Tuesday, May 29, 2012

The Interregnum, an Explanation

While I haven't posted here for a while, it's mostly because the books I was reading defied review--or were not my usual fare because they were for classes and tended toward non-fiction and "academic" CV-filler material. Included in the list of things that I could add here but probably won't are:

The Information, by James Gleick
Reading Machines; Toward an Algorithmic Criticism, by Stephen Ramsay (supposed to be a justification and explanation of the emerging field of Digital Humanities, but comes off as "Me want shiny new toys to play with! Computers are fun! Maybe we can figure out something to do with them that equals scholarship, but for now they are fun!")
Noise Channels; Glitch and Error in Digital Culture, by Peter Krapp
An entire entry level textbook on programming speech synthesis for computers--not actual programming, mind you, just the concepts of how linguistics and computers interact. It was a very basic level text, read for purposes of discussing with the professor who is interested in electronic text-to-speech from a theoretical point of view. Turns our the book was old, very basic, and the field is still far away from the kind of nuance he was interested in.

There are several more Virginia Woolf books I will probably add as well, that we read for class and I'd like to preserve here. To The Lighthouse; The Waves; Orlando; Three Guineas; Roger Fry. I'll put those up over the summer.

But for now, I am reading contemporary fiction, and need to post a few thoughts on the newer literature being published. Onward!

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