Jennifer M. Chang

English 197 Portfolio

[jennifermchang]

Final thoughts

All in all, I’m very happy that I took this class. I thought it was a great upper-division seminar and I think I learned a lot just by asking questions and thinking about the class in the context of modern life and technology. Reading all of the different kinds of content and learning about “distant reading,” paired with the ubiquitous nature of data and quantitative information, forced me to take a step back and reflect deeply upon the way I use technology on a day-to-day basis, as well as the ways in which the digital age affects the way I read and interpret texts.

There’s so much content out there, from novels to political discourse to personal blogs, and we play such a large role in creating it every second. And the fact that we’re constantly inundated with it changes the way we pay attention to it. It almost necessitates distant reading, simply because we don’t have the attention span or the mental capacity to pay such close attention to everything. I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing...it’s just a demonstration of the way that the world is changing and the way literature itself is changing, both the way it’s written and the way it’s read. I do think it’s a little sad, though, that people don’t put as much thought into literary interpretation in general anymore. It’s sad that we have such short attention spans, that we can only digest information in small tidbits, or read at surface-level. It’s sad that we are distant readers, when writers have poured out their hearts and souls into their work.

I think that’s one thing I like about being an English major. Even though it doesn’t look as impressive, I like to think of it as preserving art. By continuing the practice of close reading and extensive literary interpretation, we’re giving authors’ work the attention it deserves. I think that’s what writers live for, not only for their work to be enjoyed and appreciated, but also for it to have meaning to someone.

[jennifermchang]

Thought Essay #2

Distant reading has allowed for a rather incredible phenomenon in modern literary interpretation—the luxury of objectivity. Literature, like any art form, is extremely subjective in its analysis. However, the distance that accompanies the ubiquitous nature of the digital landscape serves to reveal literate in its most raw form—pure information, stripped of decorum or aesthetics—largely invisible to everyone, including the author. Unlike close reading, distant reading does not cater to the holistic view of literature; instead, it examines texts in the most impartial way possible, allowing a more quantitative look at the data. Through the completion of the class project, it is clear that distant reading is not only a convenient part of modern literary interpretation, but also a necessary one; with the amount of literature readily available and the digital content being constantly created at any given moment, an unbiased and uninvolved perspective is important. Thanks to digital tools and resources, rather than engaging in a large volume of literature at the micro level, scholars and researchers can now view literature as sets of encoded data, which make comparison and analysis much easier than using abstract data. This class project demonstrated the usefulness of distant reading and investigation in literary interpretation today, by providing us with the resources to analyze a corpus of over a hundred children’s fiction books from the 1880s.

In our preliminary research for the class project, Ashley and I were assigned to compile a contemporary comparison corpus for our 1880s children literature corpus. However, while we did our research independently, we encountered similar problems. Firstly, it was difficult to decide what kind of children’s literature to pick without having a research question in mind. In order to select appropriate reading material for comparison, it would have been useful to know exactly what kind of data we were seeking. And secondly, there was a noticeable lack of contemporary children’s fiction available online, due to copyright infringement issues, which severely limited our options. It also brought to attention a fundamental flaw in digital literary study: it does not allow a comprehensive view of all literature, only the easily accessible works, which are often self-published or uncited.

For the text analysis portion of the class project, our group chose to use Voyant Tools, Lexos, and AntConc. Personally, I liked Voyant Tools and Lexos for their visual representations of data; they were colorful and easy-to-read, which made it easy to evaluate data with a single glance. We were most interested in word frequency and how it created patterns that could be analyzed and from which conclusions could be drawn. In conducting different experiments, looking at word frequencies, and analyzing different trends that emerged, along with considering the significance of our research in proportion to the theme of the course, I was struck by the data we uncovered in our corpus. We first studied Jo’s Boys by Louisa May Alcott, because all of us had a generally vague understanding of the storyline. Upon first inputting it into Voyant Tools, we noted that the language was very simplistic, perhaps to cater to the presumably younger audience; however, the phrasing was much more sophisticated compared to that of contemporary children’s books. From this information we could make the generalization that a) either children were more well-read in the 1880s, or b) children’s fiction in the 1880s was more sophisticated.

