d i a p s a l m a t a

who indiscreetly venture

2012-04-11T13:09:00.000-04:00

We were curious to know how it happened that many of the outward branches of those trees came to be broken off in that solitary place, and were informed that the bears are so discreet as not to trust their unwieldy bodies on the smaller limbs of the tree, that would not bear their weight; but after venturing as far as is safe, which they can judge to an inch, they bite off the end of the branch, which falling down, they are content to finish their repast upon the ground. In the same cautious manner they secure the acorns that grow on the weaker limbs of the oak. And it must be allowed that, in these instances, a bear carries instinct a great way, and acts more reasonably than many of his betters, who indiscreetly venture upon frail projects that will not bear them.

// from William Byrd and Edmund Ruffin (ed), The Westover Manuscripts: Containing the History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina; A Journey to the land of Eden, a.D. 1733; and A Progress to the Mines. Written from 1728 to 1736, and Now First Published (1841)

Minding my "P"s and "B"s

2012-01-25T01:19:00.001-05:00

Posed post practitioners been bring be up by piece pattern!

Publication observes Presbyterian, complained being Episcopalian bishops between Bishops. Presbyters both, both prominent "b" "p" pattern, bishops "b" "p." Prominent presbyters "p" "b" beginning pattern "b" "p." Both bilabial plosives members produced stopped by lips.

"B" "p" proliferate veritable partial pile up. Brief prelaty pastor, parish, Archbishop. Books pluralists bachelor parishioner private protestations chop Episcopacy palace. Metropolitan penance pusillanimous breast politic presses open birthright privilege. Parliament abrogated bud liberty printing Prelatical people.

Pointing provided by "b" "p" explicit presbyters. Prelates block part opposite, opposite "p" -- syllable break opposite superficially, but.

Put interpretation brings problems practiced pattern.

Put pattern bearer, build countable presence, "b" "p" passage back attempt. Begin, Presbyter -- but Priest places poetry, prose, plays.

Problem properties interpretive; alphabet patterns, repetition abound. Patterns produced alphabetic patterns imputed arbitrarily patterns by.

By began interpretive proposition, believes episcopal priests oppressors, despite apparent worship proposition. Pattern elaborated interpretive hypothesis; pattern noticeability because interpretation place picking.

Numbers prompt interpretive hypothesis. Be. By capability disposal, incredible computing power patterns, by patterns. Begin interpretively.

Proceed place; appear program.

But --

Put expected surprised! Surprise! Been up; computer's ability beyond appears be pretty

computer, opposed capable playing.

Point place be embracing cosmopolitan perspective. Pushing big keeps dropping Europe. Be pretentiousness sympathetic Paris! Be experiences!

Possible; but between computer program. Happened simply, been books patterns;

been purportedly representative sample. Contemplation produced problem, possibly process patterns -- deep apprehension.

Computer corpus put potentially bodies -- briskly stop program.

Piles become between practiced samples. By priesthood, enterprise promise encompassing bargain bit provides, predicts scholarship.

Interpretive payoff! Be payoff! Been pretty; perhaps burgeoning computer-assisted interpretive pruning paths opened up by possibilities multiply?

Begins by, by propose. Keeps deep prolonged.

Hypothesis pursued point. Point place stop. Point keep going.

Explains browsing. Help browsing. Picking numbers. Interpretive hypothesis accept stumbling. Broadly, computer programs help.

Accepts be incapacity, because numbers produce, provoke interpretive; provide concepts practically discernible!

Presents ramped up been about practice. Hypothesis: process poem poem poem poem impetus hypotheses poem produce poems. Interpretation computers multiply process, opening up serendipitous paths performed computer-based been human-based computers.

But by interpretive paths, basis but build platform prompted by numbers. Fellowship

project perfection correspond typically been. Enable better bearers disruptive double by beleaguered.

But proclaimed place practice by between, between, between play.

Hood's interactive educational instruments

2012-01-24T12:28:00.001-05:00

"Many Elizabethan mathematical books had instruments that could be assembled from paper cutouts on their pages. Thomas Hood took these pedagogical examples to heart and in 1597 constructed a vellum instrument from four diagrams that illustrated the theoretical and practical aspects of astrology. Hood found a way, through the manipulation of ingenious revolving gears and overlays mounted on vellum and pinned together, to illustrate in one view the relationship between plants, the signs of the zodiac, and the parts of the human body they governed. Much like a mdoern PowerPoint or overhead projector transparency, Hood's instrument was a pedagogical display intended to facilitate efficient and effective education by encouraging his students to actually manipulate an instrument." (Deborah Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution)

[Terrible scan of Hood's instruments, MS Additional 71495 (British Library), from the image printed in Harkness's book. Permission not asked; despite the instruments having been scanned for the book, there appears to be no digital copies available through the BL's digital collections. Consider this grainy image my plea to make the high-res scan available to researchers.]

This paper instrument was assembled wrong when it was "discovered" at the British Library in 1994 (Stephen Johnston, "The astrological instruments of Thomas Hood").

Hood's instruments remind me of the twentieth-century educational volvelles Jessica Helfand displays in Reinventing the Wheel.

In the book quoted above, Harkness points out that vernacular mathematics instruction became popular during Elizabeth's reign -- it was advertised on streets, taught in informal classes at home, discussed in public lectures and aided by pedagogical instruments like Thomas Hood's. Interestingly, many of the twentieth-century educational volvelles Helfand catalogues are also functional advertisements for domestic products like bread and iceboxes. The history of paper volvelles weaves in and out of the history of democratizing -- and commercializing -- education.

Remixing Freshman Comp

2012-01-17T10:37:00.009-05:00

I'm teaching Writing 20 this semester, Duke's freshman composition course and the only course required of all Duke undergrads.

Enrollment for each course is capped firmly at 12, so dozens of sections are taught each semester by a mix of grad students (across many disciplines), post-docs (also across many disciplines) and Thompson Writing Program faculty. Each course is (kinda, sorta) a "content" course -- everything from food science and pirates to captivity narratives is on the docket this semester -- but of course writing must be a significant portion of each section's curriculum.

My section is "Cut/Copy/Paste: Remixing Words" (syllabus here). My students have a wide array of interests, from neuroscience and art history to engineering and computer programming. To make this class most useful to everyone (myself included), I've tried to develop a few strategies -- most pulled from creative writing courses -- for mixing up the freshman comp course.

Busting the content/criticism divide. No traditional lit-crit compositions; no five-page thesis-driven essays on a "major theme" in Hamlet, no close readings of Keats. This genre does a few things well (that clause was a struggle for me to write, and I'm not sure I believe it), but none of those things (whatever they may be) serve students planning on graduating in 2015. We inhabit a different textual ecology than the one that invented literary criticism; our toolbox of critical methods should reflect that.
In-class remix exercises. Toward that end, our critical inquiry begins by practicing the methods of the artists we'll be studying. We're reading Breton on automatism; then we're doing some automatic writing. We're reading Burroughs on cut-ups, then cutting up Burroughs. We're reading Goldsmith on uncreative writing, then reading him backwards. Fill in the blanks for hypertext, digital poetry generators, flarf, collaborative writing, and audio remix. While I hope this encourages students to take art seriously -- that is, to engage actively with these ideas, and encounter them in all their transformative potential -- I'm also hoping these exercises will give students a few very basic skills and literacies in media production that they can build upon in future studies. (And if they never learn anything else about digital media, at least the black box has been cracked open, just a bit.**) Most importantly, by scooting around the edges of more traditional writing practices, I'm hoping these methods take a sledgehammer to one of the scariest things about any freshman comp course: the blank white screen waiting to be filled with "interpretation." We'll fiddle around with words that we didn't produce first in order to learn the mechanisms of writing. Once we know how the machine works, the rest is dictionary roulette.
Lab report. That all being said, there is one assignment in a traditional genre: the lab report. Students will perform a writing "experiment" on the class -- something like a surrealist exquisite corpse exercise, but (I'm hoping) a little more involved. They write a hypothesis beforehand (what will this exercise teach us about writing?) and a lab report afterwards detailing their process and conclusions. In addition to helping us investigate what makes sense (and nonsense) in writing, this should prompt some reflection on the cross-fertilization between (experimental) literary criticism and (experimental) science.
Distributed readings. Several times throughout the semester, we all read something different for class. I did this mostly because I couldn't decide on just three digital poems to teach; but I'm hoping the experience of, for instance, browsing the Electronic Literature Directory will give everyone a taste of a wide range of works, and that choosing one to discuss in class will encourage inter-(rather than intra-)textual connections. Distributed experiences/encounters == greater collective knowledge. Plus, we all know writing is social -- right? Well, so is reading. In fact, when we all read something different, reading isn't that much different from writing, since the process of plugging your thoughts on your reading into a group conversation is similar to the process of communicating your relationship to ideas in text.

If you have any experience with these or similar exercises, I welcome your thoughts. I'm not sure how any of this -- particularly the in-class exercises -- will work yet, as I've not taught this course before and, in my graduate career, have only taken one course that attempts similar methods. (It was a course on digital writing at MIT, taught by Nick Montfort; and while Nick attempted to have us do some surrealist exercises in class, we were a small, lumpy group, and I'm not sure his enthusiasm really took root in our phyllosilicate-heavy soil. Sorry, Nick.) But even a small remix of the usual freshman comp should yield results worth replicating.

** It is also entirely possible -- probable, even -- that, when it comes to media production, I will learn more from them than they will from me. Which would be awesome.

