Before trying something new I need to get familiar with Tracery and SpaCy and word vectors. So, I will revisit my text cut-up from Week 2.
Previous cut-ups —>
Text cut-up from Week 2.
Old poem used in the digital text cut-up; Written in 2018
Notes for the process of the cut-up can be found in the Jupyter notebook here: https://github.com/meghag9704/RWET_A4.1/blob/main/Digital Cut-Up Revisited (MG_23Mar2023).ipynb
Note: Equity language is an ongoing conversation in the literary world. I am using this assignment as simply a meditation on the aspect of equity language and it does not speak to any personal belief or opinions on the topics of equity language and censorship.
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In February, news of Roald Dahl’s children’s books being changed to make language more inclusive and accessible made headlines causing many writers and the literary community to engage in a heated conversation about inclusivity. This past week I read an article relating to the topic in The Atlantic by George Packer. In it, Packer takes an excerpt from a book about a travel expedition to India and re-write it to be more inclusive and adds:
“By the new rules, shelf upon shelf of great writing might go the way of blind and urban. Open Light in August or Invisible Man and see how little would survive.”
For this digital text cut up, I wanted to use this as a prompt to create a tool that pulls texts from Project Gutenberg and applies an equity guide to them. I haven’t read Light in August or Invisible Men. So, for this experiment, I will choose Frankenstein as an example.
<aside> 💡 Note: I could not find this done elsewhere even though it seems like something that would exist. If you have seen these examples, I would love to see them.
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Looking at equitable guides.
As per The Atlantic article there are multiple established Equitable language guides. Here is a list of the ones I referenced: