Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.
This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.
Blog #2
https://www.mindomo.com/mindmap/4991e0600c1247c09e65a974a8692746
I chose to use the template of story summary for my mindomo. I chose this because it allowed me to refresh my memory of the play and helped me highlight some of the most important parts of the play. There is obviously so much you could choose to write about, so it took me sometime to choose what was most important to put in my mindmap. The hardest part for me in constructing my mindmap was figuring out where to start and how I would break up each act. Once I figured that out it was much easier to put my ideas on the screen. Being able to look at the story broken up by act allows you to get a better understanding of the story. It also allowed me to make connections that I may have not noticed prior. The amount of love in this play is unreal; it seems like a big love triangle. Mindmap has a wide variety of tools to play with to give you what best suits your needs. The digital tools allowed me to take notes and better group categories together. Mindmap as a digital tool is essential to use and opens up many different ways to help you understand what you are reading. You’re able to break up and categorize everything much simpler than if you were writing by hand. The ability to split things up into groups and to make subtopics for each group was very useful in helping me understand the reading. By having subtopics attached to the bigger idea it allows you to understand what led to the main topic. A lot of the topics that I chose to highlight in my summary of the book I believe helped me to understand the storyline as well as the characters. A majority of what I chose to include shows you a lot of the development that the characters had gone through. The beginning portion of this play was surrounded by death and grief, but that changed into love and violence. Many people were fighting over the love of others and were putting their needs secondary. Antonio got arrested for who he thought was Sebasitan and Malvolio looked like an imbecile. This play shows you what love will make someone do and I did not fully realize that until I used a mindmap. Everything in this play is derived from the idea of love. Mindmap is extremely useful and should be used more often throughout English. For my Mindmap I chose to break up each act and dive into the most important parts. I highlighted what stood out to me while reading and put it as a sub-topic. I was able to make connections between different acts and noticed that many things were foreshadowed early in the play. It also allowed me to understand the characters and there decision-making better. Tools that this website has are extremely rare and give insights to the readings that may have been unnoticed at first. Without mindmap I would not have fully understood what I was reading or the main plot of the play. I was really struggling to understand at first, but the tools on this website gave me the resources I needed.
Blog #1
With technological advances there are many different ways to read books. Ebooks, scanned copies, and printed books are a few of the ways you can read. Printed books are my favorite to use. I love the smell of the pages, and the sound of the paper as you turn the page. You get to read the story the way it was intended to be read when reading from a printed book. There are benefits to using Ebooks, accessible anywhere and anytime. Ebooks are much easier to purchase, and are much more portable. The scanned copies show you the struggle the book had gone through to survive. The majority of the pages are ripped. The language in the scanned book is also referred to as “good” English. If you like authenticity then the scanned book is the way to go. I personally like the printed book best. I can take the book wherever I please and don’t have to worry about it dying on me. I also feel that using a scanned copy or ebook is strenuous on people’s eyes. There are also many different types of ebooks and finding the one you like to use may be hard to find. Ebooks also don’t last forever, they can break at any time. If you take good care of a printed version of a book, it can last for generations. I personally like being able to hold the book in my hand and feel the pages. I am not a huge fan of technology and think that it ruins relationships. Many people can become connected to their books and having an online version of the book cuts off that connection. My favorite book of all time is The Blind Side. I have a copy of the book on my dresser right next to my bed. You are unable to have that kind of connection when you are reading from a kindle. The biggest upside to reading from a printed copy of the book is that there are definitions of some of the words. The language that is used in the printed copies are slightly more updated then the actual scanned copy. Printed copies also allow the author to make money for their product. Ebooks and scanned copies could be illegally copied and then the author makes no money off their work. The scanned copy was my least favorite to read, due to the language, as well as, how worn down the pages were. I was more focused on the condition of the paper than I was on what I was supposed to be reading. That’s also an issue for me when it comes to reading on an ebook.Having the printed copy in my hand allows me to put down my phone and not worry about who posted something new on twitter. I will stick with a printed version of a book for as long as I possibly can.
