aw. Re: Where did ...

[Paul Mackin]

On 9/29/2011 2:06 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
> The dots on the page or what rhetorical analysis calls artful diction
> or tropes are arranged in paterns or what rhetorical analysis calls
> artful syntax or schemes. This is analysis 101. You don't need a
> Standford computer to count the words or identify patterns when a
> text, the kind Nabokov calls a minor author text is studied. The dots
> and the patterns are generic and it takes an experienced writer or
> reader of such texts only a quick skim to calssify it or put it in a
> genre (Aristotle to Chicago School see Booth). But when the text, say
> a Jackson Pollack Painting, is the work of genius, the Stanford
> computer is, while usefull still, limited by its use of the
> translation of words to numbers. This point, as we discussed
> previously when we dismissed McLuhan's folk/literate binanry, and the
> surmises of Gleick on computers that use words or "languages",
> although favoring the deeper stories of Pinker, is an ancient one that
> Plato and Arsitotle plumbed. That it has surfaced as a preoccupation
> of the academy should not surprise, as we are in the middle of a
> communications crisis or revolution that the Greeks would both
> recognize and find monsterous. Humanism, the David with a stone, now
> only rolls it to the top of Camus's mountain top, where it finds
> nothing, and can not smile about it. Or maybe it's just gas.
>
I'd love to see the analysis of cultural transmission and the social 
life of novels that Amazon could come up with their fantastical 
algorithms the zillions of gigabytes of data they have collected on us 
readers.

I just ordered a Kindle Fire, with the full knowledge that every future 
move I make will be subjected to distribution analysis.

Mr. Finn may well be on the right track. if you're going to have to go 
through 1000 badly written book reviews you need to employ distant 
reading rather than the close variety.  From the little bit of the study 
I glanced through he's a good writer, which I hope doesn't jeopardize 
his academic career too severely.

Notice he utilizes Bourdieu. Several works referred to.

P.