A Brief History of Authoterrorism

2011-12-03T12:40:00.003-05:00

ANTIBOOKCLUB, a new publishing (ad)venture out of Chicago, released its first book this fall, A Brief History of Authoterrorism. It's a sometimes funny, sometimes odd, always delightful anthology chronicling just how far authors will go to promote their work. I wrote a wee bit of aca-fiction for the book. It involves Leibniz's binary system, the history of copyright law and a rare book room OCR mystery. (Of course. What else would I write about?!)

It's beautifully edited and designed by Gabriel Levinson. Do check it out, and support the project if you can.

"Becoming Plant" up on postmedieval's open review

2011-07-16T16:02:00.008-04:00

A draft of my essay "Becoming Plant: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits" is now online as part of postmedieval's crowd review for the special issue, "Becoming-Media," co-edited by Martin Foys and Jen Boyle.*

It deals with Nehemiah Grew's The Anatomy of Plants (1682); medieval marvels and early comparative anatomy; the changing book of nature trope; epitomes and compendia models of reproduction; and the codex form as a metaphor for the structure of living things.

It began as an experiment in methodology -- in creatively conciliating the specificity of a media-archaeological approach with a narrative of broad cultural change -- but evolved into an associative journey through plant-animal-book hybrids.

The web-based review process is set up to be open-ended (you can read more about it here); all are welcome to leave comments and critiques. In fact, please do! I can think of few better uses for technology than to facilitate communication across previously insurmountable barriers.

*I wrote and rewrote this sentence a dozen times. Does one put an essay "up for" or "under" public review? Is the essay "at" or "on" the review site? Our prepositions haven't gelled for this process yet. If you're confused, visit the site I linked and you'll get the idea.

Acosta's Cubist Woodcuts

2011-07-15T17:58:00.001-04:00

I've been looking at a lot of sixteenth-century herbals (loosely defined) lately. To me, this is one of the most beautiful: Cristobal Acosta's Tractado de las Drogas, y medicinas de las Indias Orientales ... (1578). The images transform the typical leafy, full-bloom plants of contemporaneous herbals into cubist woodcuts, bizarrely static and yet vibrating with unexpected, emergent patterns.

I've grabbed a few of my favorites here from the Biblioteca Digital del Real Jardin Botanico. Enjoy.

The Evelyn Tables

2011-06-07T09:09:00.004-04:00

These are the Evelyn tables, a set of four anatomical tables showing the veins, arteries, vagi and sympathetic nerves of a single dissected human body, pasted onto wooden boards. They were prepared in Padua in 1646 by Giovanni Leoni d'Este, dissector to the Professor of Anatomy, Johann Vesling. John Evelyn acquired them -- perhaps the oldest anatomical preparations in Europe -- then donated them to the Royal Society. Evelyn recorded the purchase in his Diary:

Three daies after this, I tooke my leave of Venice, and went to Padoa to be present at the famous Anatomie Lecture, lasting almost the whole Moneth, during which I saw three, a Woman, a Child, & a Man dissected, with all the manual operations of the Chirurgion upon the humane body: The one performed by Cavaliere Vestlingius, & Dr Jo. Atheisteinus Leoncenas, of whom I purchased those rare Tables of Veines & Nerves & causd him to prepare a third of the Lungs, liver & Nervi sexti par: with the Gastric vaines, which I transported into England, the first of that kind had ben ever seene in our Country, & for ought I know, in the World . . . (January 1646; The diary of John Evelyn, ed. E S de Beer, 6 vols, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1955, vol. 2, p. 475)

(Sorry for the poor image quality. For larger versions, visit the online catalogue of the Royal College of Surgeons and search "Evelyn".)

I first stumbled across the Evelyn tables while researching botanist and microscopist Nehemiah Grew, who compiled a catalogue of the Royal Society collections, published in 1681 as the Musaeum Regalis Societatis. Grew mentions Evelyn's donation in his preface.

They of course immediately reminded me of the anatomical flap anatomies on exhibit at Duke right now, as well as a talk Michael Sappol gave at the accompanying symposium. Sappol discussed the Visible Human Plexi-book (2000), a human-size plastic "book" made up of vertical slices of the human body. In the plexi-book, paging through the book is paging through the human body.

(I can't find a picture of it anywhere online, but Sappol's book Dream Anatomy has a nice image on page 158, Cat. 188. )

Layered like small paper booklets bound at the neck, the flap anatomies treat organs as the unit of individuation, with paper lungs resting over a cut-out of a stomach. The plexi-book, though -- based on the Visible Human data set -- slices into the human body as if it exists within a perfect Euclidian plane, each page showing a two-dimensional slice of the X-Y axis as it moves across the Z-axis. Not only are these two radically different ways of visualizing (and virtually dissecting) the human body within space, they also present different methods for imposing the human form onto the codex, or perhaps absorbing the body into the book -- letting our own materiality dissolve into that of the page.

Evelyn's tables float somewhere between the flapbook and the plexi-book -- a "life-size" version of the tables in Vesalius' Epitome showing different anatomical systems the reader could cut and paste together.

@HUMlab

2011-05-16T10:47:00.001-04:00

I just returned from Umeå University in Sweden, where I was visiting HUMlab. It's a neat place -- part digital humanities lab, part humanities meeting space, with a diverse* set of post-docs, staff and faculty filtering through. Patrik Svennson, whose work I've mentioned here before -- in particular, he has an excellent series of DHQ articles surveying the field of "digital humanities" writ large -- runs the lab.

As you might expect if you know Patrik's work, the lab is conscious of its layout and design, with two connected, multipurpose rooms, the one a modular computer lab-cum-classroom, the other a workshop space with around six (probably more?) screens lining the walls, including one enormous backlit projector. Last week, the latter room still held a video installation by Dutch filmmaker Iris Piers, in which the screens were hooked to sensors that adjusted the brightness of the film according to how close the viewer stood to the screen. Although the lab colonizes a portion of the library's basement, it has more of an arts+design feel than a typical library workspace. As I've written on HyperStudio's blog, I think this is an interesting model to push more in the humanities.

Alan Liu was also visiting HUMlab last week. He gave a great talk on "Close, Distant and Unexpected Readings," in which he carefully unpacked the histories of both the New Critics' treatment of the poem as a thing -- as "globed fruit" that "should not mean / But be" -- and the kind of statistical analysis of texts advocated by Franco Moretti and his lab at Stanford. While Prof. Liu began by distinguishing between close and distant forms of critical reading, he eventually wove the two together through two similar origin stories. He concluded by sharing a few examples of digital projects his students have created, from Facebook stagings of Shakespeare to an interpretive video that frames the structure of a Borges story through different kinds of film shots. It became clear that, although close and distant reading are often set in opposition to one another, they're more like criss-crossing tracks headed in the same interpretive direction, whereas the new methods being pioneered by his students radically transformed the critic's relationship to the text, imagining it as performative and adaptive.

You can view the video of the entire talk here.

While at HUMlab, I gave a talk also, entitled "The Book Rebels: Fore-edge Paintings, Flap Anatomies and Other Acts of Digital Resistance." I was planning on publishing the text of it here, and still might use portions as fodder for future posts; but for now, the full video is available here.

* When I say "diverse," I don't just mean a few literary historians and a few cultural historians "bridging the gaps between their disciplines." I met someone from a religion department, Tim Hutchings, studying online Christian testimonials; Astrid Mager, an STS scholar studying search engines; Jim Barrett, working on an English literature dissertation on digital storytelling; Heather Richards-Risetto, an archaeologist using GIS and 3D visualizations to reconstruct ancient Mayan cities; Simon Lindgren, a professor of sociology writing about online participatory culture; Mike Frangos, a modernist and media historian with a PhD in English from UC-Santa Barbara; Cecelia Lindhe, also assistant director of the lab, with a PhD in Comparative Literature, working on media archaeological approaches to studying medieval art; Emma Ewadotter, a PhD student in art history, also working on digital representations of medieval art; Finn Arne Jorgensen, another STS scholar with a forthcoming book on the history of recycling; the list goes on. Their approaches and disciplinary training vary widely, perhaps more so than any humanities lab I know of in the states, and my transdisciplinary muscle (wasted a bit since entering an English department) got a good workout trying to locate nodes of intellectual contact and common methodologies.

Digitizing Dead-end Branches

2011-05-06T08:42:00.004-04:00

At the Animated Anatomies symposium at Duke last month -- I wish I could have blogged the event, but there was just too much interesting stuff to keep track of it all; videos might be posted soon -- I played a bit with the idea of media genealogies. For the most part, the media artifacts or technologies we most study are those that "won" some evolutionary battle, that are most "fit" socially, culturally and economically, and therefore survive. Thus while Hero of Alexandria may have invented a steam-powered engine in the first century A.D., it fizzled out, it didn't "go anywhere" until the technological milieu of the Industrial Revolution made widespread reproduction and adoption of steam power possible. Or so the argument goes.

Another way of putting this is that Hero's aeolipile is a dead-end branch on the tree of technology's history. It wasn't fruitful; it couldn't reproduce anything of enough social or cultural significance to continue its lineage. And so, like a maladapted species, it died out.

