aw. Re: Where did ...

[alice wellintown]

http://www.ted.com/talks/what_we_learned_from_5_million_books.html
On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 5:42 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
> A warning to younger readers, frequent coarse language does occur.
>
> It does? I'm interested. Is this a warning or a marketing scheme?
>
> If you, Paul, read this nove on your new Kindle Firel, you could toss
> a wrench into the data. lol ;---*
>
> http://www.yareads.com/feed-%E2%80%93-m-t-anderson/book-reviews/2182
>
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 29, 2011 at 5:13 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net> wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>>
>