Note: this Pynchon novel is one of the mostly widely read works of fiction in American colleges. Instructors in English 25 are especially on guard against plagiarism in essays about this novel. Please do not copy anyone else’s work without attribution. As stated in this course’s Intellectual Property & Academic Integrity Guidelines, “Professor Liu reports all cases of plagiarism and other academic dishonesty in his courses to the UCSB Office of Student Conduct without exception.”

Using a spreadsheet program (e.g., Excel or Google Sheets), create a spreadsheet (or set of sheets) that compares the lives of the following three people:

• (A) The life of a typical college student at UCSB. (If you model your student after yourself or someone you actually know, please do not identify anyone by name for reasons of privacy.)
• (B) The life you think you will have in the future as a career worker, professional, or other role  in the field of your choice. (If you have not yet decided on your dream career, profession, or role in society, please choose a possible one you could see yourself pursuing.)
• (C) Case’s life while “working” in his role as the hero of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (based on your deduction about what his life is like).

The following is a partial example of the columns/rows format you can use for an Excel, Google, or other spreadsheet for this English 25 assignment on “being human in the age of information knowledge work”: download Excel spreadsheet    or Google sheet   . Feel free to vary this template if you have a better idea. (Optional: if you wish to be extra creative, make additional sheets in your spreadsheet to provide context or to dream of a better life. See this expanded Excel spreadsheet or expanded Google sheet with additional sheets for “All Career Workers” and “What If”)

Adapt as needed the activity labels in the example spreadsheets (“sleep,” “eat,” “study,” and so on), but strive for some standardization (e.g., “eat” instead of “lunch”) so that general patterns are discernible. (You can also include other kinds of typical activities that are not appropriate for an instructor to make explicit in a template like this!)

For “total hours per activity over 7 days”, do a back-of-envelope calculation to scale up from the one typical weekday and the one typical weekend day.

As indicated in the example, add a brief explanation or comment in a cell with your observations on each kind of life.

(If you have spreadsheet skills, you can use formulas to calculate and/or create graphs if you wish.)

Help resources for students new to spreadsheets:

• Excel:
  • WikiHow, “How to Make a Spreadsheet in Excel” (basic how-two told through screenshots)
  • Matthew MacDonald, “Creating Your First Spreadsheet” (chap. 1 from Excel 2013: The Missing Manual)
• Google Sheets:
  • Google, Help page for Google Sheets

What you will need for this exercise:

• Antconc program (download)
  • Alternatively, you can use Voyant Tools or an AI large language model as  your tool. (See mentions of these below)
• A stopwords list (download the following stopwords list and save it as a plain-text “.txt” file on your computer: buckley-salton.txt)
• A long document or set of documents (up to several hundred documents if you wish) that you have access to as plain text files (stored as “.txt” files).
  • Alan keeps a set of demo text corpora on his DH Toychest site here. These include, for example, a variety of ready-to-go text files (usually downloadable in .zip files) and links to online repositories of texts such as Project Gutenberg.
  • There are also online text versions of the novels assigned in English 25 in case students wish to work with those:
    • Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 in someone’s online version (This is a PDF file from which you will need to copy the text and put it in a plain-text .txt file).
    • William Gibson’s Neuromancer in The Cyberpunk Project’s online HTML version. (This is a HTML file from which you will need to copy the text and put it in a plain-text .txt file)

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Instructions for this exercise:

1. 1. Download and install onto your computer the Antconc text-analysis program (available for Mac, Windows, Linux).  The current version of the program is 4.x.
      • Note for Mac Users: When you try to open AntConc, there may be a security message that says the app was prevented from opening. In order to get around this, you need to click the Apple icon, go to System Preferences, then Security & Privacy, and (if you haven’t already) change your preferences to Allow apps downloaded from “App Store and identified developers.” Even if these are your settings, the system will prevent AntConc from opening (it’s not an identified developer), but there will be a caption next to the radio buttons that says something along the lines of “AntConc was prevented from opening” and a button labeled “Open Anyway.” Click Open Anyway, and you shouldn’t have any issues running the application after that. 

