The document summarizes different approaches to analyzing textual structures through computational methods: 1. Levi-Strauss analyzed myths by chopping texts into relation units and rearranging them to uncover deeper paradigms. 2. Colby used a thesaurus program to parse words in texts into themes, revealing patterns that hinted at cultural structures. 3. Ramsay applied graph theory to analyze Shakespeare plays, representing scenes as nodes and transitions as edges to compare structural metrics across genres. The document discusses how these methods uncover unconscious patterns rather than conscious meanings, and how texts can act as "delivery mechanisms" for cultural models.

1. Seeing Textual Signals
Prof. Alvarado
MDST 3703
10 September 2013

2. Business
• About the inability to save files
– Try disconnecting and reconnecting the drive
– Use UVA’s VMWare View Client to access the HIVE
• See http://its.virginia.edu/hive/
• Puts you on a Windows system
• Can install JEdit there (in your own directory)
• Office hours
– My Wednesday and Thursday afternoons are usually
open
– Contact me

3. Responses
• Studio is hard!
• The readings put coding in a different
perspective

4. Review
• Plato’s cave is an allegory of media
• In digital media, interface and code are related
as shadow to puppet
• In studio, we saw how source code could be
rendered differently
– JEdit = puppet area (back of the cave)
– Web Browser = shadow area (front of the cave)
• What kinds of things varied between the two?

5. Review
• The opposition is reproduced as HTML vs CSS
– Both are source code, but one defines structure
the other style
• Documents exhibit a hierarchy:
1. Structure (elements and attributes)
2. Content (“parsed character data”)
3. Style (typography, layout)
• Which level would Aristotle consider most
important?

6. Comments
• All of the scholars we read for today regard
text in “geometrical” terms
– Although each takes a unique approach
• But whereas Aristotle links his geometry to
the point of the play – the former explains the
latter – the others don’t link the patterns they
discover with a purpose or an effect
– Is this true?

7. Today, we look at the computer as
an aid to reading and interpretation
The computer is the child of logic
(codified by Aristotle)
What we find are variant forms of
analysis that echo Aristotle

8. Is a text a shadow or a puppet?

9. Claude Lévi-Strauss

10. Structuralism
• Lévi-Strauss was a French structuralist and
anthropologist
• He believed that society and culture could be
described in mathematical terms, i.e. rules
that generate patterns
• Although he did not use computers, he was
intrigued by them and modeling his thinking
on how he imagined they worked

11. Structuralism argues that the visible products
of human culture – works of art, language,
institutions, etc. – are the results of hidden
structures that generate visible behaviors
The best example of this is language
Our speech – the observable part of language
– is governed by grammar, or structure, a
hidden set of codes and rules that exist in the
brain and shared by a community

12. How does Levi-Strauss approach
getting at the structure of a text?

13. RELATIONS = SENTENCES = INDEX CARDS
BUNDLES OF RELATIONS = SEQUENCES OF CARDS = PASSAGES

14. So we chop the text up into units and rearrange them

17. OVER-RATED
BLOOD RELATIONS
UNDER-RATED
BLOOD RELATIONS
SLAYING OF
MONSTERS
DIFFICULTIES
WALKING

18. To understand the myth, we need to
understand the relations between
the columns
This will give us the “paradigm” of
the text

20. Is this how we think of reading a
text?
If not, then what is Levi-Strauss
talking about?

21. Benjamin Colby

22. Colby
• Colby is an American anthropologist
• He was one of the first to use a real computer
to do something similar to Levi-Strauss
• But his method is dictated by his tools
– Words are associated into themes by a thesaurus
of themes
– The words in texts are then parsed into this
thesaurus
– A pattern of themes emerges

23. The IBM 7090, announced in 1958, was the first
commercial computer with transistor logic. It was
intended mainly for scientific computing, but it was
also suitable for business and administrative use.

24. Sample thesaurus entries
If a text has a word on the right, then the
category on the left is identified as being in the
text at that point

26. Colby wants to
make observations
of this kind

28. Like Levi-Strauss, Colby wants to
read these patterns as evidence for
deeper structure – paradigms
Can Colby’s method help provide an
Aristotelian description of these
folktales?

29. Colby's theory
TEXTS
CULTURE

30. Stephen Ramsay

31. “Algorithmic Criticism”
• Ramsay is a UVA graduate student
• Teaches English at Nebraska
• Developed a method to apply mathematical
graph theory to Shakespeare’s plays

32. A
B
C
D
Graph Theory, developed by
Euler, allows us to see that
one would need to have an
even number of bridges to get
on and off a given land mass
without going over a bridge
twice.

33. Graph Theory
• Regions and boundaries can be represented
by “vertices” and “edges”
– AKA nodes and links
• Links can be represented as having a direction
or not
– Directed vs Undireced

34. Many things can be represented as
graphs – networks of points and
lines that abstract the relationships
between parts
By representing things as graphs, we
can transform them in interesting
ways

39. How many colors
do you need to
create a map in
which no
adjacent regions
have the same
color? Graph
theory tells us
the answer is 4

40. What about texts?

41. A Comedy of Errors, an early farce

42. Richard II, a history

43. Cymbeline, a late romance

44. Coriolanus, a history, battles as limbs

45. Antony and Cleopatra, a history, battles integrated

46. Henry IV, Part 1, central place of the Garter Inn

47. Henry IV, Part 1, Eastcheap Central

48. Measure for Measure, a room in the
prison central

49. Julius Ceasar, extremely linear

50. King Lear, linear then divided

51. Henry VI, Part 1

52. Henry VI, Part II

53. Henry VI, Part III

54. Anthony’s path through the play as a subgraph

55. Cleopatra’s path

56. Antony and Cleopatra

58. Clustering by number of single-incident scenes

59. Alignments of tragedy and comedy

60. Comedy and tragedy clusters

61. Metrics
• the number of unique scene locations
• the total number of scenes
• the number of single-instance scenes
• the number of loops (scene locations that
appear consecutively)
• the number of switches (consecutive scene
locations with an intervening location).

62. So, Ramsay begins by counting and
linking scenes
Then he finds metrics for these
graphs (e.g. number of scenes, etc.)
He ends by correlating these metrics
to known genres (comedy, romance,
tragedy, history)

63. Observations

64. In each case, the “meaning” of the
text is not what we think of as
“meaning”
It is something unconscious

65. On the other hand: What do you
remember when you read a
book?

66. We remember scenes, images, plot
lines, values, etc.
We sometimes remember verbatim
passages
We don’t normally remember the
words

67. We get much of our
culture through books
(and other "cultural
models" in Colby's words)

68. Like cigarettes, books are a
“delivery mechanism”
(not of nicotine, but of culture)

69. Text is like this
http://anthonyflo.tumblr.com/post/7590868323/photographer-and-self-described-geek-of-maps

70. A text is a signal
Culture is a transmitter