Timeline
The timeline of Zone One jumps around quite a lot between the past and present. My timeline will focus in on the past memories that Mark Spitz has while living through this horrific world. It also shows how similar the skels are to humans. It occurs quite often that Mark relives a past event due to the similarities he sees in the skels and himself. The skels are very human-like, and that makes it hard for the survivors to forget the past. Mark Spitz is constantly being reminded by the past. Reminiscing about the past is also a sign of weakness, and you see that throughout the novel. Every time someone loses focus and thinks about their past life, they are put in danger. Mark got bit by a skel due to him losing focus and getting lost in a memory. He is also wandering around New York City, which continuously brings back memories from the past. The purpose of my timeline was to show that no matter what you try to do, you cannot forget the past. I also wanted to get to learn a little more about our main character Mark Spitz. By looking into his memories, you can see what his life was like prior to Last Night. Some of his past memories show you, his ex-girlfriend, old teachers, and family life. There is a restaurant that reminds Mark of his family and a certain memory of his father. You get to learn a little bit about his relationship with his family. Mark also shows you how mediocre he was in the past world. I think it is essential to know as much as you can about the main character, and that is why my timeline focuses on him. All of these memories are crucial in understanding how Mark functions. My timeline shows his interaction with the skels and the new world. There is a point where Mark tries to save the life of a straggler and tries to tell his comrades to leave it alone, as it is not a threat. He shows a little bit of compassion here toward the straggler. The moments that I chose to highlight show you the deeper meaning and helps you understand some of the choices Mark makes. I think that a lot of the memories that Mark has could be from the world that we live in today. This led me to choose a time that was very far in the future for the dates of when the book takes place. I believe that something like this could actually occur today and our own government even has a plan on how to combat a zombie outbreak if one did occur. There is a pandemic currently happening globally, so who is to say that there won’t be a virus that turns us into zombies in the future and threatens mankind. I think this book also shows you that there is more to life than the American system. Mark Spitz was a mediocre person in the past world but seems to be thriving in the new one. Even though he is thriving he still dreams about the past and misses it, Mark does not necessarily agree with the old system of government.
Video Game Design
If I had to create a video game based off of Zone One, it would have to be a 3D, open world video game. It would also have an aspect of a role-playing game (RPG) and a third-person shooter. An open world game allows for the player to explore freely. Open world games provide players with the ability to choose how to approach the game and the challenges the player will face. An RPG is a game in which players assume the role of a character in a fictional setting. The player assumes responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative. A third-person shooter allows you to view your character. The player can choose to do this either through literally acting, or through decision-making regarding character development. I think having my game as an open world RPG would allow the player to explore, as well as learn about the main character through the decisions you make. The player would be given a map to make sure they know where Zone One is at all times. This would aid the character in not getting lost and to better understand the area that they are exploring. It is hard for open world games to keep the player focused on the main objective, since all they want to do is explore. I think you can also see this in Zone One as Mark Spitz struggles to stay focused at times and dwells on the past. In my video game, there can be side missions that allow you to see his memories and play through them. These side missions would also help with player development, as well as, allow the player to learn more about the main character. These side missions also help the player explore different areas. There could be side missions that allow the character to go to Connecticut, Long Island, and New Jersey. You would be able to experience all the memories of the “Last Night” and all memories during this post-apocalyptic world. Exploration would be crucial, but the player would be given the freedom to not complete the side missions. By completing side missions, the player would get experience points and this experience points would help the player to develop certain skills. Some skills that could be obtained are, being stealthier, different takedowns on the Skel, better gathering skills. In open world RPG, it is important to go searching for material and goods that can be used to trade or upgrade weapons. The same would stand for my video game; there won’t be any currency, so trading is important for helping you succeed. The player would be able to trade food and resources to other survivors and also would be able to recruit people to join his group when exploring. Upgrading your skills and stealth would be extremely important for my video game. I think the book itself is somewhat of an open world game. Mark Spitz is always exploring different areas of Manhattan in search of Skel. If Colson Whitehead were to pitch a video game idea based off his book, I believe he would have you the same genre that I had used.
