Writing Schedule Summary + Charlottes Web Article

For those of you who had to continue rewriting after the first rewrite the schedule is that the next write is due on Dec. 28th by mail at my home in Chiba: C.Richardson, 1941 Yamada, Ohara, Isumi-shi, Chiba 298-0025. Your paper should come with an envelope with your address and a stamp on it so I can send it back to you. The next rewrite is due on Jan. 4th with the same conditions as above and if another rewrite is required that will be due on the first and last class in January which is Tue. the 11th. Good luck and have a good holiday.
AlterNet
Reading Charlotte's Web as a Parent and an Activist
By Tony Newman, AlterNet
Posted on December 30, 2010, Printed on January 2, 2011
http://www.alternet.org/story/149364/

One of my earliest memories is sitting on the couch with my mom as she read Charlotte's Web to me and my sister. Thinking back on the book, I don't remember all of the details, but I do remember that Charlotte (the spider) was helping save her friend Wilbur (the pig) from being killed. I remembered there was a mischievous rat named Templeton that I thought was cool.I also remember me and my sister crying as my mom read us the end of the book.

I now have a four-year-old girl named Eva and was nostalgic and excited to introduce her to Charlotte's Web.

While sitting on the couch with Eva, watching the movie Charlotte's Web 35 years after reading the book, I realized that in addition to being a great storyteller, the author E.B. White was also a visionary and an activist. Watching the movie as an activist who does media work for the Drug Policy Alliance, I now have a whole new lens to look at Charlotte and her strategy to save her dear friend Wilbur.

Wilber is the cute little pig who finds out from his fellow farm animals that he is going to be killed and eaten, because that is what happens to pigs. Wilbur can't believe that they are going to kill him. Wilbur turns to the wise spider Charlotte and asks if it is true. Charlotte promises Wilbur that she will protect him and that he won't be killed.

Wow! Hearing this story as a parent, I now see that this is a pretty intense, scary story! I have to admit that realizing that Wilbur is going to be killed because we eat bacon is kinda of a wake-up call that gets me thinking

Anyways, how is Charlotte going to protect and save her friend? Charlotte ends up spinning a web that says "Some Pig". The family who owns the farm is blown away by the "message" in the web and calls the neighbors. Soon the town is buzzing. After a couple of months the news wears off and Charlotte again spins a web that says "Terrific." The family calls the local newspaper. The next thing there is a photo of Wilbur under the "Terrific" web on the front page of the paper. The crowds come, the family decides Wilbur is special and Wilbur is saved.

Charlotte (and E.B. White) realized that the only way to save Wilbur's life was to make people care about Wilbur. If someone is nameless, we can kill them, stuff them in a jail cell or do other terrible things to them. If we hear someone's story, hear about their dreams, their histories, their families, it moves us and we care.

While watching Charlotte's Web, I couldn't help but think of my friend and colleague Anthony Papa. Anthony Papa is a New Yorker who was sentenced to 15 years for a first time, non-violent drug offense. Papa's life was ruined when a "friend" convinced him to pass an envelope of 4 ounces of cocaine for which he was to make $500 dollars.

While in prison Papa found his passion for art and became a painter. Papa's greatest piece is a haunting self-portrait of himself where he is looking into a mirror. You look into his eyes and feel the agony and despair from a man who realizes he is going to spend the best years of his life in a cage. Papa's self-portrait ends up showing in the Whitney Museum. Papa (like Charlotte) realizes that the way he is going to free himself is by telling his story and having people see more than just a number.

Papa sits at his typewriter, writes his story and sends it into the local Westchester Journal. Papa then uses this humanizing piece to get other stories and before long there is a major feature in the New York Times. The story builds and builds until Governor Pataki grants him clemency. After spending 12 years in jail, Papa was literally able to paint his way to freedom.

That is only the first half of the inspiring story. When most people get out of jail, they want to put the nightmare behind them and never want think about jail again. Instead, Papa ends up starting a group with activist, comedian Randy Credico called Mothers of the New York Disappeared. They understood (like Charlotte) that to change the way New Yorkers looked at people behind bars, people had to see a whole picture of these people, not only their jail numbers. They organized families of people behind bars. They would organize vigils and actions with family members holding up photos of their loved ones. While the "nameless" were considered drug dealers, they became real people when their families told their stories. These weren't "kingpins" or queenpins"; these were moms and dads, brothers and sisters, who loved their kids and families and were rotting away in jail because they had a substance abuse problem or were desperate to make money and because New York had draconian mandatory minimum sentences under the Rockefeller drug laws.

