet is by far one of my favorite plays. Yes it may sound a little cliché but I truly love the complexity of the story, the wit, the characters, all of it fascinates me!

So, here's a few of my favorite quotes from the play:

Alas! poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.-Act V Scene I




The rest is silence.

-Act V Scene II