Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 17, No. 804.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
www.princeton.edu/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 07:19:15 +0100
From: lachance@chass.utoronto.ca (Francois Lachance)
Subject: Re: 17.744 MonoConc (Pro), with thoughts on teaching
Willard,
I want to pick up the thread of learning objectives and the
pedagogical use of tools for textual analysis. I think your comments on
MonoConc relate to a blog entry by Matt Kirschenbaum about the exercise
set by Douglas Hofstadter in the early pages of Godel, Escher, Bach.
See
http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/blog/archives/000339.html
Matt invites readers to consider why Hofstadter introduces his
discussion of the Mechanical, Intelligent, and Unmode with what can turn
out to be a frustrataing exercise. That invitation raises similar
questions about the value of learning by doing that your MonoConc example
embodies.
For some reason, the example put forward by Matt and your example have me
wondering if certain teachers complement the exploration of the
application with the exploration of the objects of study. Does anyone
teaching humanities computing set up exercises along the following lines?
Present a class with a given distribution and then invite students to
discover if the given distribution is replicated in an analysis of
different versions of a text. Repeat the exercise with one set of students
introducing a typo in one version (or altering it in some form); another
group of students is assigned the task of determining if the comparative
analysis picks up the change. Repeat with the student groups switching
tasks.
> Date: Sun, 28 Mar 2004 08:59:01 +0100
> From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
>
<snip/>
> MonoConc is very easy to learn -- as I said, 5 to 10 minutes is all that's
> required. The students I've had tend to come to humanities computing
> believing that it's about pushing buttons. So I've tried to rush them past
> the push-button interface to problems of interpretation. The more
> sophisticated-in-features this interface is, the harder that is to do, the
> more they take what they see as a harder problem of the kind they've mostly
> already mastered rather than a new sort of problem entirely.
>
<snip/>
-- Francois Lachance, Scholar-at-large http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~lachanceWondering if...
mnemonic is to analytic as mimetic is to synthetic
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