documentclass	mainfont	fontsize	geometry	header-includes
article	fbb	11pt	margin=1.5in	\usepackage{fancyhdr, array, ifthen} \newcommand{\sectionbreak}{\clearpage} \pagestyle{fancy} \fancyhf{} \renewcommand{\headrulewidth}{0pt} \rhead{ \ifthenelse{\value{page}=1} {\textbf{Department of English and Comparative Literature} | Summer 2023} {} } \fancyfoot[CO, CE] {\thepage}

Introduction to Language and Computation

w/ Prof. Dennis Yi Tenen

Course Description

How would you teach a computer to read a novel? In answering this question over the course of a summer semester, we will have to get down to the letter---and then work our way up to larger units comprising written language: words, sentences, paragraphs, stories, and story collections. Along the way, students will be introduced to basic concepts in linguistics and formal literary analysis, by using simple computational tools. These building blocks will help us become better close---closest possible---readers of texts, but also to perceive patterns and structures at scale, visible across long-distances, in archival time and space. No prior experience is necessary to participate: the only course requirement is interest in language, history, and technology.

Course Structure

3 hour sessions, 2 times a week, for 6 weeks.

We will generally spend the first section of the week on discussing the reading and the second session on workshops and exercises, in preparation for homework.

Provisional Schedule & Reading List

Week 1: Letter

What is a letter? The history of alphabets. Glyphs and hieroglyphs. Telegraph codes. Character encoding. From memory to pixel.

• Selections form An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) by John Wilkins.
• Selections from Plain Text (2017) from Dennis Yi Tenen.

Worksheet 1

Week 2: Word

Word boundaries. Parts of speech. Types and tokens. Spelling and misspelling. Counting words.

• Selections form How to Read a Word (2010) by Elizabeth Knowles.
• Selections from Speech and Language Processing (2008) by Dan Jurafsky and James Martin.
• Selections from Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing (1999) by Christopher D. Manning and Hinrich Schütze.
• "Boris Yarkho's works on literary theory" by Mikhail Gasparov in Studia Metrica et Poetica 2016.2: 130–15.

Worksheet 2

Week 3: Sentence

Syntax. Sentence clause structure. Semantic roles. Punctuation.

• Selections from Syntactic Structures (1957) by Noam Chomsky.
• Selections from Studies in Lexical Relations (1965) by Jeffrey Gruber.
• "Types of Lexical Information" in Semantics: An Interdisciplinary Reader in Philosophy, Linguistics and Psychology (1971) by Charles Fillmore.
• Selections from Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West (1992) by M.B. Parkes.

Worksheet 3

Week 4: Paragraph

Patterns and arrangements. Composition. Style guides.

• Selections from The History of the English Paragraph (1894) by Lewis Herbert.
• Selections from English Composition and Rhetoric (1866) by Alexander Bain.
• "The Stadium of Discourse" by Paul Rodgers in CCC 18 (1967): 148-51.
• Selections from Strategies of Discourse Comprehension by Teun van Dijk and Walter Kintsch.

Worksheet 4

Week 5: Story, Narrative, Discourse

Visualizing stories. Myth, plot, situation. Genre. Structure and texture. Context persistence.

• Selections from Speech Genres and Other Late Essays by Michail Bakhtin.
• "Stalking a Generative Poetics." by Schauber, Ellen, and Ellen Spolsky in New Literary History 12.3 (1981): 397-413.
• "Paradigm Shift in Plot Models: An Outline of the History of Narratology" by Ruth Ronen in Poetics Today 1990 11(4):817–842.

Worksheet 5

Week 6: Collection, Archive

Historical and institutional context. Description vs. prescription. Sample bias. Corpus analysis.

• "Towards a Description of English Usage" by Randolph Quirk in the Transactions of the Philological Society (November 1960).
• "A Vector Space Model for Automatic Indexing" by Gerard Salton and others in Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (1975) 18.11:613–620.
• "The Image of Absence: Archival Silence, Data Visualization, and James Hemings" by Lauren Klein in American Literature (2013) 85.4: 661–688.

Worksheet 6

Course Requirements & Grading

• 25% Class and online participation
• 25% Weekly worksheets
• 25% Final exam
• 25% Final paper / project

University Policies

When in doubt, cite! Plagiarism is insulting to your fellow students, your instructors, and to the research community at large. It wastes my time and yours, and is, ultimately, not worth the risk. Consult Columbia’s guidelines at http://www.college.columbia.edu/academics/integrity or ask me for help early in the writing process. We will discuss the ethics of code reuse in a separate session.