I have to say, the Twitter Bot workshop has been my favorite class thus far. Although working through CodeAcademy has been, at times, frustrating and overwhelming, I really felt it paid off when I basically understood what it meant to import a library, reference a list, etc. I used some code someone else had written in a dev environment that somehow existed in a web browser and slightly modified it in order to make a tweets appear without actually typing them. Okay, when I put it that way, it sounds pretty lame. That said, it felt pretty cool to see it work.

I have a lot of cool ideas that I want to play with moving forward. I do really want to create the cast of bots I talked about in class, though, that tweet the lines of a play at each other. I really want to see what happens when something like Hamlet is broken down into lines, tweeted over time, broken up by other people’s tweets about their eggs Benedict and the scores of Penguins’ games, and tweeted using @Ophelia etc. I’m interested in how a text changes when it’s translated from one medium to another, and also investigating what my role (as a “programmer”–and, as you all know, I’m using that term very generously) in the creative process is when I do something like that.

As a middle-school teacher, I encounter texts–literary texts among others–in a few different ways. Trying to introduce ninth-graders to Romeo and Juliet or middle school students to Naomi Shihab Nye means trying to connect those texts to something in the students’ world. Consequently, there are ZILLIONS of resources out there for high school and middle school teachers to help students to access challenging texts “on their level.” Some of you may have seen texts like Srsly Hamlet and  YOLO Juliet on the end caps at local book stores. As English grad students, many of you have probably thought, “Oh my god, they’re ruining great texts.” But these books are widely popular and used in lots of classrooms across the country, because students find them more engaging/accessible. Of course they do. In a way, it reminds me of those activities I used to do when I  was a high school student where you have to translate a difficult passage (usually from Shakespeare. You’ll notice I reference him a lot. And Poe. They’re the staples of the “English Cannon” as it’s presented to the youth of America, whether I like it or not…) into “modern English.” The idea is, supposedly, that the act of translating shows that you understand the content. What we have in the cases I mention above is different because the students are presented with a “translation” already done for them. But it sounds like I’m bashing these texts–in fact, I think that I probably am. But I’m not sure if I’m right to do so.

When I teach a play, and particularly when I teach Shakespeare, I talk a lot with students about the unique quality of drama to be re-imagined. I’ve seen steampunk productions of King Lear, contemporary versions of Othello complete with waterboarding, and I’ve shown students the competing interpretations of Romeo and Juliet that cinema of the last 50 years has given us. If Drama can be reinvented with creative casting choices, setting, costume design, etc., why can’t it be adapted for social media? Well, the answer, obviously, is that it can, but what happens to a text when it is adapted for social media? What if people retweet it? When I was making my bot with you all, and it was just spitting out lines from “The Tell-Tale Heart,” I got a follower. Who? Why?

I’m not sure what to make of pretty much ANY of this. I know that I still think Srsly Hamlet is an abomination. No meter. The wit is basically lost. And it seems trivializing. I don’t think that I’m saying that because I’m an old fuddy-duddy. I think I’m right to cringe. Would a tweeting Bard be equally cringeworthy? That’s what I’m curious to find out!

This was a little bit of a random post–I hope it was meaningful in some way to some of you! Cheers! 🙂