Annotated Bibliography Assignment
Bibliography by Valerie Liu
1. Wordle. 10 Feb. 2009 <http://www.wordle.net>.
A text-analysis tool that creates “word clouds” – groups, or clouds, of words from a provided text, with the most prominent words appearing larger than the less prominent words. Wordle breaks down the text to a jumble of small, infrequently appearing words, and large, frequently appearing words, and allows the user to change the font, colors, and layouts of the text to appeal to the aesthetics. The tool creates an interesting visual effect that cannot be easily seen by simply reading the text in its traditional, original paragraph or line form. With the frequent words enlarged, the user can see the emphasis and analyze the importance of the words, possibly realizing or reinforcing themes that were previously unnoticed. Entering the text of Kurt Vonnegut’s short story, “Harrison Bergeron,” my group noticed the interesting arrangement and prominence of the words, “just,” “think,” “like,” and “anybody.” Seeing as “Harrison Bergeron” is a satire of the consequences of the extremities of complete and total equality, it is interesting to find that a simple text-analysis tool can also conjure up the same ominous message to “just think like anybody” – ultimately, a brainwashing message to enforce a completely similar mindset to create and maintain equality. Using Wordle, we not only create an extra aesthetic image for the project’s goal of creating a documentary, but we also can use the similar emphasis in both short story and “word cloud” and see how the satire can be so decomposed and still convey a similar, if not the same, type of theme.
2. LIWC – Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count. 10 Feb. 2009 <http://liwc.net/index.php>.
A text-analysis tool that organizes and sorts words into categorizes like big words, self-references, social words, positive emotions, negative emotions, overall cognitive words, and articles of speech, and then compares the averages in each of the categories in the provided text to the averages of personal texts and the averages of formal texts. For example, in Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” LIWC was able to categorize and report that compared to personal texts and formal texts, Vonnegut’s satire has an overall higher average of social words and an overall lower average of cognitive words. Following the satire’s ridicule of the extremities of total equality, it makes sense that the social words used is higher and that cognitive words, which seem to mean “thinking” words, is considerably lower, since thought may signify a difference in equality, which cannot and is not present in the future world in “Harrison Bergeron.” Text-analysis tools like LIWC are able to break down the text and categorize and compare the words into categories to see the text in a different perspective. The tool gives insight to comparisons and contrasts to general word-type frequencies in other texts so the user can analyze that difference and use it to aid additional interpretation.
3. TAPoR. McMaster University. 11 Feb. 2009 <http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal>
An on-line text-analysis website with various tools that helps visualize text and interpret it in multiple ways. TAPoR can run searches through the provided text and extract, collocate, and visualize, etc. By uploading a text or using TAPoR's archive of provided texts, users can run different tools on the literary work and see what previously-unrealized or realized interpretations can come out of it. Our project uses TAPoR's Visual Collocator to find connections between words. The Visual Collocator builds connections and links words that have a certain "target word." Double-clicking any word will create new webs of its collocates and create interesting connections and graph designs between different words. The Visual Collocator displays the linked words and webs through a graph layout, and help provide a new perspective to the text. Our group uses TAPoR to discover insight and both simple and intricate connections between the various words and the collocates they appear with. When the "Harrison Bergeron" text was uploaded and entered into the Visual Collocator, we found that the word "law" was connected to words such as "required" and "equal," which was then linked to the word "weren't." The idea of the "required equal" falls in place with the extreme equality in "Harrison Bergeron," and while the tone and interpretation of the text together is obviously translated as a satire, it is interesting to find that a simple text analysis tool collocates the word "weren't" to the word "equal" -- finding the largely negative aspect of equality conveyed in the text.
4. Srivatsan, R. "Photography and Society: Icon Building in Action." Economic and Political Weekly 26.11 (Mar. 1991): 771-773. 11 Feb. 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/4397434>
An analytic article about various forms of photography, including film, in different fields, and its role in "incessantly communicating and making meaning" (771). The article discusses how the visual format has transformed people from listeners to viewers, and how the the medium of photography and film "has a way of penetrating any discourse and powerfully reconstituting its logic and practice" (771). It continues to discuss not how visual media is the truth, but rather its "claim to truth" and how it is able to habitualize the viewer to whatever it broadcasts by "repeated exposure in the name of truth, as guaranteed by the ethics" of television and photography. Movie cinema, it argues, is as powerful in sparking ideas of change or dulling other ones, because it is produced "by a fusion of the cinematography and a story line" (771). The importance of a story line in visual media can be applied to how ideas of equality and hammered and broadcasted to the members of society in "Harrison Bergeron," and also to the way we will try to both emulate and recreate the brainwashing processes of the story as well as create our own translation of the themes of dystopia and the absurdity of total equality. The idea of the "story line" -- which suggests a creation of something slightly fictional -- coupled with visual media's "claim to truth" and the viewers' assumption that the truth will be delivered, permits easy manipulation of the viewers' minds, as "Harrison Bergeron" portrays and as we try to recapture. Our project's focus on media outlets like video, photographic documentation, and a children's learning video, uses visual medias in the same ways as Vonnegut's satire wields despotic power and generates its own agenda and following.
5. Melin, William E. "Photography and the Recording Process in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Leonardo 19.1 (1986): 53-60. 11 Feb. 2009 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1578302>
An article discussing modern technology, including video, photography, and music, and its role in facilitating change in "virtually every aspect of modern life -- social, political, economic, and cultural" (53). The article quotes Charles Rosen in stating that "technology influences... by transforming society itself" (53), and how the different media outlets respond to one another and evolve in accordance with one another. It gives examples like the recording process' role in the transformation of music, and photography's role in aiding, rather than ailing, painters in creating even more realistic artwork, though the general fear was that paintings would be quickly phased out and neglected as photography rose to popularity. As our project will incorporate techologies such as video, photography, websites, and blogs into the translation and interpretation of "Harrison Bergeron," this article shows how our decision to use multiple media outlets that respond, complement, and reinforce one another is based on the underlying idea that the different technological forms have a history of not overriding each other, but rather how they work in compliance with one another to achieve agendas and constitute change.
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