Zone One Mapping
Personally, I did not find this mappin tool to be too much help. I can understand in some cases where mapping out locations can be beneficial. I do not believe that it needed to be done for this book. Throughout the book, Mark Spitz is jumping around from memory to real life, but the locations are generally the same. His memories mostly take place in his home town of Hempstead or in New York City. The locations themselves do not vary too much. I also do not believe that locations are too important to the story, the same way that days of the week and time are not that important. The normal institution and way of life does not mean anything now. The name of places may give the reader a sense of direction but at the end of the day the only place you really need to know is New York City. Mapping out the locations did not help me see much more than what I had already known. When we were reading, A Journal of A Plague Year, I think mapping that out was crucial. H.F. was constantly going from parish to parish, and to different stores and pubs. Location was extremely important to that novel due to the fact that that the book itself was trying to map out locations without using a map. The book essentially wanted you to take the information that it gave you and map it yourself. When we mapped out that novel it allowed me to follow the story better, and gave me a better understanding of what London looked like. Many of the students in the class have been to the city and have a general understanding of what it looks like. I have also lived in Long Island my entire life and have been to the city countless times. Hempstead is also no more than 20 minutes from my house. If someone who isn’t familiar with the Northeast read this, especially New York City I think it would be very beneficial to map the novel out. The map does not give us any context that we did not already know. I think it can help you connect certain stories within the story itself, which can be beneficial to most. It could also potentially help the reader plot points of importance, and helps the reader to not sway too far from the action. Sometimes I feel that books do bounce around a lot to try and keep the reader entertained. The negative to doing that is that the reader may lose focus on the real plot or theme of the story. I completely understand the purpose of mapping out the locations and to help increase someone’s knowledge of the book, but I do not believe that helped me or changed my perspective of the story at all. My mapping may just be more of an illustration of what occurred during the book. If I had tried digging deeper, maybe I could have gotten more out of it. Maybe if I had tried looking at the story from a different perspective then my map would have come out differently and could have changed my understanding.
Timeline
The timeline of Zone One jumps around quite a lot between the past and present. My timeline will focus in on the past memories that Mark Spitz has while living through this horrific world. It also shows how similar the skels are to humans. It occurs quite often that Mark relives a past event due to the similarities he sees in the skels and himself. The skels are very human-like, and that makes it hard for the survivors to forget the past. Mark Spitz is constantly being reminded by the past. Reminiscing about the past is also a sign of weakness, and you see that throughout the novel. Every time someone loses focus and thinks about their past life, they are put in danger. Mark got bit by a skel due to him losing focus and getting lost in a memory. He is also wandering around New York City, which continuously brings back memories from the past. The purpose of my timeline was to show that no matter what you try to do, you cannot forget the past. I also wanted to get to learn a little more about our main character Mark Spitz. By looking into his memories, you can see what his life was like prior to Last Night. Some of his past memories show you, his ex-girlfriend, old teachers, and family life. There is a restaurant that reminds Mark of his family and a certain memory of his father. You get to learn a little bit about his relationship with his family. Mark also shows you how mediocre he was in the past world. I think it is essential to know as much as you can about the main character, and that is why my timeline focuses on him. All of these memories are crucial in understanding how Mark functions. My timeline shows his interaction with the skels and the new world. There is a point where Mark tries to save the life of a straggler and tries to tell his comrades to leave it alone, as it is not a threat. He shows a little bit of compassion here toward the straggler. The moments that I chose to highlight show you the deeper meaning and helps you understand some of the choices Mark makes. I think that a lot of the memories that Mark has could be from the world that we live in today. This led me to choose a time that was very far in the future for the dates of when the book takes place. I believe that something like this could actually occur today and our own government even has a plan on how to combat a zombie outbreak if one did occur. There is a pandemic currently happening globally, so who is to say that there won’t be a virus that turns us into zombies in the future and threatens mankind. I think this book also shows you that there is more to life than the American system. Mark Spitz was a mediocre person in the past world but seems to be thriving in the new one. Even though he is thriving he still dreams about the past and misses it, Mark does not necessarily agree with the old system of government.
Hestia
Digital humanities projects are becoming more and more common and study a variety of different topics. The projects typically look at history or literary works. The digital humanities project that I will be looking at is called Hestia. The most important reason I chose this project was because it has a combination of both history and literary works. The site Hestia is supported by some very well-known universities, such as Open University, University of Manchester, University of Southampton, and University of Oxford. The project is also supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. Hestia is backed by some very credible names and that also helped me choose this project. There were also two phases for Hestia. The first phase was funded from September 2008-July 2010. The team that worked on the process was Elton Barker, Stefan Bouzarovski, Chris Pelling, and Leif Isaksen. The second phase was funded from July 2013-June 2014. Kate Byrne, Eric Kansa, Adam Rabinowitz, Beverley Daley-Yates, Enrico Daga, all worked on the second phase of Hesita2. The goals for both phases were extremely different but the second phase used phase one to help its research.
Phase one of Hestia took a look at a Greek writer and historian Herodotus. Herodotus was alive sometime around the fifth century BC and lived in a town called Halicarnassus, which is actually in modern day Turkey. There are five books that Herodotus wrote and that the team for Hestia used in their project. Herodotus would write about the great wars that had occurred between his people, the Greeks, and the Persians a generation before his time. He also explores the world that he lives in and also talks about the conflicts of the world that had arisen during his life, He also wrote about the deeds of various kinds of people and the towns and cities that had risen and fallen throughout his life. It is quite interesting to see how Herodotus states that towns and cities they were small one generation before are now great in size.
