One last thought as I dash to CSC: I’m interested in a panel about the incipient formation of the Google Research Centers, both how wonderful it is that scholars will be given the opportunity to do “nonconsumptive” reading of copyrighted texts (aka datamining) and how hard it will be for those scholars who are not at the big ten or the ivies to be excluded from use.

(I just discovered a wonderful “data mining as literary criticism” presentation, and so recycled an earlier posting on datamining to offer this instead).

Digital Artist Ira Greenberg developed for me a poetry visualization tool using processing.  All kinds of interesting issues come up in the field of data visualization.  Too much of what we seen as the result of datamining is what Edward Tufte would call “Chart Junk.”  Do visualizations that are aesthetically pleasing improve our understandings of what we see, and if so, how?  If much digital visualization has a cognitive or ludic provocation, what are the effects of aesthetic provocations?

This visualization shows positive and negative emotional words in Felicia Hemans’s poem “Domestic Affections.”  I will show a few other poems and a few other ways of visualizing them.