William Demby Symposium 2018

1. William Demby
A novelist across Atlantic

2. When I met Bill
• I was 8-9 years old
• He was an elegant, creative, fascinating black-man
dandy
• He revealed me the “absolute value” of aesthetic, of
beauty; like a sacred code of life, close to the
religious belief one, to which I was educated by my
family
• I was able to look at life and religion by a new and
higher point of view
• (Also) Thank to Bill I developed an early critical
thinking
• This (humble) contribution is over any other thing a
tribute to his memory

3. When I met Bill
• When I first met William Demby I have been most
fascinated by the elegance of his language
mastering, first appreciated by me in Italian, then
also in English (which unfortunately I haven't
been able to inherit)
• At the time, after him, I was convinced to become
a writer.
• Then, when in my first year of Lyceum I met also
an awful Italian literature teacher that humiliated
all my ambitions by cutting off my own Italian
composition (where I was trying to imitate James
Joyce's flow of consciousness) with a very bad
rating (3 out of 10), I started to like physics, math
and computer science.

4. When I met Bill
• When I first met William Demby I have been most
fascinated by the elegance of his language mastering, first
appreciated by me in Italian, then also in English (which
unfortunately I haven't been able to inherit)
• At the time, after him, I was convinced to become a writer.
• Then, when in my first year of Lyceum I met also an awful
Italian literature teacher that humiliated all my ambitions
by cutting off my own Italian composition (where I was
trying to imitate James Joyce's flow of consciousness) with
a very bad rating (3 out of 10), I started to like physics,
math and computer science.

5. And I am asking now to myself:
how could you, elegantly,
"compute" your admiration?
• I had my degrees with a dissertation on a computer
program, made by myself, called “Poet”
• I like to play with words, phrases, concept and images.
• What could I possibly make to share with others my
gratitude and my love for William Demby and his
literature?

6. What are Digital
Humanities doing to
support literary critics in
their analysis?
• Franco Moretti «Distant Reading»,
themes and proposal
• European Association for Digital
Humanities
• Fast worldwide spread of curricula and
master degrees in Digital Humanities
• What could we possibly ask to Digital
Humanities and to Computational
Linguistic?

7. What is (are) the
language profile(s) in
King Como?
• What are the most freqent words?
• What are correlations between words?

8. What Digital Humanities
are doing to support
literary critics?
• Different platforms are spreading on the
Web to support literary and language
analitics.
• Voyant Tools, to name one, is a web-
based text reading and analysis
environment. It is a scholarly project that
is designed to facilitate reading and
interpretive practices for digital
humanities students and scholars as well
as for the general public.
• I am working on another platform,
CommonSpaces, developed inside a
European Project, where I hope to
integrate some of the Voyant tools and
maybe some other tool.

9. What Digital Humanities
are doing to support
literary critics?
Voyant Tools is an open-source, web-based
application for performing text analysis. It
supports scholarly reading and interpretation
of texts or corpus, particularly by scholars in
the digital humanities, but also by students
and the general public. It can be used to
analyze online texts or ones uploaded by
users.[1] Voyant has a large, international user
base: in October 2016 alone, Voyant's main
server had 81,686 page views originating
from 156 countries, invoking the tool
1,173,252 times.[2]

10. What Digital Humanities
are doing to support
literary critics?
• Voyant "was conceived to enhance
reading through lightweight text analytics
such as word frequency lists, frequency
distribution plots, and KWIC
displays."[3] Its interface is composed of
panels which perform these varied
analytical tasks. These panels can also be
embedded in external web texts (e.g. a
web article could include a Voyant panel
that creates a word cloud from it).
• The book Hermeneutica: Computer-
Assisted Interpretation in the
Humanities demonstrates different
approaches to text analysis using
Voyant.[4]

11. Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis environment [1]

12. Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis environment [1]

13. Voyant Tools is a web-based text reading and analysis environment [2]

14. What is (are) the
language profile(s) in
King Como?

15. Which are the most
complex syntagmas?

16. What kind of
queries could
we imagine to
ask the novel?
What kind of
queries to a
Demby
Corpus?
What is (are) the language profile(s)
in King Como?
What are language profiles,
compared, in the Demby's corpus of
novels?
Did they change through time, since
the first Italian period, coming to
the last period in Sag Harbor?

17. A proposal: could we
collaborate in study

18. A proposal: could
we collaborate in
studying corpora
by ethnicity?
Trying to
recognize
literature models
by language
profiles ?

19. A proposal: could we collaborate in studying corpora by ethnicity?
Trying to recognize literature models by language profiles ?

20. A proposal: could we collaborate
in studying corpora by ethnicity?
Trying to recognize literature
models by language profiles ?
• A proposal: could we collaborate in studying
corpora classified, or interpreted by ethnicity?
Trying to recognize literature models by language
profiles?
• Could this be possibly useful, for instance, to
understand the way in which human societies are
becoming more and more similar yet preserving
their diversity?
• Could this be a way to improve and foster positive
creativity in ethnical and social dynamics?

21. A proposal: could we collaborate in studying
corpora by ethnicity? Trying to recognize
literature models by language profiles ?
• Could we (and should we)
promote for instance a
creative writing school
according to how much it
enhances in its students an
objectively assessed spirit of
syncretism?
• Many many questions arise
after the introduction of
these tools.
• This would not diminish the
interest and the gratification
of this new playground for
literary scholars.

22. I am pretty sure that
Bill would have loved
this novel literary
playground.