This model has much to teach us about the ways media objects must interact with and adapt to their surrounding environs in order to be adopted by a given historical period. In fact, it's perhaps not a big stretch to say that this model, or something like it, implicitly undergirds much of the research that goes on in new media studies, since we (and media executives) often want to know why particular trends in video games or film or television interested (or disgusted) certain kinds of audiences at particular moments in time. When it comes to historical work, though -- artifacts that speak to us from a more distant, dimly-lit past -- the evolutionary model leaves the dead-end branches as just that, dead-ends.

Or, in the case of Hero's aeolipile, fodder for McSweeney-style irony.

Anatomical flapbooks are definitely dead-end branches on the tree of media history. So are astronomical volvelles and other moving paper instruments. They flourish for a time but don't evolve into anything else: they simply die out.

Since the symposium, I've been thinking a lot about dead-end branches and digital archives -- namely, how our digitization practices expose the assumptions underlying the tree model. In order to create a digital facsimile of a book, you have to have some notion of what a book is, its form and functionalities. In most cases, the book is taken as a aggregate of pages lined with (primarily textual) content. This formula then becomes the container that all digitized images are dumped into. Google Books is representative here:

Of course, dead-end branches like flap anatomies and volvelles fit awkwardly into these containers, if they fit at all. Their resistance to digitization makes them an excellent case study in history (and future) of the book, opening up a space in which to imagine alternative ways of relating to print and paper.

With this in mind, I asked Twitter: what aspects of book or print culture resist digitization? A few answers:

It quickly became clear to me that it wasn't just bookish oddities like my crazy little text-generating volvelles that seem to have no place in snap-crop-upload digital archives, but a whole slew of bibliographic data apparent only in the materiality of paper and ink. Yet, as fascinating as I find this, it's not exactly a new revelation. Mediating artifacts obscures some traits of the original while bringing to light others. Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin were thinking about this over a decade ago in their well-known book Remediation (MIT Press, 1999). What was new to me was the stark contrast between the tree model I was thinking about -- struggling with -- and the way in which my online community rapidly demolished it. Attacking the question from a variety of different disciplines, periods and perspectives, the answers I received self-organized into an emergent network of artifacts and practices that all seemed absent or lost in digital media and yet, by dint of appearing on my Twitter page, were suddenly visible in a new, and newly mediated, way. In other words, I wanted to think about how archival practices elide the human labor that goes into making and reading books, and here was a very visible form of human labor bringing them back to light.

Obviously a simple Twitter feed isn't the same as producing a new kind of archive -- or maybe it is. Maybe the messy chaos of online communication, and its status as a form of public record, helps keep some of the noise of history present in the archive. Helps us slice into the dead-end branches, finding the networks operating just beneath our range of vision.

[Nehemiah Grew, Phytological History (1673). Grew was one of the first natural philosophers to examine cross-sections of plant parts under a microscope.]

(At the very least, it -- and this post -- helped me put the finishing touches a talk I was writing up, "The Book Rebels: Fore-edge Paintings, Flap Anatomies, and Other Acts of Digital Resistance.")

Dragonfly Wings & other Bookish Things

2011-03-28T11:12:00.003-04:00

Look closely at the flower. Notice anything? Now check out the opposite side of the page:

[Joris Hoefnagel (artist), Mira calligraphiae monumenta, Flemish, illumination 1591-1596, script 1561-1562. Getty, MS 20, fol. 37v. Image from here.]

It's a beautiful example of trompe l'oeil in a manuscript, from the illuminator and engraver Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1601). Towards the end of the sixteenth century, Rudolf II commissioned Hoefnagel to illustrate the Mira calligraphiae monumenta, produced by the calligrapher Georg Bocskay twenty years earlier. Because Bocskay's calligraphic flourish crossed the entire page, Hoefnagel nestled the flower stem into an "slit" in the parchment. The shadows on both the flower and the mussel preserve the illusion.

Not uncommon in illuminated manuscripts, in fact trompe l'oeil flourished in Netherlandish book painting during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Other examples from the same period show strewn borders with three-dimensional shadowing, as if the flowers were tossed on top of the page --

[Master of the Dresden Prayer Book, Bruges, 1480s. The Getty, MS 23, fol. 13v. Image pulled from here.]

[Hours of Engelbert Nassau, Flemish, 1470-1490. Bodleian, MS Douce 220, fol. 170v. Image pulled from here.]

-- while still others show pilgrim badges and other devotional objects -- which pilgrims would have, in some cases, actually sewn into their books -- as if they are pinned to the page --

[Book of Hours, early sixteenth century. The Hague, MMW, 10 E 3, fol. 90v. Originally pulled from here.]

[Book of Hours from Belgium, perhaps Tournai, 1480s. Pierpont Morgan Library MS M.0234, fol. 037v. Image pulled from here.]

I love this. On the one hand, I'm thinking of the contemporary trompe l'oeil murals produced by frescography, a method of digitally designing and printing illusionistic images that expand the depths of walls; on the other, I'm imagining contemporaneous late medieval / early modern florilegia, Stammbücher, and herbaria, which often acted as scrapbooks of pinned and pressed flowers, butterflies and pilgrim badges. In the former, digital media becomes a means of projection, of expanding one's physical environment; in the latter, the book becomes the platform for collecting, preserving and transporting, both in time and space, those aspects of one's environment which bear personal significance. Both practices hinge on the production of wonder.

Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Virginia Roehrig Kaufmann have published an excellent article on the origins of trompe l'oeil in Netherlandish book painting during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. However, they approach the topic from the discipline of art history, linking manuscript illumination to the rise of Dutch still life painting. It would be interesting to consider these illusionistic paintings not only as visual artifacts but as one node in a network of bookish practices that treat the codex form as an archive of both words and things.

There's a thin, sometimes obscure line between the page as a medium bearing representations -- images and text that draw you away from its materiality -- and the page as an archival platform in itself. Hoefnagel knew this. In addition to illustrating the calligraphy book shown above, he was commissioned to visually represent Rudolf II's famous wunderkammer and produced his own Animalia Ra

tionalia et Insecta (Ignis) (1575-1580). The latter uses the trompe l'oeil device to turn the book into a collecting case for insects, both figuratively (as in this illustration of beetles) --

[Joris Hoefnagel (artist), Animalia Rationalia et Insecta, Flemish, 1575-1580. National Gallery of Art, Plate XXXXIII. Images pulled from here.]

-- and literally, as in this illustration of dragonflies, complete with actual dragonfly wings glued to the page:

[Joris Hoefnagel (artist), Animalia Rationalia et Insecta, Flemish, 1575-1580. National Gallery of Art, Plate LIV. Images from here.]

There's been quite a bit of work done on curiosity cabinets as encyclopedic "Book(s) of Nature" -- here, then, is the encyclopedic book as a wunderkammer, folded in on itself.

Timely Nostalgia

2011-03-09T09:21:00.007-05:00

The thing about volvelles is that not many people write about them. So when I google "volvelles" + whatever I might be poking around for, chances are this blog is somewhere in the results list, as well as few random links to posts on this blog.

Which is exactly what happened last night when I found this languagehat.com post from over a year ago. It's on my master's thesis, and embarrassingly flattering. (I had to read it peeking through my fingers and cringing self-consciously.) I tried to post a comment in response, but I couldn't -- perhaps comments are disabled after a certain period of time -- so I decided to use my blogger's prerogative and use this space to thank Steve for the post, and for the kind words.* When you do somewhat strange work -- strange for academia, that is -- the looks of confusion and this-will-never-get-you-tenure talk (though increasingly rare, I've noticed) can be discouraging; so it means a lot to me when someone "gets it."

Thanks to the people who took the time to comment, too. Trond Engen, I don't know who you are, or why you insist I was 31 when I finished the thesis; I was 23. Chalk it up to a webby wwwormhole.

Some of the challenges to the "novelty" of the project in the comments (and, by the way, I never claimed conceptual novelty: in fact, the thesis itself is an attempt to historicize generative writing) got me thinking about the visual decay of web-based work. If you've ever taught or taken a course on digital literature, you know there's one comment that's inevitable: "It just looks dated to me! Don't they know how far CGI has advanced?" When language dons the dress of design, as it must online, its visual component starts to signify, to make meaning. Of course, written language always has a livery -- we just don't tend to notice it much when it's the utilitarian sweatsuit of Times New Roman text on an 8.5"x11" page. On the web, though, the decoration of links is necessary for navigation. So when a once cutting-edge digital poem written at the height of Netscape's popularity is shown today, it's kind of like watching a Backstreet Boys video on YouTube -- a wee bit "We ♥ the 90s."

Various digital pieces play with this nostalgia. I'm partial to the pixelated, NES aesthetic of Neil Hennessey's "Basho's Frogger." What of digital scholarly work, though? The typography and layout of a journal article or monograph age at a glacial pace compared to the design of a web-based essay (although, it's worth pointing out, they do age -- ever looked at a book of lit crit published in the 1940s?; it even smells uncitable). Most scholars and digital projects seem to err on the side of caution, producing crisp white websites with timeless layouts -- but then they've foregone the opportunity to make the design work rhetorically, which seems to me one of the most exciting possibilities of webtexts.

And what of those students who expect digital art to look like the latest and greatest in photorealistic CGI? I'm always stupefied by this comment -- actually, by my own lack of a snappy response. Visual aesthetics carry more weight on the web than they typically do for us in a book; that seems inevitable. It's tempting to say: "Look past the font and colors to what the piece is doing" -- but that's like asking someone to look past the mess of the splatters to get at a Jackson Pollack painting. It's missing the point.

