MUDding

Posted on November 17, 2011 by james

The login screen from Genesis, the first LPMud

Image via Wikipedia

I began the month intending to write 50,000 words. I got a bit past 5,000 and then got sidetracked by another project. I shouldn’t be surprised. This is how it’s been in the past.

From the title, you might guess that the distraction was a game, and you’d be right. But I didn’t get sidetracked playing a game. Instead, I’ve been sidetracked creating a game. It’s one I’ve been working on now and again over the last few years, but I’m diving back in using my research day, evenings, and weekends to get enough stuff together that I can show it off at THATCamp Games near the end of January.

I might not be getting the 50,000 words done, but I am doing a lot of creating. At least I’m keeping within the spirit of the month.

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NaNoWriMo, Here I Come!

Posted on October 20, 2011 by james
Green with Red and Clear Pens 12.1

Image by ? Crystal Writer ? via Flickr

Every November, I mean to buckle down and write 50,000 words. Every November, something comes up that keeps me from doing it. Last year, I taught an introductory course to creative writing at Texas A&M University. The year before, I probably got too busy with work. This year, I’m going to make it happen! I don’t have any trips planned except for Thanksgiving. I don’t have any activities after work or on the weekend that take up a large amount of time. Nothing is standing in my way.

For those who haven’t heard of NaNoWriMo, hop over to the website and take a look. I’m raising money to help the nonprofit that runs it build communities in classrooms, coffee shops, libraries, and living rooms all over the world and help the inspiration flow for me and thousands of my fellow novelists. More importantly, your contribution will help The Office of Letters and Light build a more engaged and inspiring world.

For the rest of this post, I want to explore why NaNoWriMo works and touch a bit on what it could mean for digital humanities. Today is my research day, after all, so I need to tie this in with my work somehow.

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Narrative Statistics: Revisiting Sentence Length Statistics and What to Do Next

Posted on October 5, 2011 by james
This entry is part 2 of 2 in the series Narrative Statistics

 

Last week, we explored the Poisson distribution as a possible distribution of sentence lengths. If you look at the figure for Hunter Crackdown, the Poisson seems reasonable, but it breaks down when looking at other works. In this post, I’d like to go back and try to derive a distribution that has the same qualitative features as the distributions we saw for each of the works. Then, I want to discuss a bit what we might want to do next.

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Narrative Statistics: Figuring Out a Distribution of Words in Sentences

Posted on September 29, 2011 by james
This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Narrative Statistics

Thursdays are my research days. I have a couple things cooking away that I’m not quite ready to write about yet, but I want to take a little time today to explore something that I plan on doing a lot more once my cooking is done.

I’m interested in studying narrative as a dynamic system. That is, there are several variables at play that determine the direction of a narrative. There are plot dynamics, character dynamics, and thematics that an author plays with to construct the story. They all interact in complex ways. A particular plot might require certain type of characters. A particular character might not fit certain types of plots. Some plots and characters don’t illustrate well certain themes. The author has to select the right plots, characters, and themes (and write well) for the reader to enjoy the story. 

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Available: Of Fish and Swimming Swords

Posted on July 27, 2011 by james

Cover: Of Fish and Swimming Swords

I bit the bullet and pushed my novel out to the Kindle, Nook, and Smashwords stores. Feel free to download a copy and write a review! It’s only $2.99, but if you want it for less, comment here sometime in the next week (before August 4th, 2011) with a link to your blog and I’ll send you a coupon for Smashwords. The only thing I’ll ask in return is that you write a substantive and constructive review on your blog.

It will be two or three weeks before the novel is available in the iBookstore or other stores fed by Smashwords.  I’ll post when I see the novel show up in these other stores.

From the blurb:

In a world built around fours, where the trinity of the United States government has been replaced by the Cardinalities of the Muses, Barbara finds a hidden symbol in yet another investigation and suspects foul play. But who can she trust? As she and her family dive into the mystery and horror, they find that they are battling forces that reach to the very core of the world they believe in.

Follow the family of four as they unravel the mystery and discover more about each other.

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Fabulous Fabulator

Posted on May 28, 2011 by james

The Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) is in a week.  I’ll be teaching a course on data discovery, management, and presentation using a platform I’ve been developing for the last couple years.  This will be the first time other people will try to use the platform to build a project.  I’ve been writing the workbook for the week-long course and I think we can do it.

For those who aren’t familiar with what I call the Fabulator, I’ve developed a compute engine as an extension to Radiant, an open source content management system.  The goal is to provide a platform for dynamic, data-driven digital humanities project sites that fill the role of the traditional monograph.  These sites make a scholarly argument using interactive web applications instead of static text.  The problem is that libraries don’t want to touch these projects.  No one wants to provide the long-term maintenance required to keep a web application running as the underlying languages and systems change.

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Player Piano: Mechanizing the Humanities

Posted on April 29, 2011 by james

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a talk at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) with the same title.  I’ve linked to the video here so you can see the slides along with my monotone voice.  In this talk, I use imagery and music along with mathematics to explore how we might approach taking ownership of computing in the humanities.

The last slide is wrong.  It should be the following:

close:reading(text_) :=
     word_ \ connotes: semantic:connotations(word_),
     word__ = f:split(' ', text_),
     semantic:sensible?(word__)

close:reading(sentence_ \ time-period: '1860') 

I’ll explore the implications of this code in another post.

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Creating a Book Cover

Posted on April 24, 2011 by james

I’ll say right off that I don’t know how to create a great book cover.  What I want to explore in this post is my thinking behind the evolving cover for my first novel, Of Fish and Swimming Swords.

When self-publishing, you have to provide covers for each of the formats you’re publishing.  If an electronic edition, you’ll need the equivalent of a front cover.  If going with a POD edition, you’ll need the front, spine, and back of the cover.  Usually, you want the electronic cover to be a version of the POD cover.  For my covers, I’m using Inkscape for vector drawing and the GIMP for final composition and effects.  Both are free, open source applications that have versions for Microsoft Windows, OS X, and most UNIX/Linux distributions.

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Typesetting a Book with LaTeX

Posted on April 9, 2011 by james

The other day, I talked about building an e-book for Kindle and Nook.  Today, I want to add a few things to the Makefile we created so that we can produce a PDF.  The end result will be that every time you want to create a PDF of the book, you will only need to type ‘make pdf’.

If you’re one a Mac, you’ll want to install MacTeX.  If you’re on Linux/UNIX, you’ll want to install the package that contains pdflatex.  We’ll be using LaTeX to typeset our book.

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Building a Book for Kindle and Nook

Posted on April 7, 2011 by james

I’m thinking about self-publishing my novel, Of Fish and Swimming Swords, on Kindle and other ebook readers.  Today, I want to talk a little about the process I’m using to build the book as I do final edits and formatting.

The easiest way to build a book for Kindle and have a good chance that it will look like what you want is to create a MobiPocket file.  Amazon makes available all of the tools you need to create one of these files.  I use a Mac, so if you use either a Mac or a Linux/UNIX system, you should be okay.  I’m not sure how things work on Windows.

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