A couple of weeks ago, I had a Python workshop where I piloted a streamlined version of my "Python for Working with Text" series, playing around with the idea of a tutorial that jumps more directly into loops from a very basic introduction to programming. The workshop brought me to rethink the ways I could play around with the order of how I teach Python concepts for working with text, particularly for analyzing gender.

My goal, explained in the last post, is to re-write the dissertation as a kind of programming handbook. So the past few days I've been thinking up potential outlines for my first chapter of the diss, which is on text analysis. The first chapter would be called "loops", and takes the iterativity of the loop as method for exploring how gender norms might be subverted in text analysis. Like the diss chapter, it begins with a quote form Orlando, but it then moves directly into instruction with loops. It explains how they work to clean the text of Orlando and how to analyze some of its elements. Then it moves to Gender Performativity, or it interweaves Performativity into the technical instruction. Finally, at the end, it introduces word vectors in a text analysis exercise.

The idea might be that a student could do an entire chapter for homework, say a week's homework, in a graduate course on Digital Humanities or something like that. Now I'm getting really excited, thinking about how the tutorial might open up computational ways of reading through and thinking about "literary" textual data.

As I draft out my ideas I'll have to figure out how to structure everything, especially some of the denser theoretical segues like my section on "falsifiable criticism". Maybe these can be streamlined into notes in the margin, though I would also want to provide a deeper engagement, should the reader want it. Maybe longer notes in the back, maybe an appendix, I don't know.

This is super exciting.