After years of sharing people's stories, generating moving TV segments and feature stories, New Yorkers changed the way they looked at people behind bars for drug-related offenses. Watching a personal piece about a mom being locked up for 15 years, away from her family, because of a mistake she made or because she has a drug problem moved hearts more than any statistics or policy papers. In 2008, after 35 years, the inhumane, ineffective and racist drug laws were finally reformed.

There is a picture in my office of Anthony Papa giving Governor Paterson a hug at the Rockefeller Reform bill signing. It makes me emotional to think about Anthony Papa's story. Papa spent 12 years in a cage because of one mistake and because of the way our society treats people who use drugs. He lost his family and freedom. He was able to regain his freedom through his art, activism and brains. He then used his freedom to help free some of the people he left behind.

I am moved by Anthony Papa. I think E.B. White would be moved by Anthony Papa's story too.

Tony Newman is communications director for the Drug Policy Alliance.
© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/149364/

This might be of interest to one of you out there writing about Doyle:'The Sherlockian'
By GRAHAM MOORE
Reviewed by JANET MASLIN
Graham Moore's novel crosscuts a murder mystery and hunt
for the diary of Arthur Conan Doyle with the actions of
Conan Doyle himself.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/books/16book.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema5

Victorian Literature

A few of you are writing about Victorian writers and this article may be of use to you. Read it through carefully.
Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers
Erik Jacobs for The New York Times

18th-century books scanned by Google in their Cambridge, Mass. offices.
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: December 3, 2010


Victorians were enamored of the new science of statistics, so it seems fitting that these pioneering data hounds are now the subject of an unusual experiment in statistical analysis. The titles of every British book published in English in and around the 19th century — 1,681,161, to be exact — are being electronically scoured for key words and phrases that might offer fresh insight into the minds of the Victorians.
Humanities 2.0
Measuring the Victorians

This is the second in a series about how digital tools are changing scholarship in history, literature and the arts. The first article examined projects that mine vast stores of digitized materials and the debates over the usefulness of such research.
Multimedia
Graphic
Examining Victorian Literature, Title by Title
Related

*
Humanities 2.0: Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches (November 17, 2010)
*
ArtsBeat Blog: Google and the Victorians: The History Goes Way Back (December 3, 2010)
*
ArtsBeat Blog: Computing, Rather Than, Absorbing Novels (December 4, 2010)

Enlarge This Image
Erik Jacobs for The New York Times

Jon Orwant of Google says scholars will have free use of the new tools.

This research, which has only recently become possible, thanks to a new generation of powerful digital tools and databases, represents one of the many ways that technology is transforming the study of literature, philosophy and other humanistic fields that haven’t necessarily embraced large-scale quantitative analysis.

Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, the two historians of science at George Mason University who have created the project, have so far charted how frequently more than two dozen words — among them “God,” “love,” “work,” “science” and “industrial” — appear in British book titles from the French Revolution in 1789 to the beginning of World War I in 1914. To Mr. Cohen, the sharply jagged lines that dance across his graphs can be used to test some of the most deeply entrenched beliefs about the Victorians, like their faith in progress and science: “We can finally and truly test these and other fundamental claims that have been at the heart of Victorian studies for generations.”

Mr. Cohen said that he and Mr. Gibbs hoped that their work could serve as a model for how scholars might use the shopping cart of new digital tools to challenge longstanding assumptions and interpretations across the humanities.

Some of their colleagues are clearly intrigued by the possibilities.

“My own reaction was sheer exhilaration,” said Alice Jenkins, a professor of Victorian literature and culture at the University of Glasgow, who saw Mr. Cohen present his preliminary results at a recent conference on the Victorians.

There is also anxiety, however, about the potential of electronic tools to reduce literature and history to a series of numbers, squeezing out important subjects that cannot be easily quantified.

“I was excited and terrified,” said Matthew Bevis, a lecturer at the University of York in Britain, who was at the same conference. “This is not just a tool; this is actually shaping the kind of questions someone in literature might even ask.”

“It should come in a box marked ‘Handle With Care,’ ” he added.

Such concerns didn’t stop Mr. Bevis or other academics in the audience from asking Mr. Cohen to run a few electronic searches of particular words pertinent to their own work. Meredith Martin, an assistant professor of English at Princeton who is studying the history of poetic form, was interested in the terms “prosody,” “meter” and “verse.”