We also looked at gender in both broad and narrow sense. We discovered that out of the 105 male authors and the 29 female authors, the men overwhelmingly wrote about male characters (with effectively zero of them in the corpus about solely female characters), and the women wrote mostly about female characters. Using a holistic view of the entire corpus, it was also clear that the male characters in the aforementioned novels were also written more positively than the female characters. Men and boys were hardworking, adventurous, and pioneers; women were weak-willed, passive, and wholly uninteresting. While women and girls were featured in some of the novels, they almost always played supporting roles like wives or mothers, or the girls were secondary characters to the main male protagonist.

We also noticed that Jo’s Boys, while largely centered on boys and their activities, portrayed women and girls in a favorable light—well-mannered and self-sufficient. The novel featured high frequencies of words with positive connotation, such as “like,” “good,” “dear,” “great,” “happy,” “love,” and “better.” In contrast, G.A. Henty’s A Final Reckoning contained almost no mention of women, with a predominance of male-oriented words like “Mr.,” “master,” “man,” and “boy,” and that these words had a strong correlation to the word “work.” Henty, who is well-known for his books about the adventures of boys, includes very few feminine words like “girls,” “women,” “Mrs.,” and “lady.” In Oliver Optic’s All Adrift, Optic (also another author known for writing “boy’s stories”) uses words like “wildest,” “wanderings,” and “unwholesome” to describe the male characters, suggesting that boys were more unconventional, can’t-be-tamed rule-breakers and adventurers that girls.

It is important to note that although these gender ideals are rather antiquated (reflective of the values of the 1880s), even today we struggle with equal gender representation in popular culture media today. While the focus has shifted off of literature, the new areas of criticism are television, movies, and video games, in which it has frequently been pointed out that women are still held to unrealistic standards, faced with racist and sexist stereotypes, or objectified. The glaring inequalities in the gender binary were much more accepted or commonplace in the 1880; thus, it wasn’t surprising to find such stereotypes in children’s literature of the time period. However, it brings to light an important contemporary problem: if we are portraying women and girls in a particular light in the media, it is no wonder that they suffer from unrealistic expectations for themselves and from others about how they should look, dress, and act. While our research revealed a lot about the 1880s and the patterns and thoughts of writers about gender roles in society, it also provoked a thoughtful examination of our modern values and how they have and have not changed.

Although we gleaned a good of information from this project, it seemed that the research questions we really wanted answers to were better suited to in-depth studies of individual novels than a broad analysis of a whole corpus. Many of the questions we asked were specific to particular authors or storylines, and it would have been more useful to ask more comprehensive questions. In addition, we could have chosen questions with more direction; rather than analyzing for correlation, we should have written specific parameters for the novels we were testing in order to obtain more concrete data. While “distant reading” can be an effective method of exploring literature, perhaps it is not the best procedure when attempting to get the root of fundamental problems such as the ones we posed.

[jennifermchang]

Specialized research

We’ve decided to narrow our focus to 1880s children’s literature. Lindsay and Aaron have spent a lot of time and effort choosing novels to include in our corpus, and have come up with a list of 134 novels to use as a base. I’ve been assigned to the text analysis team, which means that we will eventually perform basic research on all 134 novels in order to gather data and make general observations.

To start, we chose one novel from the corpus, Jo’s Boys by Louisa May Alcott, to kind of serve as our control. By running it through Voyant Tools, we made a couple of observations.

Surprisingly, the words “girls” and “boys” were mentioned fairly equally throughout the novel, despite the novel being centered around the activities of boys. However, we noticed that the word “boys” was usually used directly (referring to the thoughts and actions of boys), whereas “girls” was often used theoretically (referring to the ideas of girls, how they should act, or their relation to boys in the context of the story).

Secondly, we noticed that the words “don’t” and “won’t” were among those mentioned in high frequency. “Don’t” seemed to correlate more closely with “girls” and “won’t” appeared to intersect with “boys” more often. This was an interesting find as well, as it could be used to make inferences about the way children’s behavior is perceived. Is “don’t” (a command word) used in conjunction with “girls” because of the way girls are “supposed” to act, or that they’re more submissive? Is “won’t” (a word that denotes resistance) used to imply that boys are disobedient or more strong-willed? We’ll have to to further research on it, naturally, but it’s a good start.