Residue from the past clings to digital media even as the present pushes forward with increasing rapidity. In this kind of visual environment, words like "novelty" bump elbows with notions of nostalgia, and linear histories get twisted into spirals. Which is to say: learning to be an attendant reader of new media forms is as much about becoming a careful historian as anything else -- combing through the tangle of texts and colors and designs, new, old and nostalgic, we encounter online.

It's also learning to read your feedreader carefully, so you can thank people and respond in, well, a timely fashion.

* And my gratitude to Rattus peacay. For a genus with hoarding tendencies, his is a particularly generous species.

Flap Anatomy Dresses

2011-02-24T10:48:00.007-05:00

There's an upcoming exhibit and symposium at Duke on flap anatomies -- that is, anatomical prints with movable, paste-in body parts. (I've shared a few previously on this blog.) The exhibit covers the sixteenth through the twenty-first centuries and includes some lovely examples of early modern fugitive sheets, as well as a some intricate, quasi-pop-up style "moving atlases of the human body" designed in the late nineteenth century. A website with some images and video of the collection will be up sometime in the next few months.

An example of a flap anatomy, from Georg Bartisch's Ophthalmodouleia (1583). Image from the Duke University Medical Center Library.

In the meantime, you can imagine my delight when I stumbled upon this flap-anatomy dress:

From a Fall 2010 Fashion Week event at Shih Chien University. Information and images pulled from here and here and here. More images here.

As with the fugitive sheets, flaps -- here, fabric flaps -- open to reveal different bodily systems. It isn't just the structural relationship that caught my eye, though. It's the model's pose.

Giulio Casserio (anatomist) and Odoardo Fialetti (artist), Tabulae Anatomicae... (Venice, 1627). Image from Dream Anatomy; visit this link for higher resolution images and more information.

As Michael Sappol (who'll be talking at the upcoming Duke symposium) points out in Dream Anatomy, the illustrations in many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century anatomies are coy, almost flirtatious. The models -- some of them repurposed from other texts, including, in the case of Charles Estienne's De dissectione (1545), from pornography -- playfully pull up their skin to reveal neatly labeled organs. "The anatomist was a performer," Sappol writes; "anatomy required showmanship."

John Browne, A compleat treatise of the muscles, as they appear in the humane body, and arise in dissection... (London, 1681). Image from Dream Anatomy; visit this link for higher resolution images and more information.

The two copperplate engravings shown above don't contain any moving parts; instead, the models move themselves, performing their own dissections. They're alive -- feet are lifted, muscled held tight -- but engaged in acts typically done on and to the dead. Thus if flap anatomies put the reader in the position of the performer-anatomist, animating inanimate objects with her hands, here the inanimate animate themselves: they illustrate impossible acts.

In fact, it would be interesting to consider these images alongside, for instance, Robert Hooke's Micrographia (1665) or Nehemiah Grew's The Anatomy of Plants (1682), two Royal Society publications on microscopy. Both Hooke's and Grew's work is stuffed with gorgeous plates magnifying subvisible worlds in the same way these anatomies reveal new dimensions just beneath the surface of the human body.

More on the flap anatomies exhibit and symposium soon. And, yes, in case you're wondering: I would totally wear that dress.

Hunting the Spotted Hiybbprqag Mountweazel: The Google / Bing Thing

2011-02-07T14:29:00.002-05:00

Last week, Google claimed Bing has been stealing its search results, sparking a rather public tussle over legitimate uses of clickstream monitoring. While the debate itself has been interesting, I'm more struck by the way in which Google discovered the supposed theft:

We created about 100 "synthetic queries"—queries that you would never expect a user to type, such as [hiybbprqag]. As a one-time experiment, for each synthetic query we inserted as Google’s top result a unique (real) webpage which had nothing to do with the query. [...]

To be clear, the synthetic query had no relationship with the inserted result we chose—the query didn’t appear on the webpage, and there were no links to the webpage with that query phrase. In other words, there was absolutely no reason for any search engine to return that webpage for that synthetic query. You can think of the synthetic queries with inserted results as the search engine equivalent of marked bills in a bank.

We gave 20 of our engineers laptops with a fresh install of Microsoft Windows running Internet Explorer 8 with Bing Toolbar installed. As part of the install process, we opted in to the “Suggested Sites” feature of IE8, and we accepted the default options for the Bing Toolbar.

We asked these engineers to enter the synthetic queries into the search box on the Google home page, and click on the results, i.e., the results we inserted. We were surprised that within a couple weeks of starting this experiment, our inserted results started appearing in Bing. Below is an example: a search for [hiybbprqag] on Bing returned a page about seating at a theater in Los Angeles.

// "Microsoft uses Google search results -- and denies it"

Why's this so interesting? Producers of dictionaries and maps used more or less the same technique to catch copyright infringers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Often called Mountweazels, after the fictitious entry for Lillian Virginia Mountweazel in the New Columbia Encyclopedia, these traps allowed publishers to identify violations of their copyright.

It's easy to see why dictionaries and maps might need Mountweazels. Reference works intend to be informative, with short, functional prose; and maps of course should all show the same streets in the same location, if not the same information about those streets. Since dictionaries and maps -- if they're any good -- should accord with all other dictionaries and maps, it's tempting for publishers to filch each others' work.

In other words, publishers construct, then disseminate fictions -- fictions which often take on a life of their own -- in order to protect the actual and real content of a work, as well as its reputation as purveying "true" information. Mountweazels are thus a beautiful confluence of medium and message, form and genre, literature and copyright law; they show how world and word weave together across time and through different platforms. Google's "hiybbprqag" doesn't quite have the same charm as, say, esquivalience, defined in the 2001 edition of The New Oxford American Dictionary as "the willful avoidance of one's official responsibilities," or Guglielmo Baldini, my favorite fake Italian composer -- but with time, it may become as notorious, taking on a meaning of its own. Whether Google intended it or not, it has fabricated an entity that acts in and on the world.

A few Mountweazels, trap streets, and mistaken entries:

Dord, a word erroneously added to the 1934 edition of the New International Dictionary after a slip reading "D or d, cont./density" was misread as "Dord," meaning "density."
From the 1975 New Columbia Encyclopedia: "Mountweazel, Lillian Virginia, 1942-1973, American photographer, b. Bangs, Ohio. Turning from fountain design to photography in 1963, Mountweazel produced her celebrated portraits of the South Sierra Miwok in 1964. She was awarded government grants to make a series of photo-essays of unusual subject matter, including New York City buses, the cemeteries of Paris and rural American mailboxes. The last group was exhibited extensively abroad and published as Flags Up! (1972) Mountweazel died at 31 in an explosion while on assignment for Combustibles magazine."
Guglielmo Baldini appeared in the 1980 New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, along with Dag Henrik Esrum-Hellerup. Baldini had made his fake debut in the work of a century earlier in the work of German musicologist Hugo Riemann.
Beatosu and Goblu, Ohio were both added to the official state of Michigan map in 1978-9. Take a closer look at the name: they refer to the University of Michigan ("Go Blue!") and their rivals from Ohio State University ("Beat OSU!"). The chairman of the State Highway Commission, a U of M alumnus, inserted the fake towns -- mostly for fun, but possibly with trap street intentions. More on copyright traps in maps here.

"I dream of a new age of curiosity.

2011-01-11T09:52:00.002-05:00

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity, futility. The word, however, pleases me. To me it suggests something altogether different: it evokes 'concern'; it evokes the care one takes for what exists and could exist; a readiness to find strange and singular what surrounds us; a certain relentlessness to break up our familiarities and to regard otherwise the same things; a fervor to grasp what is happening and what passes; a casualness in regard to the traditional hierarchies of the important and the essential.

I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little: from the channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insufficient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent 'bad' information from invading and suffocating the 'good.' Rather, we must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings.

// Michel Foucault, "The Masked Philosopher"

Zombie Editions: An Archaeology of POD Areopagiticas

2010-12-15T18:30:00.002-05:00

I'm zipping along on Amazon, trying to find a lightweight edition of John Milton's Areopagitica -- a paperback Penguin, maybe -- when I stumble upon this:

Yes, there's an egregious typo in John Milton's name; but that isn't the only weirdness here. English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica is machine-speak for "Does Not Compute" -- or, if I may be allowed some license with my translation, "Situation Normal, Metadata Categories All &*$%ed Up." Someone (or something) missed a few line breaks. And why is Edward Arber, a nineteenth-century editor and professor of English, tagged as the author of this hot mess?*

This is a zombie edition, one of many I found for early modern texts on Amazon. Produced as cheap print-on-demand editions from EEBO or GoogleBook scans, they're listed alongside reputable scholarly print editions published by university presses, indistinguishable at first glance except for a few glaring markers. Like a mismatched cover image --

-- or excessively expressive titles:

Closer examination reveals their undead status. In the case of English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica, the publisher is the aptly-named BiblioLife, a project of BiblioLabs, which designs software "to address the challenges of cost-effectively bringing old books back to life." (BiblioLabs takes the "brining things back to life" shtick pretty seriously. Their website proudly boasts that their company is located in a "Renewal Community" -- a distressed urban zone where businesses are eligible for billions in tax incentives.) Another common publisher of zombie books is Nabu Press, taking its name from the Babylonian god of writing and patron of the scribes. The description for each Nabu Press book includes the same disclaimer:

This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Whereas most "Product Descriptions" describe the content of the book, here the publisher draws attention to the physical artifact -- to its missing or blurred pages, its poor pictures and errant marks. In his latest book Piracy, Adrian Johns points out that during the eighteenth-century, pirated reprints didn't simply impinge on the intellectual property rights of authors -- a concept still in construction -- but threatened the civility of scholarly discourse by disseminating corrupt, even ugly copies of important texts. In other words, piracy forced a split between "texts" and "books" -- between words and the things that circulate them.