The main goal of phase one of Hestia was to look at all the information provided by Herodotus and use digital humanities tools to make connections. The team that worked on Hestia used a digital form of Herodotus’s work to extract all the places named in his writing. After they did that, they would use web mapping technologies such as GIS, Google Earth, and Narrative TimeMap. These tools allowed for the team to investigate the cultural geography of the ancient world that is shown through the eyes of Herodotus. Not only did they work on mapping the places they were referenced by Herodotus, but after they had mapped them, you could click on the location and read about what Herodotus had writing about that place. You could read about the people that had lived there also. They were also able to see how relevant certain towns and cities were by using a tool to check how many times the place was mentioned in the story. They also used a heat mapping tool to show how much a place was referenced, and this would actually appear on the map. They did not just want to connect the locations named to a map, but they also wanted to connect the people who were mentioned. That is one thing that is commonly left out in digital projects. They will sometimes stop once they have mapped the place, but this team made sure that everyone that Herodotus mentioned was represented. Excerpts of Herodotus’ writing that mentioned people within a city or town were included when you would click on a location to give extra background information. This extra information would allow you to learn about the people, culture, and atmosphere of that place. The team that worked on phase one of Hestia did a wonderful job.
Hestia2 which was created by another team used the work of phase one to show some of the major issues you may face when working on digital humanities projects. The most prominent issue they believe digital humanities projects face is data visualization. The way information is viewed and processed is constantly changing, so it’s hard to keep updating the work to keep up with the new technology. Another major problem is being able to present the data in a way that would make sense to educated and-non-educated people alike. This is extremely hard to do because the teams that work on the projects do not want to reduce the complexity of the data that was collected or give a misleading picture. Another main issue is the struggle to find accurate mapping of the world. There were different maps from the east and western world with colliding information. The maps from Asia and Europe were sometimes very different but were necessary to use due to the fact that the places to which Herodotus was referring were located in Asia, as well as Europe. The team that worked on Hestia2 did an amazing job pointing out some of the problems that Hestia and other digital humanities projects may face. I think it is important for other digital humanities projects to take these issues into account when working on a project in the future.
There were many reasons as to why I chose to pick this digital humanities project to look at. For starters, I looked at many projects but I was struggling to find one that interested me. The reason this digital humanities project interested me so much was because I am a history minor. History has always been intriguing to me and being able to read a little bit about Greek and Persian writing was quite interesting. Learning about some of the super powers interests me. I also found the tools they used very unique and yet simple at the same time. The heat map was very different from tools I have seen or used myself. The heat map is a very simple yet effective tool. I also did respect the amount of work and research they had to do. The project was very organized and was backed by some very respectable universities, which made the project a lot more credible. The maps they used were also extremely helpful and got their point across. Another reason this digital humanities project caught my attention was because it was somewhat similar to our professor Adam Sills project for Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year.
Attractiveness of Zombies
Ghosts, ghouls, and spirits used to be the most talked about fictional creatures. Midway through the twentieth century that had changed. A new fictional character arose; it was cannibalistic and looked somewhat human. It was called a zombie and instantly blew up. I believe there are a lot of reasons as to why zombies blew up and are now very common in TV shows, movies, and comics. During the 1960s is when zombie movies really started to gain some traction. The 1960s was a very strange time in the United States and I think people liked things that had zombies in it because it allowed them to escape from reality and think about something fictional. Some events that occurred during the 1960s were the Vietnam War, Civil Rights Protests, and the Cuban Missile Crisis. On top of that the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The US was also dealing with the Cold War between Russia. The only bright side to this decade was Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to land on the moon. All of this was happening between one decade and made everyone’s life very stressful. I think people enjoyed zombies because it allowed them to talk about something other than the crazy time they were living in and also allowed them to use their imagination. People really do fear the future, and during this time period, people were being bombarded with some very scary global catastrophes. People were not sure if they would be alive tomorrow. During the early 1950s, students in school were going through duck and cover drills. These drills came around due to the fear of a nuclear bomb being dropped on the US, and these drills were carried on into the 60s. Many US citizens may have felt as if the world around them was falling apart, surrounded by fear and potentially death. The US government was also taking a lot of heat for still taking part in the Vietnam war. A majority of the US population did not back the war, so there was a growing distrust between the government and its citizens. All the news stories on these issues would induce fear into the people and would turn people away. No one’s gonna read about the Cuban Missile Crisis in the newspaper and believe that they are safe. Zombie stories gave people the opportunity to escape and witness the world end in a way they had never imagined. Even though the world may have been ending due to zombies, people were still able to sleep at night knowing that zombies are fictional creatures. Zombies began to become a part of people’s lives and it only continued to grow. This love for zombies continued to grow into the twenty-first century and is still growing. The world that we live in today is facing many problems between terrorism, diseases, economic problems, social issues, climate, and a lot of political division between people. Zombie movies, shows, and comics allow people to talk about something other than the ridiculous world we live in. People just want something to fear other than what they have to fear about in their actual daily lives. Zombies are fictional and allow for people’s fears to be focused on the show or movie.
