English Language and Literature

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This is the collection for the University of Waterloo's Department of English Language and Literature.

Research outputs are organized by type (eg. Master Thesis, Article, Conference Paper).

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Browsing English Language and Literature by Author "Hancock, Mark"

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    Critical Tools: Using Technology to Augment the Process of Literary Analysis
    (University of Waterloo, 2016-09-29) Bradley, Adam; Hancock, Mark; O'Gorman, Marcel
    When it comes to the arts and sciences, Northrop Frye argues that “it is clear that the arts do not stabilize the subject in the same way that science does. . . The stabilizing subject of science is usually identified with the reason; the unstabilizing subject is normally called the imagination”. Since the nineteen eighties, with the institutionalization of Humanities Computing research, there have been attempts at combining humanistic questions with technological innovations, and by extension, scientific concerns. Within the digital humanities there is a tension between these two positions that often results in the neglect of the human analyst and an elevated use of technology when applied to tool design. This can be seen in the current trend of distant reading, which is the batch processing and analysis of text corpora using machines. This approach stands in stark contrast to close reading which traditionally in English studies has entailed looking at individual words and their relation to a text as a whole in terms of not what the text means, but how it means. In this thesis I argue that the bridge between technology and literary criticism can be built using digital tools as long as those tools allow access to both the reason of science and the imagination of art. I present four digital projects that each investigate this problem in a novel way: (1) I use an algorithmic approach to investigate T.S. Eliot’s own theoretical position in terms of his diction, (2) I designed and developed a visualization of the English language, LDNA, that can be recovered back into the original text, (3) I conducted a study with 14 expert literary critics to analyze their current methods and used these results to design a tool, MetaTation, that can be integrated into the literary critical process, and (4) I also demonstrated how evidence-based testing of literary theory can be done in the context of Engineering writing by conducting a study that tests the feminist theory of false universals in human-computer interaction literature. I use these projects to present a hybrid approach that answers the question: How do we reconcile the specificity and human dependent nature of an unstable and imaginative close reading with the historic breadth and reason of a distant reading approach?
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    The Effects of Ambiguity: A Feminist Study of Human Signifiers in Human-Computer Interaction
    (University of Waterloo, 2016-02-01) MacArthur, Cayley; Randall, Neil; Hancock, Mark
    A lack of diversity in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields has been a popular topic of discussion and a persistent challenge in terms of recruitment, engagement, opportunity and equality spanning decades. It is not well-understood how new technologies created by the human-computer interaction (HCI) community affect identity construction in minorities such as women, people of colour, and persons with disabilities. The Feminist HCI movement calls on the community to engage with broader moral commitments such as empowerment, diversity, identity and equity, as well as epistemologically embracing multiplicity over universality. However, a gap remains between theory and practice. I argue that goals of feminist rhetoric must be met in the community’s discourse habits as an essential step to more inclusivity in HCI; these goals include dismantling certain oppressive language structures. Feminist theory suggests that the abstract, gender-neutral language used to talk about people in male-dominated systems actually elicits imagery perceived to be male, which would function in contrast to the intentions of writers who want to be gender-neutral when using these words. In this thesis, I present a study used to determine whether the human signifiers used in HCI publications have the same effect. Findings suggest that these HCI “people” words do generally have a tendency to be perceived as male. Insights from this study reveal some tendencies in how these words are thought of among a general audience. I recommend a stronger commitment to Feminist HCI in theory and practice, and greater awareness and sensitivity towards the connotations elicited by these falsely universal terms that are not representative of the diverse community within and outside of HCI.