Department of English

• Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - 2:00pm to 3:30pm

Vitale II

6th Floor of Van Pelt

Chris Mustazza will present a WIP to the Digital Humanities Working Group.

We're excited to hear about Chris's Price Lab project; he's looking for feedback for a book chapter, and you're very welcome to join! Title and abstract below:

"This paper proposes a new listening methodology that lies, in some sense, between Charles Bernstein’s close listening and Tanya Clement’s distant listening. While it’s tempting to think of these approaches as presenting an integral of scope, Bernstein’s work proposes the use and tuning of the human ear for understanding the sonic materiality of the phonotext, while Clement’s work, following its namesake of Moretti’s distant reading, calls for a form of surrogate listening—using the machine in place of the ear. Building on Bernstein’s work and toward Clement’s, I suggest Machine-Aided Close Listening as a methodology that uses data visualization as a prosthetic extension of the ear. This is to say that by considering three dimensions of the phonotext—1) the textual manifestation of the poem, 2) the audio of the poet performing it, and 3) a visualization of that audio—the reader-listener can empirically confirm the ear’s impressions and expose new facets of the sonic materiality of the performed poem. In support of this methodology, I will demonstrate a new digital tool for aligning these three facets of the phonotext."