Although POD books are not pirated, these zombie editions exert a similar pressure on our concept of "the book." On the one hand, so-called POD facsimile editions that reprint a GoogleBooks scan of an original edition put a new batch of readers in touch with the visual aesthetics of early modern books, from the typography to the importance of title pages. In fact, one no longer needs to have institutional access to EEBO to download or own a facsimile edition of most early modern texts. As someone who geeks out over such things, I'm pretty excited by the possibilities POD holds; as a reader subjected to the general awfulness of these "facsimiles," though -- most of which are corrupted to the point of illegibility -- ....well, just take a look at the table of contents for English Reprints Jhon Milton Areopagitica:

On the other hand, POD publishers are also pulling from sites like Project Gutenberg, which offer "plain vanilla" texts stripped clean of accidentals. These editions usually come from OCRed scans, which simply means a machine has turned an image into copy-and-paste-able digital text. Depending on the sophistication of the OCR software used, anywhere between 1-20% of the words may be garbled, with older, non-standard typography being more difficult for the machine to read. While this typically isn't a problem, the occasional misrendering can be disruptive, especially when encountered in a printed book -- a medium in which we're not used to finding typos.

Areopagitica (Volume 1); 24 November 1644: Preceded by Illustrative Documents, shown above, is an excellent example. Pulled from an OCR of a scan of a bowdlerized reprinting in the Little Humanist Classics series, the text substitutes "sexist pronouns" with "the humanist pronouns HU, HUS, and HUM," even going so far as to switch "adulthood" for "manhood." Several confused readers, expecting OCR corruptions but perhaps not humanist bowdlerizations, left disappointed reviews (although at least one female reader appreciated the edition's "inclusive wordage": "I am not a man," she writes, "mankind does NOT mean humankind, and during John Milton's time women were being burned on stakes, so his outlook especially towards women was dim, and very well could have been reflected in this book, if it wasn't for the publishers insights regarding this." She concludes, without a touch of irony, "This is an excellent account of one of the original ideas for free speech in this country.") So much for Milton's campaign against censorship.

Like the pirated reprints of eighteenth-century England, then, these POD editions put scholars, especially book historians, in a real bind (pun intended). Cheap facsimile editions could bring bibliographic concerns back to the forefront of research, indeed to the very site of reading; but, sadly, most publishers downright suck at producing them. Meanwhile, "plain vanilla" texts are flooding the market, ostensibly pushing us away from any material connection with the original book; yet it's hard to immerse oneself in the immaterial text when OCR errors, the artifacts of shoddy digital scans, continually draw attention back to their technologies of production. In each case, a tangle of texts, technologies and histories challenges us to reconsider the border between material technologies and immaterial texts -- in short, to rethink what makes each POD book a "book."

Interestingly, the reader, left to navigate this web herself, emerges as the primary agent of meaning. It's the reader who must carefully check metadata for clues of corruption and read reviews to be sure she isn't buying, for example, a bowdlerized "Little Humanist Classic." It's also the reader who must discern typographic clues. (If the typography in a "facsimile" edition of an early modern text looks nineteenth-century, chances are it's a GoogleBooks scan of a censored Victorian edition. Because the term "censorship" is culturally relative, even nineteenth-century editions purporting to be "complete and full renditions" often are not.) When Amazon lumps POD books together with scholarly critical editions, it's up to the reader to become a literate surfer and sorter of information.

As, I suppose, it always has been.

*If you're curious, here's what probably happened: between 1868 and 1880, Edward Arber produced a series "English Reprints," cheap editions that disseminated literary works to a broader audience. At some point, both an 1868 and 1903 reprinting were scanned and posted on Google Books and/or archive.org; in the translation to Amazon's system, the metadata for the title included the series and tagged the series editor, Ed Arber, as the author; so now Milton's Areopagitica is accessible through the frame of a nineteenth-century popular reprinting.

Puzzling Drumbeat

2010-11-23T23:32:00.006-05:00

I started writing a long post hyping all the awesome people I met at Mozilla Drumbeat, peppered with some broad insights on the future of the education on the open web.

It might have been a good post; but it was taxing to write, and I was having a hard time separating personal from professional insights. Words beginning with "c" kept coming up: context, the clatter of skateboards, collaboration, crowds, clouds, the salty seawater crust I can't remove from the edge of my favorite poncho. And I kept finding the most beautiful photographs from the festival. I wanted to combine my messy half-thoughts with these visuals in a way that honored the experience of being there.

So I made a puzzle -- because, well, the whole festival was (delightfully, playfully) puzzling. A mix-n-match tinker-board of local and global action.

(And, of course, I've been wanting to make something with jqPuzzle for some time. )

Enjoy.

Feast of Fools: a dispatch from the edge of the gorge

2010-10-19T13:39:00.006-04:00

Printers and booksellers almost always represent the early literary miscellany or anthology as a feast, a collation of fruits gathered in one banquet to suit a variety of tastes. While claims of heterogeneity and contemporaneity often signify only that the material has never before -- or not recently, or not legally--been published, the metaphor of a feast reveals the cultural logic of the collection. While harking back to the word's etymology, it reinscribes the paradoxical independence yet community of miscellaneous readers.

Similarly, the less common Greek term anthology, meaning a collection of flowers, marks simultaneously the distinction and the unity of the contents, the flowers garlanded within the volume. Thus Restoration and eighteenth-century booksellers emphasize that the various feast of the miscellany or anthology is designed to invite the reader not only to select those particular fruits that appeal to his or her palate, but to join the banquet.

That's Barbara Benedict, writing about early modern literary anthologies. They were, as she points out, feasts -- sites for communal reading, communal gorging on the printed word.

That's Tim Carmody, responding to one of my tweets about THATCampRTP. THATCamp is a digital humanities unconference wherein participants self-organize and -direct discussions. The upside is that it's a free-flowing discussion; the downside is the upside. If we want the carnival to have structure, we've gotta set up our own tents.

Sometimes, though, I'd rather just gorge.

I love brainstorming. Scratch that; I love brainstorming when all participants revel in the luxury of the process. Because it is a luxury, to get to sit in a comfortable chair, in a comfortable room, building castles in the sky. It's why I tend to seek out anarchists -- they're idealists, they know how to luxuriate in thought.

Knowing how to luxuriate in thought means knowing how not to get snagged on realities. When you're dreaming up your anarcho-primitivist commune over home-brew mead, you don't stop to ask who'll be its future apiary supplier. Honey will continue to flow from buttery hives of stinger-less bees, and that's all anyone really needs to know.

When you go to a potluck, you check your reality at the door. You feast.

The Anglo-Saxons knew how to feast. In Beowulf, words are wasted on the feast at Heorot, where an attendant "bær hroden ealowæge, / scencte scir wered" [bore an adorned ale-cup, pouring bright, sweet mead] (495-6). Scops sing; "þær wæs hæleða dream." (Grendel knew how to gorge, too, biting on bone-locks ("bat banlocan"), gobbling hot blood from the Danes' veins.)

Late medieval English folk definitely knew how to feast. In a Saturnalian brawl, delightfully dubbed the Feast of Fools, young people elected a mock bishop as the Lord of Misrule, the Archbishop of Dolts, the Abbot of Unreason. It's a carnivalesque tradition bordering on the dangerous and easily bleeding into violence.

[Pieter Bruegel, The Fight Between Carnival and Lent (1559)]

(When it's really biting cold out, and I forget a jacket or a scarf (as I often do; no matter how much experience I have with weather, I always forget it exists), I think of the tailor King Jan of the Münster Rebellion (1534-1535), a stark raving madman who stripped naked to run the icy streets of his scared-shitless anarchist commune. Looking back to the Feast of Fools; or forward to suicide-bombing terrorists?)

Step away from the edge for a moment (the other kind of gorge) and think formally about the metaphor. There's a table; it has dishes on it, from the sweet to the savory, from simple fruits and nuts to stuffed meats and sauces. There's drink. There might be music -- music too loud for anything more than suggestive physical expressions; gesture, dance. Everything points away from our normal modes of (scholarly, scholastic) communication towards a lawless outside -- but an outside nonetheless (as Tim points out) contained within a Heorot. The rules no longer apply here, in this place, at this gathering. Here, where the Lord of Misrule abides.

I want more scholarly feasting. THATCamp has the potential to be a feast and, at its best moments last weekend in Durham, was. But to make the feast work, we have to temporarily shelve reality. Which means shelving the words "standards" and "best practices." There's a time for details, and communal brain-gorges aren't it.

An example. When someone playfully says wouldn't it be cool if you could wallpaper your office with a touchscreen bookshelf? (as John McVey did say to me this summer -- John is someone who knows how to intellectually feast), you don't ask how that would work with Apple's DRM policy. You grin and toss the ball back. As in: ooo! you could instantly customize the colors!

The urge to feast is systematically rooted out of us, those of us with formal academic training. Gluttony is a mortal sin to be refined into dialectic -- something more controlled, more abstemious in its rhetoric. You're supposed to be excited; but not too excited. Language comes from your lips, not your fingers. You absolutely should not (as I often do) slosh your drink all over your nice conference shirt during the breaks. If you slosh your drink, your hands are gesticulating too much. Don't move your hands (I tell myself).