Data Set (Parish Relevance)
Cole Conlon
The hardest part about reading Defoe’s “A Journal of the Plague Year” is keeping up with the location and where all the deaths are from. I tried coming up with a solution to see what parishes are most talked about in helping me better understand. So, I chose to take a deeper look at the relevance of each parish. I decided to create a line graph on Google, and I took a decently large sample size of some of the parishes in the novel and looked at how many times they were talked about in the novel. I wanted to see how many times each parish was mentioned and see where H.F had spent most of his time. It is sometimes hard to keep up with the location of the narrator. H.F. is constantly being told different stories and sometimes may be in one location and hearing stories of a nearby parish. It is also easier to see where H.F. has traveled and where the plague is most severe. My data set was quite interesting and showed that St. Stepney, St. Mary White Chappel, and St. Giles Cripplegate were the most referenced parishes. All of these parishes were referenced more than 25 times. A couple other parishes that were mentioned over 20 times were, St. Giles in the Fields, Aldgate, and Southwark. There were a few parishes that were hardly mentioned in the data and those were, St. Brides, St. Albans, and St. Mary WoolChurch. Those three parishes were only mentioned once. The reader is able to look at the novel in a different way when able to group the parishes together. I believe that one major flaw with the novel is the struggle to keep up with the location of H.F. It is very easy to get lost in the stories that are being told to H.F.. I believe by using this data it is easier to understand what parishes were struggling the most with the plague. Also allows you to better comprehend which parishes were most visited. This data may also help you understand how the plague itself was moving throughout the novel. I think this is extremely vital to the reader, as I lose focus of where I am at times while reading, due to the novel being quite dry at times. I think the graph I made is extremely influential and is perfect for what I hoped it would be able to do. It gives you an idea of the most important parishes and helps keep up with the pace that the story moves at. This graph was extremely helpful and definitely did what it was intended to do. It allowed me to be able to understand the movement of H.F. and the plague itself. It also helped me gain a clearer understanding of the stories being told.
Blog post #3
Twelfth Night is a play written by Shakespear and was a comedy, which also had a lot of irony throughout it. I wanted to use Voyant tools to test a theory that I had. Given that the play is ironic, I wanted to see if there was a connection between the word “fool” and the character Feste, also known as the Clown. The Clown is supposed to be the least intelligent and jokester of the play. However, he appears to be the most intelligent and Viola even points that out. The tools I used to check my theory are Stream Graphs and Trends. Both of these tools checked to see the amount of times the words were used throughout the play. They both check how they are relative to each other and if there is any connection that can be made. I thought it was quite interesting to see that in the Trends graph, when the Clown was mentioned that fool was used significantly less. There was also only one instance where the word “fool” was used more than the word “clown” in the Trend graph. The Stream Graph pointed out that there was an inverse relationship between the two words. Whenever the word “fool” was used a significant amount, the word “clown” was barely used. Both of these graphs go to prove my point that Feste the Clown may be the smartest of the characters. Both graphs also did a good job of showing the inverse relationship between the words. Feste is dressed as a clown and may be looked at as an idiot but is actually quite intelligent. Viola even stated that Feste’s witticism requires a great deal of intelligence and skill, and is comparable to the work of a scholar or wise man. Feste has a strange part in the play. He mostly sits out on the sidelines and waits for the perfect time to make an entrance. Viola is clearly taking note of this great skill that Feste has. Feste himself knows that he is surrounded by idiots himself. Malvolio who is referred to as a highly intelligent character in the beginning of the play ends up being the main fool of the entire play. The reason I chose the two tools that I used was to see the most simple way to connect the two words together. I believe the tools did a great job of helping me prove my theory. The tools themselves were very easy to use and provided a better understanding of the play for me. The only issue that I have with the tools is that, someone who knows little to none about the book would be extremely confused. Having an understanding of the play is important to be able to use these tools. At the end of the day, the tools did their job and helped me prove my theory.
Cole's Re-coding of Literature 