Milton and the Incomplete ( MiltonInc .)

1. Milton and the Incomplete (MiltonInc.) Phillip Cortes

2. Project Purpose • Our digital humanities project sets out to understand two things: • close-reader’s experience of analyzing the images in Milton’s texts • distant/digital reader’s experience of using Voyant tool ScatterPlot on Milton’s texts • We want to explore the ways that these two experiences are interrelated with the concept of iconoclasm.

3. Project Divisons • The project is divided into 2 divisions: • 1.The digital team of four participants will run ScatterPlot trials on a selected set of Milton’s poems. • 2.The text team of six will close-read the set of poems. Our close-readers will use the DH tool Scalar to publish their close-readings of the texts.

4. This Project will have 4 main phases. • 1.Digitally running ScatterPlot and using Scalar to conduct close-reading. • 2.Methodological analysis: Because we want our project to examine thoroughly the digital and textual experience of Milton’s work, both members will understand the specific methods involved in ScatterPlot’s distant readings and in close-reading annotations of the texts. • 3.Assessment Stage: Determining the relationships between method and iconoclasm and between interpretations and iconoclasm. • 4.Final Review: Both teams will review and compare their findings. They could then specify the similarities and differences between digital and textual experiences. • We will also have self-evaluation sessions after each phase. • We will then repeat the entirety of our project for a second run, applying the conclusions gained from our self-evaluations.

5. Sample Image of ScatterPlot trial Plot of Medium-length poems, no stop word list is added. Poems in this set: “On the morning of CHRISTS Nativity. Compos’d 1629.” “L’Allegro” “Il Penseroso” Lycidas •Clusters of a specific color depict words that the program has calculated to have corresponding frequencies. ¤The digital team will run trials on a set of short poems (18 sonnets), medium-length poems, Paradise Lost, and PL’s four invocations.

6. Sample Image of Scalar-generated image of close-reading commentaries. Double clicking on dark orange box leads users to Lycidas poem. Light orange boxes lead users to comment pages. Each comment page contains a single annotation of an image. Gray boxes just represent comments, not pages, but they will also take you comment pages. These scalar images help us think about close-reading through a new perspective. Particularly, the box structures cause us to think of close reading analyses as box-like divisions, or as incomplete fragments separate from the original text.

7. The above image is another rendition of the Scalar image from the last slide. Gray boxes represent comment pages and the orange box represents the Lycidas poem page. Though we see connecting lines between the poem page and the comment pages, we cannot help but see these box-like structures as divisions partitioned from the original. Below is a screenshot of a comment page. It is a text unto itself. Fragmentary and perhaps an incomplete thought requiring more elaboration.