The Yale Modernism Lab is an virtual space dedicated to collaborative research into the roots of literary modernism.

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”  Thus wrote T.S. Eliot in his poem “Little Gidding,” the fourth of his Four Quartets. Much the same might be said in the most modern of senses about the Yale Modernism Lab, the brainchild of Yale Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Pericles Lewis.  Recipient of a John and Yvonne McCredie Fellowship grant to support development of the Modernism Lab, Lewis has long experience in the use of computers for the creation of new knowledge so we might again “know the place for the first time.”

“I remember the first computer I used as a grade school student,” muses Lewis.  “It was an Apple II, and, like any kid, I played a lot of games before I realized its value for instruction and communication.” Lewis, for example, recalls vividly how when he started at Yale he required his students to send him by email their questions about the last class’ reading assignment before the next. This means of improving the experience and effectiveness of each class for student and teacher alike spurred him to consider more broadly the potential upsides of computer-enabled collaborative research in the humanities.

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Paul Hudak, Professor of Computer Science and incoming Master of Saybrook College, received a McCredie Fellowship to further develop the set of compositional programming modules called Haskore for use by students in his class, Fundamentals of Computer Music: Algorithmic and Heuristic Composition.

Some time during the fifth century B.C., on the Greek island of Samos, legend has it that the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras, while passing a blacksmith’s shop, took note of the musical ring that accompanied each stroke of the smith’s hammer. Intrigued, he looked in the shop and noted the different anvils.  After careful measurement, he realized that the sizes of the anvils were in simple ratios to one another, which explained the musical harmonies emanating from so unlikely a venue.  This discovery inspired Pythagoras’ first formulations about the relationship between math and music, laying the groundwork for ancient Greek music.

Today, the connection between mathematics and music seems obvious. But in an age of ever more sophisticated applications of computing technology to music-from Guitar Hero to laser harps to iPhone wind instruments-opportunities to instruct students and advance the relationship between the two abound.  Or, at least, so contends Professor of Computer Science and incoming Master of Saybrook College, Paul Hudak.

Recipient of a McCredie Fellowship in Instructional Technology, Hudak is an expert in the functional programming language Haskell and an amateur jazz pianist, which explain his own role in formulating a computer language for composing music in Haskell, fittingly dubbed Haskore.

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A student uses his clicker to answer a question in Professor Jeff Kenney's Astronomy 120 class, Galaxies and the Universe.

On September 4, 1998, a curious game show entered the annals of British television.  It was originally called Cash Mountain but quickly changed its moniker to Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? When it appeared a year later in the United States, audiences tuned in eagerly to watch contestants avail themselves of “lifelines” by phoning friends or eliminating answer choices as they battled their way to millionaire-dom. But, as former Yale student James Suroweicki notes in his bestselling The Wisdom of Crowds, the most reliable lifeline of all was asking the audience, which answered questions correctly 91% of the time.

And what made this assist from the audience possible? First used to evaluate viewers’ reactions to unreleased movies and television pilots, “audience response systems” (ARSs), as they were formally known, were introduced in the 1960s. By the late 1990s, ARSs started to filter into university classrooms.

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