And lastly, we used the Cirrus tool to look at the most frequently-used words overall. We saw that a lot of the words on the list had a positive connotation, like "great," "like," "good," "dear," "happy," and “love.” We assumed that this was because of the female author, and was most likely linked to the themes of family and relationships as opposed to the adventure stories that are common among male authors. It was a good lead into potential research of author genders.

Overall, I think Jo’s Boys was a good choice in terms of comparison, as there were a lot of different aspects to be unpacked. We’ll use this as a starting place for our research on the other novels in our corpus and a kind of template for our research.

[jennifermchang]

Preliminary research

We started thinking more about the topic for our class project today. I’m not quite sure what to focus on...there’s such a wide expanse of literature to choose from and so many potential research questions to study. I think what it’s going to come down to is what we’re able to quantify and effectively examine really closely with the tools we have, which is kind of the point of the class.

I proposed that we look at the way authors from the 1880s use the word “I.” Millennials are often criticized for being entitled and self-involved, so it might be worthwhile exploring the way that contemporary literature, namely characters in novels, refer to the self compared to the way 1880s heroes and heroines do so. I think it could reveal a lot about the way our mindset and attitude toward ourselves and self-reflection has evolved over time.

I have to look a little more into what kind of novels we would use, but I think it would be an interesting research question. Other topics proposed were gender roles (male vs. female characters, male vs. female authors), children’s literature, positive/negative connotation in writing, and comparisons in literature in translation.

[jennifermchang]

Starting on the class project

The point of this class is that it doesn’t follow traditional structure. Instead of homework and tests we have mini-projects, which allow us to explore resources and tools to be used  for the Big Project that we complete as a class, which will showcase what we’ve learned about digital texts and literary interpretation, as well as unpack a proposed research question or hypothesis about a specified corpus.

It’s a little bit daunting, honestly, how much literature we have at our disposal. We could quite literally access pieces written hundreds of years back and compare them to pieces written five minutes ago. Thanks to the incessant flow of information and the aggressive need of our generation for documentation, the digital landscape is in a constant state of flux. And this makes analysis a never-ending task. While we delve into literature from the 1800s, new content is being created for comparison by the second.

We’re still exploring a bunch of potential research questions, but my personal interest is in the micro-level. I’m honestly more interested in taking it piece by piece, rather than encompassing a broad scope like the corpora, and analyzing how one author thinks and their writing style evolves. While essentially the focus of our class project is to consider a massive spectrum of literature on a quantifiable literature, one of the things I’d like is for it not to lose its original charm and soul, which can only be accomplished with a closer eye.

[jennifermchang]

Thought Essay #1

The introduction of the digital landscape has drastically changed traditional methods of discovering, reading, annotating, and interpreting literature. The scholarly capabilities of this particular concentration are much broader with this new approach—essentially, researchers can now take readings and quantify their contents into concrete data, which was formerly regarded as generally abstract information. This allows for patterns, trends, and effects to emerge and be examined in an academic context, giving literary interpretation an entirely new depth and dimension. The increasing popularity of these tools has created an interesting paradox: that although we study works of literature more closely, we actually distance ourselves from the texts by no longer viewing them as whole entities but merely collections of various quantifiable elements, a concept introduced by Franco Moretti in Graphs, Maps, Trees (2007). While it can be argued that this detachment is too far removed from the original intent of the author, in fact, a certain objectivity is useful in literary interpretation; it prevents preconceived notions or personal interests from coloring perception, and provides inherently impartial insight of the text itself. This kind of study has the potential for endless applications outside of the curriculum—as we reside in a digital world that continues to evolve into a more analytical and data-driven environment, refreshed methods of evaluation allow classical literature to remain pertinent to today’s readers.