“I actually sent him an e-mail as he was talking,” Ms. Martin said. She figured he would be inundated with requests, and “I wanted to be first in line.”

Mr. Cohen and Mr. Gibbs’s “Reframing the Victorians” study is one of 12 university projects to win a new digital humanities award created by Google that provides money along with access to the company’s powerful computers and databases.

Some scholars are wary of the control an enterprise like Google can exert over digital information. Google’s plan to create a voluminous online library and store has raised alarms about a potential monopoly over digital books and the hefty pricing that might follow.

But Jon Orwant, the engineering manager for Google Books, Magazines and Patents, said the plan was to make collections and searching tools available to libraries and scholars free. “That’s something we absolutely will do, and no, it’s not going to cost anything,” he said.

One criterion in choosing projects to finance, he added, was whether they were going to create new data sets and computer codes that other researchers would find useful.

Mr. Gibbs and Mr. Cohen’s searches of book titles represent only an initial swipe at the data. Step 2 is canvassing the full texts. The professors will also have the ability to zero in on details, specific titles and passages.

Their starting point was an earlier work that focused on the written word as an entry point into the era: Walter E. Houghton’s “Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870,” a landmark book published in 1957 that has shaped generations of scholarship, even as its conclusions have been challenged. Mr. Houghton sought to capture what he called a “general sense” of how middle- and upper-class Victorians thought, partly by closely reading scores of texts written during the era and methodically counting how many times certain words appeared. The increasing use of “hope,” “light” and “sunlight,” for instance, was interpreted as a sign of the Victorians’ increasing optimism.

Mr. Houghton’s reading list was monumental, yet his methodology raised questions about the validity of extrapolating the attitudes of millions of people from a couple of hundred texts.

The kind of comprehensiveness that digital research offers quells such complaints. “All history is anecdotal,” Mr. Cohen said. “You could read three books and say the Victorians were really obsessed with evil, or you could read 30 books, or 300 books; but you didn’t read 10,000 books.”

But now, he explained, vast digital libraries present “for the first time the possibility that we can conduct a comprehensive survey of Victorian writing — not just the well-known Mills and Carlyles, but tens of thousands of lesser-known or even forgotten authors.”

The preliminary graphs he displayed at the conference mostly confirm what we already know, Mr. Cohen said. A decline in references to “God,” “Christian” and “universal” is consonant with the conventional view that the 19th century was a time of rising secularism and skepticism.

Yet large searches can also challenge some pet theories of close reading, he said: for example, that the Victorians were obsessed with the nature and origins of evil. As it turns out, books with the word “evil” in the title bumped along near the bottom of the graph, accounting for less than 0.1 percent — a thousandth — of those published during the Victorian era.

As Mr. Cohen is quick to acknowledge, the meaning of those numbers is anything but clear. Perhaps authors didn’t like to use the word “evil” in the title; perhaps there were other, more common synonyms; perhaps the context points to another subject altogether.

Ms. Martin at Princeton knows firsthand how electronic searches can unearth both obscure texts and dead ends. She has spent the last 10 years compiling a list of books, newspaper and journal articles about the technical aspects of poetry.

She recalled finding a sudden explosion of the words “syntax” and “prosody” in 1832, suggesting a spirited debate about poetic structure. But it turned out that Dr. Syntax and Prosody were the names of two racehorses.

“You find 200 titles with ‘Syntax,’ and you think there must be a big grammar debate that year,” Ms. Martin said, “but it was just that Syntax was winning.”

Scholars should also remember that the past contains more than the written record, Mr. Bevis said in an interview. Fewer references to a subject do not necessarily mean that it has disappeared from the culture, but rather that it has become such a part of the fabric of life that it no longer arouses discussion. He quoted Emily Dickinson: “Is it oblivion or absorption when things pass from our mind?”

Of more concern, Mr. Bevis said, is the fear that statistical measures could overshadow meaning and interpretation.

Not to worry, say those who embrace the new methods. There is no need to pit computation against interpretation. If anything, Ms. Jenkins argues, large-scale, quantitative research is likely to highlight “the importance and the value of close reading; the detailed, imaginative, heightened engagement with words, paragraphs and lines of verse.

“Close reading,” she continued, “will become even more crucial in a world in which we can, potentially, read every word of Victorian writing ever published.”

A version of this article appeared in print on December 4, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.

