Computing and Texts - 20056

This connection is a new variation of the Poetry and the Computer Connection. Our goal is to demonstrate to students how computing can be used to investigate textual corpora (specifically the dictionary or Old English machine-readable corpus of Anglo-Saxon and the writings of J. R. R. Tolkien). Students will use techniques such as word-frequency counts to investigate and characterize authorship, prose and poetic style, and the dating of text. In the computer science course students will learn to design introductory experiments and as part of the Methods Section of those experiments, learn to write scripts (programs, software) to search textual corpora and gather statistical measures. In the English courses they will examine the ways that computing-based approaches can mesh with more traditional approaches.