Although digital texts may seem slightly unconventional, they are gradually becoming an integrated part of the field of literary study, as asserted by Yin Liu in “Ways of Reading, Models for Text, and the Usefulness of Dead People” (2014). Liu states that regarding early literature, we cannot expect that people in other historical and cultural contexts used texts in the ways modern scholars do today For example, the “strangeness” of the verbiage in medieval texts allows us to view and analyze them without immersion in the content, thus fostering ease of recognition of periodical idiosyncrasies and acknowledgement of expressions of data. While distance between reader and text seems counterintuitive in literary interpretation, it provides a more comprehensive context within which to view and process existing information. It offers a sharper sense of interconnection and patterns; as new generations of readers develop, classical literature often loses its appeal, seen as irrelevant or outdated (Moretti, 5). Similarly, Liu argues that it discourages assumptions about the universality and necessity of text, when in fact it might be attributed to “our own historical position and cultural prejudices” (2014). The concept of the “usefulness of dead people” is rooted in Liu’s belief that contemporary analysis has rendered literature somewhat immortal—the use of new methods of investigation creates a fresh perspective that maintains its usefulness over time, so that the contributions of historical figures may always remain applicable, even to the digital age. It is important to note that the significance of literature is not necessarily its ability to stay current, but to present a cohesive depiction of thoughts and ideas, from which readers can derive personal meaning that transcends time. Much of the inquiry into basic text analysis includes word frequency, which can actually serve as valuable insight into important aspects of text. My analysis of “The Importance of Being Earnest” by Oscar Wilde was the first exercise in which I saw a direct connection between the data I was extracting and the meaning of the text itself. The unique format of plays differs from that of novels allows an almost precise correlation between the number of times a character’s name is mentioned and the amount of dialogue attributed to said character. For example, while Gwendolen is arguably a more important character than the young, naïve Cecily, “Gwendolen” appears only 157 times in contrast to “Cecily,” which appears 254 times. This ostensibly trivial piece of information reveals a surprising amount about the two women’s characters. While Gwendolen is portrayed as vain, shallow, and rather vapid, with little to contribute to conversation, Cecily is sharp-tongued and largely self-important, which can be attributed to her desire to be heard and taken seriously. After using the scrubbing tool in Lexos, the most frequently-used word was “am,” which is always used in conjunction with “I,” used 110 times, which accurately reflects the nature of the characters of the play: self-centered and concerned only with their own social status and public image. The absurdity of the characters, along with the title of the play itself (“A Trivial Comedy for Serious People”), is true to Wilde’s tongue-in cheek style of mockery and acknowledgement of the hypocrisy and arrogance of the aristocracy. The fact that we can infer these things from a piece of literature written over a century ago is truly amazing and exciting—not only is a sense of connection created between past and present, but these developments in modern literary interpretation allow for the collection of concrete data to support research questions and assumptions, something that wasn’t possible a mere decade ago. Prior to the use of digital analytics, much of literary study was theoretical guesswork, which is tremendously subjective and has the potential to be wildly imprecise; however, these new methods have revolutionized and transformed into a science this formerly abstract practice, which is undoubtedly beneficial for both the longevity of the text and the research interests of scholars.

As consumer culture and academic pursuits become increasingly digital territory, and the demand for print materials is in decline, it is easy to question the nature of literature and its place in modern society. However, digital text analysis and data mining from something as subjective as literature is invaluable: this transition is proof that literature, like any other important art form, has adapted and involved in a significant and relevant way—to fit into a world that is progressively more methodical and dependent upon quantitative data. Literary interpretation has acquired a multifaceted and multidisciplinary complexion, and the ability for readers to remove themselves from the text and dissect its components for subtleties or idiosyncrasies is nothing short of radical. Michael Witmore writes in his blog post “Text: A Massively Addressable Object,” that the ability to quantify literature creates endless possibilities of inquiry: different levels of scale and objects of addressability allow us to address it on numerous different levels that would not be possible. The fact that literature has so many new real-world applications due to technology is evidence of its usefulness, whether written five or five hundred years ago, and a testament to the permanence of literature itself.