Assignment

Next week is a holiday...lucky you ;>}. The following week the last day of the month your full complete first copy of your paper is due. Spend some time working, researching and writing it. I look forward to the result.

Communication

A few of you are writing about communication face to face as well as through technology intermediaries such as cell phones and e-mail, chats etc. Here is the latest from MIT:

MIT News Feature
Social Studies

In MIT's Human Dynamics Lab, Sandy Pentland, PhD '82, uses cell phones and wearable sensors to research nonverbal signals, information flow, and the value of face-to-face conversation.

* November/December 2010
* By Larry Hardesty

Credit: Illustration by Jason Schneider
E-mail Audio » Print small text medium text large text

For humans, the very idea of communication is bound up with the idea of language. But for hundreds of thousands of years before language emerged, we communicated the same way other social species do: through a complex system of nonverbal signals. We ignore those ancient signals at our peril, says Alex "Sandy" Pentland, PhD '82, the Toshiba Professor of Media Arts and Sciences. Nonverbal cues can make unreasonable arguments strangely persuasive, but if properly recognized and harnessed, they can make group discussions much more productive.

Pentland's research group, the Human Dynamics Lab, tends to court contradictions. To study ancient signaling systems, it uses cutting-­edge technology. But one of its recent findings is that even in an age of Twitter and texting, companies may improve their productivity if they give employees more time to talk face to face.

Pentland's MIT doctorate is in psychology, but after graduation, he immediately began applying psychological insight to artificial-intelligence research. After five years in Palo Alto, at Stanford University and SRI International, he came back to MIT as an expert in computer vision. His work expanded to include sensor systems more generally, and in 1997, Newsweek named him one of 100 people to watch in the new century for his work on "smart rooms" studded with sensors that could anticipate and meet their inhabitants' needs.

Pentland's early work also landed him on the boards of several startup companies, and it was there that he began to recognize the surprising power of primal signaling. "People were just behaving completely irrationally," he says. "But these are brilliant people. They're not dumb at all. So you say, Well, what's going on?" Pentland himself seems to have mastered some of the techniques of nonverbal communication that his lab studies. Leaning back comfortably on the couch in his office, he speaks enthusiastically but not anxiously, with the regular changes of pitch, the little conspiratorial asides, that immediately engage his interlocutor and inspire trust. "So I started looking at, for instance, charisma," he says. "How can people say things that are very convincing when in fact the facts aren't in the words? People just believe them because of the way they say it."

In the late 1990s, to get a quantitative handle on the nonverbal cues that seem to make people more or less convincing in conversation, Pentland's group developed "sociometers," which could be worn around the neck or fastened to clothing. Approximately as big as a deck of cards, these sensors contained accelerometers to gauge the wearers' physical movements, a microphone that could capture vocal inflections, and infrared transmitters and receivers that would register when two people wearing the devices came face to face. By analyzing data from sociometers worn by hundreds of volunteers in dozens of settings, the researchers discovered patterns that represent the degree of engagement between conversing people. For example, energy--lots of hand gestures--and variety of vocal inflection indicate enthusiasm; mimicking the gestures of another person was a very reliable sign of careful attention and growing trust. By looking for such patterns without assessing the content of the conversations, Pentland's group could predict, with 70 to 80 percent accuracy, whether, say, people meeting at a speed-dating event would exchange phone numbers, or whether attendees at a business meeting would exchange cards. Pentland describes these experiments in his 2008 book Honest Signals.

In recent years, his group has begun to use sociometers to analyze communication at organizations ranging from a German bank to a U.S. military installation. The striking conclusion is that unstructured face-to-face conversation--not formal meetings--seems to be a highly efficient means of propagating information that can increase worker productivity.

One recent experiment led by graduate student Benjamin Waber, for instance, involved the customer-support center for a major bank. "The way they were managing this call center, they discouraged face-to-face communication," Pentland says. "Their attitude was that that was distracting to people. So when they gave coffee breaks, they did it in a staggered way." The sociometer data indicated, however, that employees who nonetheless found a way to interact regularly with each other, forming dense communication networks in which everyone spoke to everyone else, were more productive than their less social colleagues. So Pentland's group suggested that the company let employees take breaks in groups. Average call time per customer went down, boosting productivity significantly and saving the company millions of dollars. And while customer satisfaction remained stable, those productivity gains reduced employees' stress levels, resulting in less turnover.

