THIS H&SS FRESHMAN SEMINAR IS OPEN TO 2005 H&SS AND SHS FRESHMEN ONLY.
This course is an H&SS Freshman Seminar. It is only open to H&SS and SHS first year students. In this course, team taught by an English and Statistics Professor, you will learn how small decisions made by a writer, sentence by sentence, can lead to big differences in the texts that result. You will learn some major fault lines along which a written text varies and how this variation can be described and analyzed through numbers. You will learn how this knowledge about texts can help you play literary detective and solve classic literary problems, such as author attribution (who was the real author of a text whose authorship is unknown or disputed) and genre classification (what makes the mystery novel different from the newspaper editorial, what makes fiction different from non-fiction?). Finally, you will learn how you can classify authors through numerical techniques and you can reflect on how this compares and contrasts with the way you classify authors as a competent reader of English.