[jennifermchang]

Practicum 6: Social Networking

I chose Chapter 16 (the start of Part 2) of A Thousand Splendid Sun by Khaled Hosseini, one of my favorite books. In Part 2 of the novel, the point of view shifts from that of Mariam, the 15-year-old child bride, to Laila, one of the children in the village.

Most of the interaction in this chapter centers around Laila and her daily experiences. She briefly has a conversation with two of her friends, Giti and Hasina, but aside for that, her conversations are mostly with only one other person. This is typical of the style of the book, in which the storyline mostly focuses around one person and their thoughts and actions. Laila is a relatively introspective character, especially with her isolation in the book, but more importantly, the limited interactions are demonstrative of the oppressed nature of women during this time period, when they were allowed to be sold as property. I think it would be interesting to see this entire book mapped out, along with its predecessor, The Kite Runner, which is written from the perspective of a boy in Afghanistan, to see the differences in interactions.

[jennifermchang]

Practicum 5: Topic Modeling

I had some problems downloading the Topic Modeling Tool at first, but I finally got it to work. I chose Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace because it's notoriously long, and I wanted to see what topics the tool would pick up out of a novel that's supposedly one of the most important works of literature ever written (I have never read it, but I was hoping this would serve as inspiration/motivation to). I admit I still didn't have a great idea of what the book was about after I finished running it through the program:

The results weren't very conclusive, but all of the words were one I'd expect from a Russian novel about war. I went into "Advanced" settings and changed the number of iterations to 100, but kept the number of topics at 10.

This was an interesting change, as it picked up on words that were most frequently used, but not necessarily important (i.e., "called"). I noticed that it read more like a story when scanning the list of revised topics.

I'm not entirely sure what to gain from topic modeling, but it was still interesting to see how the computer chose to quantify what is a relatively abstract set of information.

[jennifermchang]

Some notes so far...

People always ask me what classes I’m taking (perhaps out of decorum or as a measure of conversation-starting), and since I assume they aren’t interested in my Literature & the Mind classes, I tell them about this one. I’ve learned to be succinct about it, because college students tend to have attention spans that rival the length of goldfish’s, and so far the best description I’ve come up with is this:

“It’s a course that examines the quantifiable aspects of literature (word count, frequency, collocation) and turns them into concrete data for interpretation. It’s interesting because we can study what used to be an abstract art form and its constituents and use it to understand how and why it was written, and how the digital landscape affects our viewing of it.”

I actually really enjoy this class. Although it’s a specialized English seminar, I think it’s a course everyone should take, especially now as industrial focus shifts to big data and analytics. It’s pretty amazing that we’ve begun to take on literature in a scientific fashion; it allows us to see its connections to the past and make predictions for the future, something that was thought impossible until the introduction of the digital landscape.

I’m not really sure how I feel about everything being digitized, though. I’m the proud owner of a Kindle, and I love the fact that I can take 50 books with me for less than a pound in my suitcase, but I feel like the aesthetics of reading are part of the experience. I’m conflicted because anything that makes 18th-century literature more accessible to the public and increases its popularity should be celebrated, but simultaneously I wonder if the people experiencing it through these new, digital aspects are experiencing it in the way the author would have wanted.

Such is the crisis of an artist, I suppose: no one understands your work.

[jennifermchang]

Practicum 4: Text Analysis 2

I used Lexos for my first text analysis assignment, so for the second part, I decided to use Voyant and AntConc. I analyzed Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, using the Voyant Bubblelines tool:

This was a very visually appealing way of studying word frequency. The tool took the most commonly occurring words in the text over the course of the novel, as well as their frequency in each part. The word "man" had the highest appearance rate, at 102 times, while "Kurtz" appeared 93 times. This is appropriate because the novel itself reflects on the dark nature of man, and centers around Mr. Kurtz.

I also used the Voyant Knots tool, which showed the interconnectivity of some of the same words. "Man," "project," and "work" displayed high interconnectivity, unsurprising because in the novel the operations of the steamer are contingent upon the cooperation of the men on board the Nellie, and the plot chronicles Marlow's recollection of his experiences as part of the crew.