      Note: If you have trouble getting AntConc to work (e.g., on a Mac) and cannot resolve the issues, then you may want to try a different well-known program that runs wholly through a browser online: Voyant Tools. On the Voyant Tools site, you can upload your own files for analysis. Or you can experiment with two corpora of demo text files (by Shakespeare or Austen). (Click “Open” on the home screen to access the demo files).

      

      Voyant Tools includes a whole suite of tools presented in a “dashboard” style, each of whose panes can be set for a different tool. Tools relevant to this practicum (analogous to those in AntConc) include “Corpus Terms,” “Corpus Collocates,” “Phrases,” etc. See the Voyant Tools Help page for guides to each tool.
      

      Configuration bar in each of Voyant Tools’s panes. Click on the icon that the cursor is pointing to here to open a menu of tools.

   2. Find or create a plain-text (.txt) version of a long literary work or collection of works. Possible sources:
      • Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 in someone’s online version (This is a PDF file from which you will need to copy the text and put it in a plain-text .txt file).
      • William Gibson’s Neuromancer in The Cyberpunk Project’s online HTML version. (This is a HTML file from which you will need to copy the text and put it in a plain-text .txt file).
      • Prof. Liu keeps a set of demo text corpora on his DH Toychest site here. These include, for example, a variety of ready-to-go text files (usually downloadable in .zip files) and links to online repositories of texts such as Project Gutenberg.
      • Laurence Anthony the creator of AntConc, also has a utility tool called AntFileConverter for quickly converting PDF or Word files into plain-text .txt files. (Running the tool on an “input file(s)” will save the converted .txt file in a subfolder called “txt” of the folder in which the input file was located.)
   3. Study your chosen work(s) with Antconc. For example, look at results under the tabs for “Word” (word frequency list), “N-Gram” (frequeny of consecutive-word phrases), “Cluster” (similar to N-Gram,” but with the option to search for phrases with a word at the beginning or end) “Collocate” (words that co-occur within a defined number of words from each other), and “Keyword” (distinctiveness of particular words in a corpus by comparison with a “reference corpus” that you have optionally loaded in). Then take “souvenirs” of your explorations with Antconc (hopefully something interesting). For example, you can take souvenirs in the form of screenshots, exports of word lists into spreadsheets, etc. You can also use the following two options under Antconc’s “File” options to save data in text-file format (“Save Current Tab Restults”) or zipped .csv file format (“Save Current Tab DataTables”).
   4. Accompany your souvenirs with a short comment (no more than 300 words total) that explains what you were trying to do, points out anything interesting that you observe, or comments on the method or tool used.

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Help File & Tutorials for Antconc:

• The Help file for the latest version of Antconc can be found on the Antconc home page under “User Support’ > “Latest Help files”.( For example, the help file for Antconc version 4.2.4 is a PDF file here.)
• Video and other tutorials and guides are further down on the Antconc home page (scroll down).

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Basic Instructions for Using Antconc:
(click on thumbnails below for larger screenshot images)

(Step 1) Choose text files to make into a “corpus” for your analysis. (You can select multiple files in a folder) (click on image below for larger instructions):

(Step 2) Apply a stopwords list (stoplist) to filter out common words like “the,” “of,” etc.:

• First download the following stopwords list and save it as a plain-text “txt” file on your computer: buckley-salton.txt
• Then in Antconc go to “Global Settings” and follow these steps:

  

(Optional step) You can load a “reference” (i.e., comparison) corpus so you can use Antconc’s “Keyword” function. This function analyzes the “keyness” or distinctiveness of words in the corpus you are studying by comparison with a reference corpus. Instructions:

• First, have available a reference comparison file, or multiple files on your computer (must be plain-text “txt” files)
• Then in AntConc, go to File > “Open Corpus Manager” and follow the instructions in the screenshot below:

  

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(Final step) Now you can start exploring the document file(s) you chose for study using Antconc. The best way to start is to count all the words in the document(s. Choose the “Word” tab in Antconc, then follow the directions in the screenshot below:

Next, try out the “N-grams,” “clusters,” and “collocates” tabs, selecting a word (or words) to explore for phrases in which they occur (n-grams and clusters) or for words that often co-occur nearby but not necessarily adjacent or consecutively (collocates).