At a feast, your lips are for laughing, your hands for dancing, and no one gives a shit how crazy you sound. That's the point.

How our cultural heritage will be digitized and our digital heritage maintained are serious and sobering discussions; they end with action items and task forces deployed in the light of day. But we still need spaces for feasting -- the brainstorming haze, where you say things you don't quite remember the next day but you feel excited, energized. The best sessions at THATCampRTP left me eager to begin playing.

Which is now what I'm going to go do. That, and have some lunch.

Thinking Out Loud: "Storming Scholarly Publishing & Peer Review", at Drumbeat next month

2010-10-13T11:46:00.012-04:00

HASTAC will have a tent at Mozilla Drumbeat in Barcelona next month, and I'm very lucky to be a part of it. The theme is "Storming the Academy." In particular, I'll be helping us think about tools for digital publishing and peer review.

What is Drumbeat? Here's a little taste, from the Mozilla website:

Drumbeat is for anyone who wants to lend their skills and creativity to the cause of keeping the internet open. It’s a chance to for everyone — not just software developers and testers — to get involved. Who? Teachers. Lawyers. Artists. Accountants. Plumbers. Web Developers. Anyone who uses and cares about the internet.

It isn't a conference or an unconference, but a festival: we'll be in a tent, wrangling interested sundry folk from the above-mentioned list to participate in our activities. We may have some brainstorming sessions; we do some hands-on tool-building; we may have some participatory video performances. It's open to whatever creative fun we can think up!

Which is where I need your help. I've used this blog as a space to test out a few digital projects, and talk about scholarly webtexts in general. I've often expressed my frustration that more scholars aren't experimenting (despite that fact that an increasing number of journals are accepting creative webtext submissions). A frequent response is that humanities scholars aren't given the tools or skills they need to produce creative digital work -- and the few experiments in producing digital publishing tools for academics (like NINES' "Exhibits" feature) have been (in my humble opinion) less than successful. So what is needed?

Here are a few off-the-cuff ideas from a brief brainstorming session:

Mindmap publishing. Mindmapping software is readily available; but most tend to act as little more than photoshop-like systems designed to create connectable bubbles, and exporting options are slim and static. By contrast, some great visualizations have popped up on the web (e.g. the options from flare, a Flash/Flex data viz toolkit), but their "interactivity"is usually limited to navigating through a system someone else has constructed. Can we think of a way to transform data visualizations from presentation tools into mindmap-like authoring systems? How would you write differently if your mindmaps could be interactive, networked journeys through a chunk of information? How could these be "published" — or support traditional publications? How could they be tools for collaboration? Could an interactive, multi-user-produced mindmap produce an argument?
One-click digital commonplacing. Digital text is manipulable; it can be copied and pasted elsewhere with a few clicks. Printed words on paper can also be copied elsewhere. For centuries in the west, readers maintained "commonplace books," in which they would copy and categorize interesting quotes or sententiae they came across while reading. Bibliographic software like Zotero allow us to manage and manipulate documents or files (an entire article, an entire webpage) but do not, to my knowledge, allow for scrapbooking chunks from within documents. What if you could highlight text, hit (e.g.) SHIFT-S, and the highlighted text pops into a digital scrapbook, complete with citation, link and date saved? This could be done as an applet for the web, so you no longer have to sift through entire bookmarked websites to find the one quote/bit of information. This way, your research points to quotes, to words, rather than to files.

(Incidentally, we’re probably seeing a shift in how manipulable digital text actually is. Reading on an iPad is delightfully haptic, but you can’t copy/paste most text — only highlight, as in a book. So, when it comes to manipulability, you kind of get the worst of both worlds, digital and paper. Steven Berlin Johnson has a great post on this very topic.)

Maybe these tools have been made before. Maybe not. For now, the goal is to think creatively around how digital scholarship is done; then I'll spend some time researching what's out there, and where the gaps are in tools available.

Which brings me to my second point. This section of our tent activities is titled "Storming Scholarly Publishing and Peer Review" -- but I've been thinking of it more in terms of "Storming Writing and Publishing" or "Storming Writing Practices" (less aca-specific). In his keynote at Material Cultures this past summer, Jerry McGann pointed out that the biggest problems facing digital humanities are institutional, not technological — which strikes me as correct. Collectively, we have the skills to build tools to facilitate digital peer review; what we don't yet have is the critical mass (or gumption) needed to transform a slow, tedious publishing process not suited for a twenty-first century information ecology. Likewise -- again -- more and more journals are accepting digital projects; they just aren't receiving very many of them, because to produce these weird little webtexts is to rub against the grain of every "good" research habit we've adopted in academia. By shifting the focus from "Scholarly Publishing" (a phrase already laden with assumptions) to "Writing Practices" (or something similar), we're no longer thinking about how to insert technologies into our present systems, but imagining what we want our digital practices to be.

(Do you watch Mad Men? Do you remember the scene early this season when Faye Miller told Don that the experiment failed, that the women she tested for Ponds cold cream weren't interested in ritual but just wanted to get married? And Don got mad and said how do you know that's the truth, a new idea is something they don't know yet, so of course it's not going to come up as an option? It's kind of like that. If we want to see change, we have to create it.)

What if we all agreed to stop writing in MSWord? What would happen? What historical models do we have for these shifts (e.g., what can a practice like commonplacing teach us about the gaps in our own writing systems)? How does changing the material circumstances of textual production change what is produced?

These are the some of questions we want to ask at Drumbeat -- but they aren't the only ones. I haven't mentioned systems like CommentPress or the wonderful work going on at MediaCommons. I haven't mentioned much about peer review, although that will be a topic we'll be discussing. You're welcome to think with us. From the big issues to the nitty-gritty details, I want to hear what you have to say on the future of (digital) scholarly publishing.

new SpringGun Press ish out

2010-10-10T20:16:00.006-04:00

The new issue of SpringGun Press, a lovely journal of digital writing of all sorts, is out. "Speaking of Rivers," a project on Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" that I did with Pete Moore and blogged about here last year, is in it, as is a little webby reimagining I did of an absolutely gorgeous bit of writing from Mallarmé, which I've returned to a few times on this blog:

To write --

The inkwell, crystalline like consciousness, with its drop, at bottom, of shadows relative to letting something be: then, take the lamp away.

As you noted, one doesn't write, luminously, on a dark field; the alphabet of stars alone does that, sketched or interrupted; man writes black upon white.
This fold of dark lace, which holds the infinite, woven by thousands, each according to his own thread or extension, not knowing the secret, assembles distant spacings in which riches yet to be inventoried sleep: vampire, knot, foliage; and our job is to present them.

I was going to write a little something about how this webby reimagining is intended as creative criticism; but I think I want to resist glossing it. As usual, I've been obsessed with the mirror relationships of reading and writing -- the former always bordering on illegibility, the latter limning constellations on and from an open field -- and wanted to play with these quasi-Manichean relationships.

(And yes, I have spent the weekend steeped in Augustine's Confessions -- hence the sudden appearance of the word "Manichean" -- but now that I've used it, it seems appropriate. The eternal struggle for dominance, light versus dark. Consumption versus production. The anxiety of being lost in texts at the expense of our own; of writing what's already been printed. Has anyone really figured out the proper balance? Or is always the one-off binary flip of a coin?)

Editors Erin Costello and Mark Rockswold did an wonderful job with the issue. Definitely check it out.

*Gabriel Levinson first contacted me about doing something for his Deus Ex Pagina project, which he presented at Printer's Ball in Chicago this summer, which lead to this webby little oddity; so many thanks to him. Check out all his neat work with the Book Bike.

The Erasers & the Annotators: A Remixed Twitter Convo on Library Marginalia (and more)

2010-09-27T10:51:00.002-04:00

"Library Books are Sacred"; or: I Erase (I swear!)

Through the act of reading, a solitary tacit concert is performed for the spirit, which regains, with a lesser sonority, signification: none of the mental ways to exalt a symphony will be left out -- just rarefied from the fact of thought, that's all. Poetry, close to the idea, is Music par excellence -- doesn't admit inferiority.

Here, in the case at hand, is what i do: when it comes to booklets to read, according to common usage, I brandish my knife, like a poultry butcher.

// Stéphane Mallarmé, "The Book as a Spiritual Instrument"

Scholars have always made notes. The most primitive way of absorbing a text is to write on the book itself. It was common for Renaissance readers to mark key passages by underlining them or drawing lines and pointing fingers in the margin – the early modern equivalent of the yellow highlighter. According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, ‘the choycest books of most great learned men, and the notablest students’ were marked through, ‘with little lines under or above’ or ‘by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or mark may best help to call the knowledge of the thing to remembrance’. Newton used to turn down the corners of the pages of his books so that they pointed to the exact passage he wished to recall. J.H. Plumb once showed me a set of Swift’s works given him by G.M. Trevelyan; it had originally belonged to Macaulay, who had drawn a line all the way down the margin of every page as he read it, no doubt committing the whole to memory. The pencilled dots in the margin of many books in the Codrington Library at All Souls are certain evidence that A.L. Rowse was there before you. My old tutor, Christopher Hill, used to pencil on the back endpaper of his books a list of the pages and topics which had caught his attention. He rubbed out his notes if he sold the book, but not always very thoroughly, so one can usually recognise a volume which belonged to him.