I also looked at some of the words individually using trend graphs...I chose "saw," "man," and "great." The word "saw" saw a sharp incline in frequency as Marlow describes in first person his harrowing journey into the depths of the jungle, and the horrors he encounters with the rapidly deteriorating and increasingly mad Mr. Kurtz. "Man" is fairly frequently mentioned throughout the book, but displays a significant drop toward the middle of the book, perhaps reflective of his experience firsthand with Mr. Kurtz rather than speaking hypothetically or about him in theory. The word "suddenly" notably occurs at the height of the action, mostly toward the beginning and end of the middle part, but tapers off at the end after they escape the jungle and Kurtz dies.

The word "great" was a fascinating one to look at, especially given the context of the novel. Marlow is continually told about "the great Mr. Kurtz" by the other crew members, which may explain the high frequency in the beginning. However, it drops sharply in the middle of the book, when Kurtz is at the height of his insanity and Marlow is fighting for his and his crew's survival. At the end, the word reappears in relative frequency, possibly due to Marlow speaking about him in retrospect and reflecting upon his achievements as a great man prior to his madness.

And lastly, I used AntConc to compare both Heart of Darkness and The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, because both explore the nature of man and his descent into madness and/or darkness. "Man" appears consistently throughout Heart of Darkness, but is a little more concentrated in the beginning, when Marlow has not yet met Mr. Kurtz but discusses the idea of him. The Picture of Dorian Gray, with the degradation of the painting, delves into a more abstract, psychological conceptualization of the self as a being in the context of his own mind, thus the frequent appearance of the word "man" toward the end of the book.

[jennifermchang]

Practicum 3: Text Analysis 1

I chose my favorite play, "The Importance of Being Earnest" to analyze, because I find British humor very amusing and thought that a close examination of it could reveal some things about Wilde's writing style and British humor.

My first attempt was with AntConc, but it refused to download, so I used Voyant and Lexos instead. I liked the colorful style, ease of use, and variety of interpretations of data of Lexos the best. It was an interesting and visually appealing way to analyze word frequency, and it was fun moving my cursor and observing the trends in word usage throughout the text.

I uploaded the file in its entirety and used the BubbleViz tool, removing the list of stopwords from the text:

"The Importance of Being Earnest" is written in play form, which means that any dialogue spoken is first labeled with the character's name. I thought it would be interesting to see if the amount of dialogue was important to the character. As you can see, "Jack" is the most frequently used word, with 286 usages. This makes sense as he's the main character, around which the play is centered. "Gwendolen" has 175 lines of dialogue, and "Cecily" has 254 lines. While Gwendolen is arguably a more important character than Cecily, it's interesting to see that she has a little more than half the amount of dialogue that Cecily does. This can perhaps be attributed to her intelligence (she is written as an extremely vain, shallow, and vapid character). Cecily, on the other hand, is portrayed as self-important and intelligent, thus, she speaks a little less than twice as much as Gwendolen, possibly because of her desire to be heard throughout the play.

Next, I also tried removing "project," "gutenberg," and all of the names from the text using the Scrub tool.  This is what the resulting graph looked like:

I noticed that the word "am" (always used in conjunction with "I") was used 110 times, which accurately reflects the nature of the characters in the play: all rather self-centered and concerned with their own status or public image. "Name" was also a relatively popular word, which makes sense given that the entire play is concerned with the importance of names. "Oh," "yes," and "dear" were three of the most frequently used words, which I found funny because they're words typically characteristic of British patterns of speech. "Don't" was also a prominent word, which I can only interpret as a command used by many of the characters, who instruct one another on how to behave and how to think.

[jennifermchang]

Practicum 2: Finding Digital Texts

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare (plain text here)

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde (plain text here)

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (plain text here)

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (plain text here)

The Vision of Hell by Dante Alighieri (plain text here)

Beyond Good and Beyond Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche (plain text here)

Dream Psychology by Sigmund Freud (plain text here)

Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde by Oscar Wilde (plain text here)

American Fairy Tales by L. Frank Baum (plain text here)

[jennifermchang]

Practicum 1: Text Encoding

Originally appears on jayemsey.com

Brown Butter Salted Caramel Cookie Cups

I tried this recipe as an experience about a month ago, and they came out amazing. It was posted by a guy on Imgur claiming it was "the perfect cookie," so of course I had to test it. As it turns out, they're pretty damn near perfect, and I'll definitely be making them again. They were quite time-consuming, but the end result made them very worth it.

