What If Shakespeare Had a Twitter?

I have a love/hate relationship with Twitter. I've always enjoyed using it to snoop on people, keep up with celebrities, and get news right in the moment. However, I hate using it. In fact, I don't have a twitter account that I keep updated. I was required to have one for a class last year, and guess what? I haven't updated it since the class ended.

But, I must say that Zach Whalen's article on twitter bots made me rethink how I use and view twitter. Similarly, Stephen Ramsay's conclusion that he hopes that algorithmic-criticism will soon became as outdated and odd as library-based criticism forced me to view the integration of computers into literary criticism in a different way.

Ramsay is completely correct in his assertion that computers are already a part of the human social experience, and that they've transformed from clinical number crunchers to personal information devices that hold photos of our loved ones, valued manuscripts, and access to numerous social networking sites. I would argue that it would be worthwhile to see what it would mean for the literary sphere if we could collide the social networking experience (such as Twitter) with human-based computer criticism. 

Instead of viewing Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook as purely fun, time sucks, and distractions from "real" schoolwork, maybe the humanities should embrace projects such as Zach Whalen's into their fold. What if we allowed students to create this algorithms and fake Twitters as projects to explore word frequency and character information as a way to critically explore the text? It's possible that we could turn an entirely new audience onto critical thinking and literature.

I would argue that Zach Whalen's project is something that could be adapted to fit the classroom, and it could be useful in developing new and meaningful ways to explore literary criticism. How would a Marxist reading of a text produce different outlooks? Tweet from a character's perspective and apply the criticism. Reader-response? Great! Apply an algorithm like Whalen's to characters or text and interact with the text and create new meanings in entirely unique ways.

There are a myriad of ways that the collision of social networking, literary criticism, and algorithms can happen to produce meaningful and original research and criticism. The key is deconstructing our view of what these websites and computers should be used for, and instead, seeing them for what they could be used for.