Employees on their breaks were not giving each other PowerPoint presentations about operations research; they were just gossiping. "But what is gossip?" Pentland says. "Gossip is stories about what happened and what you did. So in other words, they're trading tacit information. 'I had this guy call up and he was so mad, and I ...'"

The army's Battle Command Battle Lab at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, recently concluded a two-week experiment using the sociometers. "In our laboratory here we can monitor systems easily enough--telephones, who calls who, e-mails, chat systems, all of that--so we measure a lot of that sort of data," says Brett Burland, the lab's chief of science and technology. "But we've never been able to capture face-to-face interactions before. The badge that [Pentland] developed really generated some interesting data for us."

Burland suggests how this information could help the army. "Let's say that you are sensing that you have a problem with intelligence and targeting," he says--where "targeting" might mean identification of an enemy radio frequency that the army wants to jam. "Is the problem that you're not collecting the intelligence you need, or is the problem that you're getting the information that you need to conduct adequate targeting, but you're not communicating it effectively in the process?" Data about face-to-face communication patterns, he says, "would help you to figure out where the disconnect is."

Pentland says that increased face-to-face communication also brought about productivity gains at the German bank, at an IT consulting firm, and even at MIT labs and research centers. "If you think about what needs to happen for a healthy organization," he says, "people need to know the rules of the road. They need to know how things are done. Which means they have to hear the stories; they have to interact with people. Because you tend not to do that over e-mail, or blogs, or things like that." Indeed, in some cases the rules of the road may be too controversial to commit to type."Treating different types of people differently may yield greater productivity," he says. "But it's dangerous to make a hard-and-fast written rule, because that encourages stereotyping."

Sharing this type of unofficial knowledge is what Pentland calls information integration, which he distinguishes from the acquisition of new information. The same distinction, he says, can be seen in bees. A bee colony planning to move its hive will dispatch scouts to look for promising locations. When the scouts return, they perform dances that describe their findings: this is the influx of new information. The enthusiasm of the dance indicates the scout's confidence in the quality of the location--much the way the enthusiasm of charismatic board members can, sometimes misleadingly, indicate their confidence that they're right. On the basis of the dances, the scouts fly out in ad hoc groups to inspect the proposed locations until a sufficient number of scouts signal the same location, leading the colony to make its move: this is information integration.

Both types of information flow, Pentland argues, are crucial to an organization's success, but they're fostered in different ways. Internet connections and journal subscriptions are valuable sources of new information; but information integration depends on density of communication--which, within an organization, often means talking face to face. The recognition of that distinction was named one of Harvard Business Review's 20 "breakthrough ideas" for 2009.

Indeed, the manner in which different types of information propagate through social networks has become one of the Human Dynamics Lab's chief research topics, one that Pentland sometimes describes as the epidemiology of ideas. In a series of experiments at MIT done with Anmol Madan, SM '05, PhD '10, for instance, students agreed to let their cell phones serve as continuously active location detectors, so that the lab could monitor whom they came in contact with and for how long. The students also filled out periodic surveys that gauged things like their political attitudes and dietary habits, and they supplied lists of their friends and most frequent conversation partners. Surprisingly, changes in people's political views seemed to have very little to do with the views of their closest friends, or with the views of anyone else with whom they frequently discussed politics. But changes were strongly correlated with the general attitudes of people in the subjects' immediate environment. The same went for eating habits and weight gain.

"That's this tacit, habitual, older type of thinking," Pentland says. "A way to describe it is, 'What's your impression of what everybody else is doing?'" For instance, he says, "if everybody where you live, or everybody where you hang out, always gets that third slice of pizza, even if your friends don't, you'll tend to."

By using cell-phone data, researchers including postdoctoral associate Manuel Cebrian and Nathan Eagle, PhD '05, have been able to study the propagation of information on an even larger scale. Cell-phone companies have provided the lab with anonymized information about call patterns for entire cities, and Pentland says analysis of the data mirrors the results of the organizational studies using sociometers. Communities with frequent phone calls both inside and outside the area tend to have higher per-capita gross domestic products and better Gini coefficients (a measure of income equality). This suggests that they depend on both information acquisition and information integration. It seems that economists and city planners, no less than managers of large organizations, could still learn a thing or two from the bees.

Your assignment for next week is a complete final thesis statement due next class Oct. 26 typed on a single sheet of paper.

Library Orientation

New class we will have the Library Orientation presentation by the library staff. See you on Tue.