Rhetorical style at Gettysburg
Data structures
In your previous class preparation, you proposed a data model for comparing orations. Read the following passage from an ancient handbook on rhetoric by Cicero, entitled Ad Herennium (“Guidebook to rhetoric for Herennius”): selection from Cicero. Cicero proposes a kind of sliding scale of styles, from the “Simple” style at one end to the “Grand” style at the other, and gives examples of each, but doesn’t tell us specifically what to look for in each example. We’ll try to improve on Cicero by collecting specific, identified observations using the data model you developed for the previous class.
How should we collect those observations? We could simply read Lincoln and Everett’s speeches, and take notes.
But what if we wanted to apply our model more widely? Would if we wanted to compare each of Lincoln’s and Everett’s speeches to a large corpus of nineteenth-century rhetoric? That change of scale might further suggest whether one or the other speaker at Gettysburg was more or less typical of contemporary oratory. At some point, manually collecting observations is no longer feasible, and we need to learn how to automate that part of our work. We need to write code that will collect our observations from a digital corpus.
At this point, we are translating data models into digital data structures. In our first hands-on exercise in class, we will learn how to do that, and will begin to apply our digital implementation of your models to Lincoln and Everett’s speeches.
Assignment
Open this web page, saved from a Pluto notebook you can use as a template for your work.
To get started working on your notebook, you’ll need to run Pluto on your computer, and download the web page as notebook file you can open locally. If you don’t remember from class how to do that, refer to these guides:
Requirements for satisfactory submission
- Complete the template notebook.
- Save your completed notebook using the “Notebook file” option. If you need help doing this, see “Saving a notebook”
- On your computer, find the file you saved, and name it
{LASTNAME}-lab1.jl, replacing{LASTNAME}with your last name. - Add the correctly named file to your personal folder on the course Google drive.