With best wishes, and looking forward to hearing from you.
Ruth, Zürich james Joyce Foundation

For basic text parsing (for my purposes usually just opening a file, splitting it on something, and doing some regex), I tend to fall back on perl if I want to do it quickly, though there’s much to like in python. I just happen to have basic muscle memory for doing things in perl, and I always have to go to the docs for python. Import antigravity indeed!

Your idea about cutting at the interruptions is interesting and raises, I think, the broader question about how best to try to see what is going on here. Another approach, I think, would be to do a sort of 19-column version of the text, synching up the passages so that you can read any one section up/down, but move left/right to catch the synchronizations. I’ve also just heard from a colleague that someone else has done a similar (though it sounds like more sophisticated) analog visualization of the episode. I’ll be sure to add a new post on that when I learn more.

I also finally downloaded processing and played around a little. It’s definitely a neat program. Wish I had better ideas for what to do with it. I simply graphed word frequency in Ulysses; the curve was pretty predictable. I thought about doing something like an etymology lookup for all the words to determine relative Latin-ness or Saxonic of the the book (maybe graphed over time), but I lacked the gumption to follow through. Glad to have the software reference, in any case.