For the caramel:

1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter

1/2 cup heavy cream or heavy whipping cream

3 tbsp water

1/4 cup light corn syrup

1 cup granulated sugar

A pinch coarse sea salt

In a small pot or tall-sided sauce pan, combine water, sugar, and corn syrup. Bring to a boil (it should bubble lightly). Do not stir, but swirl the pan a few times so it doesn't burn. As soon as it's boiling, drop in the cream and butter. Lower the heat and stir. It should "bubble furiously" according to the recipe, which is why you need a tall-sided sauce pan. Return to high heat and continue stirring, until it turns from a cream-yellow color to a rich, nutty brown color. The mixture will start out bubbly and slimy but will become smooth and viscous, and it should drip off your spoon in ribbons when it's done. Pour into a heavily-greased flat pan or dish (we used a glass bowl, which I do not recommend). Let stand at room temperature for 30 minutes, sprinkle with salt liberally, and let stand for another 60 minutes. You can also substitute ready-made caramel squares if you want to save time, but I promise the homemade kind is much better.

For the cookie:

1 cup (two sticks) butter (do not combine)

1 cup light brown sugar

2 tsp vanilla extract

1/2 cup granulated sugar

1 large egg

2 1/4 cups flour

1 tsp salt

1 tsp baking soda (I didn't have this so I used 1 1/2 tsp baking powder)

Preheat oven to 350 °F.

In a small sauce pan (I suggest a silver-coated one), melt 1/2 cup (1 stick) over medium heat. Continue cooking until the butter is dark brown and smells nutty. The top will foam up and there will be brown sediment forming at the bottom which is okay, but MAKE SURE it doesn’t turn black. That means the butter is burning. Remember how I said to use a silver-coated one? We ruined two sticks of butter because the heat was too high and we couldn’t see what color the butter was. The butter should turn brown, but after it does it burns very fast. Take it off the heat before you need to, because the pan will still be hot and the butter will continue to cook even with no flame. When it’s done, pour it into a small bowl and set aside (you can put it in the refrigerator for faster cooling).

In the large mixing bowl, combine the other stick of butter and the brown sugar. Cream on high for 5 minutes until light and fluffy. Add the cooled brown butter and the granulated sugar.  Continue beating on high for another 2 minutes, adding the eggs one at a time. Texture should be light and soft. Sift the dry ingredients, turn the mixer down to a low setting, and add them in three parts, mixing after each one.

Remove dough from bowl and wrap tightly in plastic wrap. Refrigerate for 30 minutes.

Meanwhile, turn your caramel out onto a cutting board and cut into small squares using a greased knife or pizza wheel. They should be roughly the size of Hershey’s kisses. Pull dough out of the refrigerator and portion into 1 oz balls. Stuff each one with a caramel portion, making sure the caramel is completely hidden. Drop each ball into a cup in a lightly-greased mini-muffin tray. Bake for 12 to 15 minutes (I did 12). Cookies should be lightly brown around the edges and soft on top. Turn upside-down onto a cooling rack, and let stand for at least five minutes before eating.

Enjoy!

[jennifermchang]

Introduction: Hacking Literary Interpretation

This is the first English seminar I’ve taken, so I’m not quite sure what to expect from it. The topic sounds interesting...from my understanding, this class is supposed to teach us about how the “digital age” has transformed the way we read and interpret texts, kind of taking literature apart and exploring the ways in which they were written. I think this is extremely relevant today, with all of the resources we have available to us, to demonstrate how important context is becoming in literature.

This portfolio is supposed to showcase our work for the class, but I think it has the potential to have a lot of applications outside of the curriculum. Now, as we become more data-driven and focused on the analytical, I think tools like these will help keep classical literature relevant.

Notes:

» Digital: Having to do with computers

» Changed landscape and new methods of storing/processing information

» Portfolio should “document, reflect, exhibit”