(Page Naming Convention: Name your new page: Bibliography by Your Name.  Remove this line when you are done.)

Annotated Bibliography Assignment

By Mike Smith, Hemingway Short Story

1. Hemingway, Ernest. “Indian Camp.” The Short Stories. New York: Scribner 1966. 89-95.

“Indian Camp” is one of the first instances where we as readers of Hemingway’s fiction get to meet one of his most often used characters, Nick Adams. Hemingway came back to Nick and his life many times throughout his career if only in the short story form. This particular Nick Adams story involves a trip to an Indian reservation with his father and his uncle. His father and his uncle are both doctors, it is not clear what kind of doctors, and they are going to the reservation to help as nicks dad says to help “an Indian lady [who is] very sick”(89). The Indian lady is very sick; she has been in labor for more than two days as we find out later in the story. The story is not truly about the sick Indian woman; it is about the experience that Nick has watching and sometimes helping his father work. Through this story we see Nick grow as he realizes that as quick as life can be brought into this world it can be taken away. That is to say because after the baby is finally delivered Nick, his father and all the others in the cabin come across the dead body of the baby’s father, who committed suicide.  This story gives us a great glimpse into the life of Nick and an excellent place to look back to, to form our ideas of Nick and the decisions that he has made in his life.

2. Moretti, Franco. Graphs Maps Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History. New York: Verso, 2007.

Moretti’s book is designed to give those who are more literarily inclined a new look at what they have been studying. Moretti’s goal, as it seems, is to explain the written word in a whole new way. The three main sections of the book, graphs, maps then trees explain how each of these techniques can be used to interpret texts. Moretti shows us through each of the sections specific examples of how this can be done. For example on page twelve in the graphs section he has a line graph which depicts the volume of works that were imported into India from 1850 to 1900. From which we can interpret many different things in many different ways. This new way of thinking about texts seems to be the focus of the book opening up many new possibilities within the field of text analysis. This goes on throughout the other sections helping to provide concrete analysis and proof that Moretti’s techniques can actually give us some kind of new insight into works that we may have thought to already have mastered. 

3. Scratch. 15 May 2007. Lifelong Kindergarten Group. 12 February 2008 <http://scratch.mit.edu/>  

            Our idea for our project is based upon visualizing a text and through that visualization creating a new interpretation of the texts. The scratch web site and the actual scratch program will allow us to explore another medium of visualization, that medium being a basic for of java programming. What this program allows us to do is create a replica environment that the user could interact with and hopefully learn from. The program itself was designed for novice users, as it says in the “about” tab on the web site “Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills.” So the interface is designed to be easily accessible to anyone with the time to sit down and actually learn the program. The programmers decided to use as the main tool of the program specially designed blocks. There are several categories of blocks and each category makes your “sprites” or characters do certain things such as walk turn around or make a sound. From these building blocks you can slowly create anything from a short film to an interactive game.

4. TAPoR. Date of Access. McMaster University. 8 February 2008 <http://portal.tapor.ca/portal/portal>.

            The TAPoR is a web site that allows user, once signed up for the free account, to analyze literature in many different ways. The home page of the web site allows users to learn more about the TAPoR and how the TAPoR came to be. Under the heading “want to learn more?” is a list of links leading the user to different pages that show the user around the web site, how to use the web site and even a link to a page that details a parallel group at the same supporting university that calls themselves TADA. TADA stands for text analysis developers’ alliance and is a group that support and helps develop new and interesting ways to analyze texts. The home page also allows for non-users to try out the text analysis tools without having to sign up for an account and look through the tools and texts that TAPoR has to offer. There is also a TAPoR news section that explains recent updates and general information about the web site.

            Once you have signed up for an account, received the confirmation e-mail and logged in the site takes you to the “my texts” tab. Once there you can review and manage what texts you have already loaded onto the TAPoR. You can also search through your texts and the public texts that have been placed onto the TAPoR’s database, there are many different kinds of search criteria and “tags” to help narrow down your search. The other main focus on the “my texts” tab is adding the texts that you want to analyze. There are several ways to add texts, from simply typing them in yourself to uploading a file or using a link to the text that you would like to use.

            The work bench is the other main tab that houses all of the “tools” that you can use to analyze the texts that you have just added. The tools range from simple word finders to a toll called “raining words” where all of the words from the text rain down and the bigger the word the more often it is used in the story. The TAPoR is a great tool not only for this project but for anyone interested in learning more about there favorite texts.

5. Words Eye. Date of Posting. Semantic Light LLC. 9 February 2008 <http://www.wordseye.com/frontpage>.

The Words Eye web site was designed so that people could turn texts, descriptive images, into a three dimensional computer generated image. When you first come upon the site the front page has several examples of user created content that you can browse through. Unlike some web sites this one requires you to sign up for an account, which is free, before you can try out the software. Once you have signed up all of the options for this software are available to you. To get started there are tutorials but the learning curve is still steep. The program is somewhat simple so very intricate and complicated ideas and pictures might be out of this programs range. Also as with many kinds of software you have to be very specific about what you want and where you would like it to placed, what color you want the object and things of that nature. This site also allows you store your creations, edit them after you have completed them and a forum to express opinions about others work or ask questions about the site. If you do get stuck the help link at the top of the site can be helpful if it isn’t sometimes lacking in the step by step instructions. Words eye is a web site that is set up for people who want to do things their own way to have a space where they can do and create whatever they want and this ideal shows in all facets of the web site from the help section to the simplistic layout of the site. The program itself is difficult to learn at first but once you have caught up to the curve you can turn any text into a three dimensional computer animated picture. Even though the pictures can be somewhat plain this program and web site allows us to create a different look at a text.