Thursday News: More on Harper Lee, computer traces book plots, malicious online advertisements, and representing diversity
Publishing NewsAdvertising / Black History Month / book plots / computers / diversity / Hacking / Harper Lee / literature / Race1 Comments
Harper Lee: ‘Trade frenzy’ and ‘concern’ over new book – In the wake of news that a new (old) Harper Lee novel is going to be published, there has been much anticipation and much concern regarding the circumstances under which this book is being released, especially since the announcement comes barely three months after the death of Alice Lee, Harper’s sister and attorney who protected her privacy and ensured that her wishes were honored. Despite assurances from the publisher, lawyer, and literary agent involved, concern persists, right alongside profound excitement at the idea of a new book by such an important figure to American literature. Of the book itself, there is already much speculation about its quality as compared to To Kill A Mockingbird:
Author, journalist and Booker prize judge Erica Wagner told Today fans needed to be ready to see “a much more raw text” as the book was unedited – pointing out how “important the editing was in the creation of To Kill a Mockingbird”. –BBC News
There Are Six Basic Book Plots, According to Computers – Haven’t we always heard that there are a limited number of plots that can be written? Well, Matthew Jockers, English professor and digital humanist, has developed a computer program that found 6, and sometimes 7 plots. Although he has yet to spell them each out, he did note that different genres have different patterns, which is not a surprise. What may be a surprise to critics of Romance, though, is that Jockers found that “Romance showed some proclivity for two of the six plot shapes, but it wasn’t an overwhelming case of all the plots falling into one . . . It was a much more evenly distributed from these six shapes.” In other words, Romance isn’t telling the same story over and over again. Heh.
There are sort of two ways of looking at what “plot” is, according to the work of the Russian structuralist Vladamir Propp. There’s the way the events unfold in the world of the story, and the way the author reveals events to the reader.
Jockers is focusing on the latter. He’s made a model that algorithmically abstracts the structure of plot by looking at how the sentiment changes in a story, resulting in a sort of plot graph. He hasn’t yet revealed what those plots are (Man versus Dataset?) but he has released the means for you to try the model yourself. This week, Jockers released the tools via the website GitHub, so you can map plots at home. –Motherboard/Vice
Huffington Post, Other Sites Hit by Malvertising via AOL Ad Network – I reported on this issue of malicious advertising links not too long ago, and clearly the problem is becoming more widespread. The latest attack affected sites from Huffington Post to LA Weekly and more, suggesting the need for an ad blocking plugin in your browser.
For those just tuning in, malvertising is a term used to describe adverts which, when you click on them redirect you to a site which either tries to hack your computer tries to infect it with a virus.
In this case, victims were redirected through several domains before being dumped on a page hosting an exploit kit, an automated tool that scans for weaknesses in your computer security which hackers can exploit. This campaign uses the Sweet Orange exploit kit, Cyphort said,and if a vulverability was found then the Kovter Trojan executable was installed to take advantage. –The Digital Reader
Why We Need Complicated and Messy Depictions of Blackness on Television – If you’re not aware, February is Black History Month, which may be another reason the new Harper Lee novel was announced this month. Although not directly related to the theme of this month, this piece from For Harriet is very relevant to all the ongoing discussions about how to represent people from underrepresented communities in fictional narratives. Courtney Taylor nicely articulates the dilemma inherent in representing characters in an environment where there isn’t enough diversity to keep characters from being seen as representative and therefore more likely to be scrutinized and criticized from a variety of perspectives. The answer, of course, is to have so many different representations that no single character is seen to speak for everyone from a certain racial or cultural background, but getting there is no small challenge.
The concerns steaming from both sides of the TV portrayal debate are understandable and valid. With the media’s power to project racial stereotypes and influence the mindset of people across the world, TV is definitely a tool that can enable oppression. Black portrayals that are less than positive can further our hardship by creating an image of black culture that adheres to the negative preconceived notions that non-blacks already have.
In short, one bad TV depiction can stereotype the entire black community.
But there’s a downside to the black community’s collective action against TV images; the individual gets disregarded. If we fight to only allow certain images on TV, we’re eliminating the vast black experiences that exist outside the unrealistically perfect depictions. Olivia Pope’s flawed love life, though not reflective of all black women’s’ experiences, can be credited as a possibility for someone in the black community. Some black women may find the drama of Sorority Sisters or Love and Hip Hop relatable to their own life situations. –For Harriet
Re: the six basic plots. The idea is insteresting. Sadly, the technology he is using is so unreliable, there is little chance that what he is discovering is useful or relevant. If you can identify whether a paragraph in a book is positive or negative with around 70% accuracy, you are doing really well. And the “counting sentiment marking” that he uses doesn’t even come close to that mark. I actually tried to track related research papers, but there aren’t any. So I’d very much reserve judgment until he can get it past some sort of peer review.