I wasn’t sure if this assignment required us just to share ideas for final projects or to present ideas for algorithmic criticism. I will attempt to do both.

The first idea I have for a final project involves drawing from our XHTML training. Here is a link to a site that I found containing a hypertext edition of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. (Note: You have to click on the image to open up a separate dialog, from which you select the individual sections of the novel). I found this really interesting because they provide interpretive aids for some of the more confusing sections of the novel. For example, the first section of Faulkner’s novel is narrated by a retarded boy named Benjy. The narrative is renowned for its disjointed and very confusing chronology. To aid the reader, the hypertext edition includes a scroll box on the side containing descriptions and dates to help the reader understand the chronology of events. On the home page, there are also links to lists of intertexts, criticism, and even visual aids. I really admire what the site creators did for this text and thought it would be interesting to try something similar for another text, for example, T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.”

As for algorithmic criticism, one idea I have is to compare one of Shakespeare’s plays, such as Hamlet or King Lear, with the sources they drew from, such as The Spanish Tragedy or King Leir. I suppose I could use visual tools to analyze how extensively Shakespeare drew from these sources and to what extent he ventured away. This is just an idea. I have not been able to successfully use many of the visualization tools with my computer to put the idea to the test.