// Keith Thomas, "Working Methods"

All Books are Sacred

Arguing with the Page

Marking Books as Brain-Work

But in the case of the living reading-machine "reading" meant reacting to written signs in such-and-such ways. This concept was therefore quite independent of that of a mental or other mechanism. -- Nor can the teacher here say of the pupil: "Perhaps he was already reading when he said that word." For there is no doubt about what he did. -- The change when the pupil began to read what as a change in his behavior; and it makes no sense here to speak of 'a first word in his new state'.

// Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 157

Reader-Editors

[editing Jane Austen's letters]

Found Marginalia

Each moment of the reading encounter is the inconsistent aggregate of other moments, stimulated -- consciously and unconsciously -- by marks and patterns of marks (and relations of marks too inchoate and variable to be qualified as 'patterns') that evoke others and thus generate meanings that are specific to the encounter.

//Terry Harpold, Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path, 2.24

Marginalized Marginalia

(This is true.)

..what do you write?

Historians of books and readers have uncovered a series of general developments that mark significant changes in what is possible and (to some extent) what is normal for readers to do. They are usually formulated as "from . . . to" narratives and sometimes characterized as "revolutions,' but they should not be seen as absolute rules governing all reading at a given time or place. ... This study contains lesson after lesson on the ineluctable specificity of readers and readings, and it is this (I would suggest) rather than the fragmentary nature of the evidence that makes marginalia resistant to grand theories and master narratives.

// William Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England, xvi

A Blank Poem (1723); or, the Present of Absence

2010-08-29T10:25:00.009-04:00

Can you read that?

It's a catalog entry for "The First of April: a blank poem in commendation of the suppos'd author of a poem lately publish'd, call'd Ridotto, or, Downfal of masquerades," printed in London in -- 1704? Sometime after 1723 is more likely, since that's when the Ridotto; or, Downfall of Masquerades was published. What's curious about this poem --

-- is that it's a blank poem. After the title page and a dedication -- "To No Body," of course -- the paper is blank, save the occasional asterisk indicating footnotes. One, marked by a dagger in the center of the page, reads: "An Elleipsis, or leaving something to be understood by the Reader."

Has anyone seen this pamphlet?

I haven't. I originally noticed its citation while poking through D. F. Foxon's English Verse, 1701-1750 at Rare Book School. Quite helpfully, Foxon includes a index of oddities he came across during the twenty-five years he spent compiling and refining his bibliography. One category, "blanks," caught my eye, given the recent interest in the topic of "blankness" by Lisa Gitelman (see the video below) and Peter Stallybrass.

A Short History of [Blank] - Lisa Gitelman (2009) PT 1 from joncates on Vimeo.

I dug around a bit more and found this copy -- the only extant copy? -- in Penn's collection, as well as a single mention in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Vol. 45) of the poem's mention in the London Mercury of May 1928.

A queer little book has recently come into the hands of Messrs. Hodgson, of 115 Chancery Lane, who have been kind enough to send it for me to see. This is a quarto pamphlet of six leaves, called The First of April : A Blank Poem, In Commendation of the suppos'd Author of a Poem lately publish'd, call'd, Ridotto, or Downfall of Masquerades, and it was published, "Price Three-pence," by "J. Graves, next White's Chocolate House, St. James's-Street." There is no date but it looks as if it had appeared late in the seventeenth century, or perhaps early in the eighteenth. At any rate it must have been after 1693, for Francis White did not set up his chocolate-house until later that year. [Good to know.] The whole publication is, of course, an April Fool's Day jest, and the humour lies, or is intended to lie, in the fact that the reader (having paid his threepence) finds himself faced with a title-page, a long dedication, and then three pages with a woodcut ornament above the heading The First of April, a number of asterisks and footnotes, and "Finis" at the end, but no text! [...] The Dedication is, naturally, also facetious, and is addrsesed "To No Body," to whom many extravagant compliments are paid, since No Body "was born before Adam," and "No Body is exempt from dying." Further than this, "Who believes," asks the Author, "that the Tithe of the English C---gy lead exemplary Lives? No Body believes it. What a glaring Instance is here of your Superior Charity, and more unlimited Faith!" There is, of course, a good deal more of this "No Body" joke, which, elementary as it is, seems to be one of which mankind never tires. [...] The joke does not seem to me to be quite funny enough to merit a life of two and a quarter centuries -- and probably a great deal more than that!

Williams is right about that. It's clever, though. We tend to see the poetic deployment of "blankness" as modern or even post-modern; it's terrain for Derrida and Blanchot reading Mallarmé writing about the "blankness of the white paper; a significant silence that it is no less lovely to compose than verse." It's the silence of Cage; it's the whiteness of margins whose vacuum of signification has sucked up an excess of significance. It's the blank stare. If Shakespeare invented human nature through language -- and Keats inked the blank pages of Shakespeare's Poetical Works with his own handwritten sonnets -- we've perfected the alchemy of turning absence to presence, of creating from a profoundly uncreative void.

So what is this "queer little book" doing? Paper was still expensive around this time, we're told. It would have made up the bulk of any printer's expenses in producing a book. Studies in marginalia, like Will Sherman's Used Books, show how earlier Renaissance readers often exploited the blank paper in books as writing pads; and why paper-intensive projects, like John Foxe's commonplace book of 1,200 all-but-blank pages, were such a risk for printers. (Foxe's commonplace book failed, the unsold sheets recycled to print two later texts -- take a look at Sherman's discussion around page 138 of Used Books). Although produced over a century later, this blank poem still seems a "waste" economically, especially for an April Fool's joke.

And clearly "blankness" isn't being theorized the way it is in, say, Mallarmé. Here, the "First of April" is the blank -- the Ridotto it "commends" is the blank -- in short, blankness is sarcasm; it signifies the nothingness and "No Body" of what it's supposed to celebrate. It's a conceptual poem that exploits its medium, but doesn't, it seem, rise to the level of a "poetics of blankness." Which is probably why I'm drawn to it. It's absence isn't theorized presence, but stands for simply absence itself. A No Thing ironically made known through the very "thingness" -- the necessary "thingness" -- of itself.

Of course, all this is written about a poem I've never seen firsthand -- whose existence to me is no more than a constellation of bibliographical citations. In other words, the blank poem is blank to me, blank to scholarship, blank to all but the very few who have left traces of its presence in their own work. Difficult to reproduce and impossible to anthologize, the very absence of text makes its material presence necessary, since its physical form bears the weight of signification.

So, short of trip to Penn, blank it shall remain.

A model for creative digital scholarship.

2010-08-24T19:17:00.003-04:00

Leibniz is endlessly drawing up linear and numerical tables. With them he decorates the inner walls of the monad. Folds replace holes. The dyad of the city-information table is opposed to the system of the window-countryside. Leibniz's monad would be just such a grid -- or better, a room or an apartment -- completely covered with lines of variable inflection. This would be the camera obscura of the New Essays, furnished with a stretched canvas diversified by moving, living folds. Essential to the monad is its dark background: everything is drawn out of it, and nothing goes out or comes in from the outside.

//Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (27)

Early Modern works on Librivox

2010-08-10T11:02:00.001-04:00

Today, I completed my thirty-sixth -- and final -- hour of Henry Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, the audiobook.

I've tried (and failed) to complete Tom Jones the "old-fashioned" way on two earlier occasions, but only managed success by marrying the wonder of spoken word to a hand-eye task just routinely dull enough to make the novel comparably exciting.

To celebrate, I'm posting a few of the early modern English works I've found on Librivox. Librivox -- a site that provides audiobooks of works in the public domain -- is a surprisingly decent resource for early modern literature, since (of course) it's all already in the public domain. (It's okay for medieval, too, but great for nineteenth-century stuff.) Unfortunately, the site's search is limited to, more or less, "Author," "Title" and "Category," making it difficult to stumble across works in your period unless you know to look for them. Having users curate private collections of "favorite listening" could fill in the gaps. This list is a step in that direction.

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum

--------------, Essays

George Chapman, "Hero and Leander"

Richard Crashaw, "Love's Horoscope", from Short Poetry Collection 019

John Donne, "Death Be Not Proud"

------------, "Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions"

------------, Holy Sonnets I-XIX, other divine poems

------------, "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", from Short Poetry Collection 088

George Herbert, Selections from The Temple

Robert Herrick, "Cherry-Ripe", from Short Poetry Collection 057

---------------, "The Night-piece: To Julia", from Short Poetry Collection 060

---------------, "Saint Distaff's Day"

---------------, "To Anthea", from Short Poetry Collection 017

---------------, "To Violets", from Short Poetry Collection 036

---------------, "To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time", from Short Poetry Collection 052

---------------, "To the Western Wind", from Short Poetry Collection 036

---------------, "Upon Julia's Clothes," from Short Poetry Collection 020

---------------, "The Vine," from Short Poetry Collection 039

---------------, "Whenas in Silks", from Short Poetry Collection 029

Ben Jonson, The Forest

-----------, "Farewell to the World", from Short Poetry Collection 083

Christopher Marlowe, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love", from Romantic Poetry 001

Andrew Marvell, "The Definition of Love", from Short Poetry Collection 013

----------------, "The First Anniversary of the Government Under His Highness the Lord Protector", from Short Poetry Collection 083

----------------, "An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return From Ireland", from Short Poetry Collection 083

----------------, "On a Drop of Dew", from Short Poetry Collection 065

----------------, "To His Coy Mistress"

----------------, "The Garden", from Short Poetry Collection 086

John Milton, Areopagitica

------------, Paradise Lost

------------, Paradise Regained

------------, Samson Agonistes

Sir Thomas More, Utopia

Dorothy Osborne, Love Letters

Katherine Philips, Poems

Sir Walter Raleigh, "The Lie"

William Shakespeare, "As You Like It"

---------------------, "Fidele"

---------------------, "Hamlet"

---------------------, "Julius Caesar"

---------------------, "King Lear"

---------------------, "Measure for Measure"

---------------------, "The Merchant of Venice"

---------------------, "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

---------------------, "Much Ado About Nothing"

---------------------, "Othello"

---------------------, "The Passionate Pilgrim"

---------------------, "Richard II"

---------------------, "Richard III"

---------------------, "Romeo and Juliet" (other versions available)

---------------------, Sonnets (other versions available)

Sir Philip Sydney, Astrophil and Stella

-----------------, "My True Love"

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene (all 6 books)

-----------------, Prothalamion, from Long Poems 005

Sir John Suckling, "The Constant Lover"

John Wilmot, "A Song of a Young Lady to her Ancient Lover"

Have any others to add?

