At some point during Ken Perlin’s talk at the NYU Game Center last week, I was gazing at a screen containing a virtual scroll of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Perlin, an NYU computer scientist best known as the guy who made Tron look cool, decided the bound book form may not be best way to understand a novel. Scrolls, those long stretches of parchment popular in BC times, are actually a better way to go.
With this app, Perlin virtually stitched the pages of Austin’s codex into a few vertical strips and added keyword searching to let you pinpoint where, say, Darcy and Elizabeth show up in the text. It’s a neat visual way to explore various questions.
I admit to not having read this Austin classic. However, the next day in a fit of experimentation, I was curious whether the words bread, chicken, or salad makes an appearance. Answer: no, no, and Chapter 39 where there’s a brief mention of a cucumber salad. Through some further searching I learned that while breakfast and dinner references dotted my strips of text, lunch makes only one appearance. I was being mysteriously drawn into this text thanks to the power of a good visually-oriented search function.
A visit to my local public library and a stroll through the “A” section of the fiction stacks may be in my immediate future.
In Perlin’s vision of high-school, students would be playing with their homework, using software to extend the creaky English curriculum through their own animated productions–say a Bartelby who works in “The Office”.
Anyway, Perlin is in a unique position to be promoting these ideas. If someone were to come up with his personal Venn diagram, he’d be at the intersection of computer graphics, mathematics, liberal arts, and Fred Rodgers. Not surprisingly his academic presence is spread out over multiple programs: NYU’s Computer Science department, the NYU Media Research Lab , and the Games for Learning Institute, where he’s Director.
Of course, programming plays no small part in his educational ideas. But instead of turning kids off with C++ and sorting, he’d present them with more digestible bits of code that could be configured easily.
During his talk, Perlin annotated the Austin text with a bagel–technically a lumpy “torus”–that could be adjusted by tweaking a few lines of Java at specific points. A 16-year old could quickly grok the few parameters to control the bagel, and then become inspired to learn the underlying algorithms. And perhaps make some interesting connections between Elizabeth’s breakfasts and a NYC classic carb treat.
If you want to see more of Perlin’s neat educational applets, check out his home page.