Second Assignment

Choose one of the options below and write an essay in response. Your essay should be at least three and a half pages in length and should not exceed six pages. Use double-space lineation, a 12-point serif font, and one-inch margins on all sides. Your writing is expected to be error-free and up to university standards.

For the first option only, your essay is expected to have a thesis: a main point that the whole essay attempts to support or prove. The essay component for the other two options can be more of a research report. The second two options require, in addition to the paper submission of the report, digital submission of one or more files. These can be emailed to the instructor or delivered in person.

A large portion of the grade will be an assessment of the written component of this assignment. The hands-on approach to text analysis here is important and should be done well, but I will be mainly looking for intelligent reflections on what you have done with the more technical aspects of the assignment and the problems with them and opportunities for further work.

The assignment is due on December 5th, but may be handed in up to and including January 11th without penalty. Consult the course outline for further information about late assignments.

Note that one class meeting, on November 28th, has been set aside as an in-class workshop to help you with the work for this assignment. Do come to class on that date if you would like one-on-one help with using any of the web sites listed here or help with XML (or XSL) or with anything else related to this assignment. You are welcome to come to class that day even if you have not begun the assignment: it might be a good opportunity to begin the assignment.

Option 1

Choose one of the following files: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Apologia pro vita sua, Emma, and Tom Sawyer. (Note that Emma is marked up in XML, while the others are plain text files.) Using the document you choose, explore some basic text analysis possibilities and results. You will probably want to focus on one or more of: word count data, word collocation data, and word distribution data. You may want to include tables and/or images (of word distributions) in your essay. What information about the text can you retrieve? What are the benefits and limitations of digital text analysis on this document using your approach? Can you arrive at any conclusions regarding the text using your approach? You are free to use a variety of tools, but I recommend using one or more of: TAPoR Tools, HyperPo, and Voyant.

Option 2

Prepare a XML edition of the poem “Youth in Exile” as published here:
      H., H. E. B. “Youth in Exile.” The Cornhill Magazine 6 (October 1862): 535-36.
This can be found on Google Books:
      books.google.com/books?id=QTcFAAAAQAAJ
Your edition can attempt to reproduce the appearance of the poem in the magazine as accurate as possible, though this is not necessary: you can produce a new (digital) edition of the poem. Your edition can use any set of XML tags you wish to use (including TEI). You should at the very least tag the various parts/divisions of the poem, down to and including the lines of the poem. You must include at least one more type of mark-up of the data in your XML file; some possibilities are: rhyme, metre, imagery, themes, metaphors, and important words. You are welcome to add more levels of tagging (but don’t get carried away). Your XML should be well-formed XML (and viewable in a web browser as XML); you will submit the XML document (as a digital file) to the instructor. Your essay will be a discussion of your choices (in tagging and any other decisions) and the advantages and limitations of transforming the poem into the edition you have produced.

Option 3

Prepare three or more XSL templates to transform the XML encoding of the first three scenes of Hamlet. You must use the XML document available on the course web site for this purpose (here). Your XSL templates should accomplish different objectives, such as displaying the document in different ways, highlighting different features, and retrieving different information from the document. You will submit the XSL files along with an essay, which should explain what you have done with the XSL templates, what they accomplish, and the advantages and limitations of treating an XML text with XSL. Note: knowledge of XSL is not a requirement for this course, and consequently this option requires more technical knowledge than most students will have.