Sir Hugh Platt's "Poem on a Fart"

2010-08-05T17:23:00.012-04:00

Looking for an e-text of Henry Power's poem "In Commendation of the Microscope" -- the manuscript of which is cited here, in this 1782 Catalogue of the manuscripts preserved in the British Museum hitherto undescribed --

-- I notice this:

Sir Hugh Platt, "Poem on a fart." An unpublished manuscript poem from the same Sir Hugh Plat (1552-1611) known for his pioneering work on helping tender-footed horses and composing cole-balls? Methinks mayhaps.

This catalogue is the only record that appears on a Google search, and EEBO doesn't contain a published version. The only other "Poem on a Fart" turned up by Google is much later: Don Fartinando Puff-indorst's 'e The Benefit of Farting explain'd: or the Fundament -- all Cause of the Distempers Incident to the FAIR-SEX: Proving, a Posteriori, most of the Dis-ordures In-tail'd upon them are owing to Flatulencies not seasonably vented (1722), appended with, you guessed it, "On a Fart, let in the House of Commons":

"On A Fart, let in the House of Commons"

Reader, I was born, and cried;
I crack'd, I smelt, and so I died.
Like Julius Caesar's was my death,
Who in the senate lost his breath.
Much alike entomb'd does lie
The noble Romulus and I:
And when I died, like Flora fair,
I left the commonwealth my heir.

Look -- it's even published in LONG-FART, for the use of the Lady Damp-fart of Her-fart-shire! Do the puns ever stop?!

Unfortunately, they do not. I wish I had the last hour of my life back.

An annotated catalog of conference ephemera, with promises and pictures

2010-08-01T18:51:00.007-04:00

The long silence is due to traveling, from Digital Humanities 2010 in London, to Material Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, and finally to Rare Book School at UVA to get drilled in the principles of descriptive bibliography. I learned and experienced too much to share it all; so, instead, here are a few bulleted memories in no particular order. Inclusion does not imply especial significance; exclusion doesn't imply uninterest. Read it as a Sunday evening exercise in cataloging a few scattered moments from across a month.

On my panel at Material Cultures were two other speakers whose research is worth highlighting: Amit Ray, who is doing interesting work on Wikipedia as a new "tower of Babel" (anglocentric though it may be); and Lisa Otty, who's doing wonderful work on digital poetry and modernism. Lisa looked at examples of "unbound" distributed narratives like Shelley Jackson's Skin, arguing that -- far from being materially "unbound," simply because they lack the codex form -- these works actually bind together new forms of textual communities, temporally and geographically. I liked her play on "binding," and her sensitive approach to materiality across literary media.

Alan Galey's work proves exactly how book historians can help digital humanists, and digital humanists can help book historians -- or maybe how the one can successfully be the other, I'm not sure. But you already knew that.

John McVey's investigations into several copies of John Todd's nineteenth-century Index Rerum have me wanting to take up book collecting more seriously. Index rerums were tabulated notebooks (a kind of printed commonplace book) for recording quotes, poems, books read and places visited. They were usually prefaced with instructions on moral rectitude and right learning, framing the practice of notating one's life as a kind of individual growth. The examples John has collected, though, quite delightfully resist these structures, telling us much about identity and memory, manuscript and print, the "blanks" of the printed page, and in fact how much book culture we neglect by focusing on literature, poetry, or the notebooks of notables. Check out some images from the Indexes John's collected, along with an introduction to their uses.

Some of the most interesting work being done in "Digital Humanities" right now is by those who may not explicitly identify with the community at all. A good example is Nate Matias, whom I had the pleasure of grabbing coffee with in London. He's been going back to the basics of visualizing (and notating) alternative pathways through a narrative in ways very similar to what excited me about combinatorial literature. Another good example is James Ascher, whom I met in person at Rare Book School last week. As a librarian and scholar, he's been thinking about models of collaboration between those trained in information management, those skilled in programming, and those who can provide intellectual leadership -- and, more importantly, how these collaborations will shape how we safeguard and access our cultural heritage. If asked, both of these thinkers would agree, I imagine, to being called "digital humanists" (correct me if I'm wrong, guys!) but are approaching their work from such radically different angles, driven by different motivations, that in a sense it's odd to call them part of the same community.

I got the chance to visit Little Gidding, where Nicholas Ferrar founded a religious commune in the seventeenth-century, and where the cut-and-paste "harmonized" Bibles I've mentioned here before were made. Also famous for the T. S. Eliot poem. I don't have much to say about it, except I highly recommend literary nerds, cut-up freaks and obscure seventeenth-century commune aficionados all make the pilgrimage.

I want to know more about the history of descriptive bibliography. As a little "code," collational formulae seem like such a rich area for historical inquiry. How did they come about? Under what needs/conditions -- driven by what assumptions? And what's with all the condensing, when the difference between a "conservative" and a "liberal" formula is only a character or two? (Could this be an artifact of the paper card catalog?) If anyone has any reading recommendations, please, please send them my way!

I also want to know more about how new media have changed descriptive bibliography. I hear tell of a program that visualizes the gatherings of a book, identifying where different pieces of type show up in any given text. This sounds amazing to me. Anyone have any links to share?

Smaller personal updates:

My piece "The Alphabet of Stars / This Fold of Lace," a reimagining of a Mallarmé quote for screen, was shown as part of the Deus Ex Pagina project at this weekend's Printer's Ball in Chicago. Fuller post on the piece coming soon.

I'm back at work on Nehemiah Grew's Anatomy of Plants (1682), researching how seventeenth-century microscopy -- and the technology of the book -- changed the relationship between plants and animals. It's a complex project, but will see publication both in print and as a piece of creative digital criticism (the digital is supposed to support the print, I imagine, but it will be entirely reversed in my case). More on this to come, but, in the meantime, if anyone knows any solid work on Grew; the changing "book of nature" idea in the Royal Society; the arbor inversa trope; mandrake roots in early modern botanicals; or any other examples of "planimals" (plant-animal hybrids, shared spirits), please do share! I'd also love to hear if you're working in a similar area.

I started a ~~wiki~~ Whiki to record my notes on articles,books, classes, conferences, talks, etc. Right now, only I can edit it (for the obvious reasons -- this is my personal record when it comes time to study for exams or write), but I welcome suggestions on reading and encourage anyone else to use it as an open resource to augment their own studies.

..and two relatively recent works of fiction that I highly recommend:

Q, by Luther Blissett (a pseudonym; actually collaboratively written). About identity (or lack thereof), anarchy, the Reformation, radicalism and a world of infinite possibilities. Super smart, ridiculously thought-provoking, and includes an entire section on a recent interest of mine, the Münster Rebellion of the 1530s, in which Anabaptists transformed an entire city into an anarcho-communist utopia (burning all bills of debt, making all property communal) before flipping it just as quickly into a horrifying theocracy, in which women were treated like cattle and dissidents beheaded. Q does amazing things rewriting the history -- replaying one of it's possibilities? -- of Anabaptism.

The People of Paper, by Salvador Plascencia. I've noticed Mark Sample pushing this book on Twitter a few times over the last few months and put it on my summer reading list. The first third had me interested, but not enthralled; then the metafictional section began, as characters stepped from the page as a way of proving how "paper" they are. It's a truly brilliant book about the materiality of the novel, about reading practices, about writing, and about, as Plascencia (a character in his own novel) puts it, "the commodification of sadness." Lovely for anyone with a deep interest in the structure and physicality of the book (or anyone else, really).

More to say, but until then, I have to catch some sleep. To a productive, but relaxing, August --

"Mass Media" --> Pack Media

2010-06-13T11:24:00.009-04:00

Print culture, mass media -- terms of convenience, yes; but also the terms we use to homogenize differences across structures of communication.

What's lost?

I've been thinking quite a bit about multitudes, particularly the rarely-mentioned "many"s that crop up throughout sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature -- (that will have to remain for another post) -- and it's got me wondering about multitudes of media. It's become common to think of our current media ecology as one of mass media, by which hordes of people experience the same media content, simultaneously or at least closely in time. Television, film and radio are mass media; newspaper are mass media, as are magazines. Cable news is sometimes confusingly referred to as "mass media," since CNN, Fox News, et al. broadcast the same content countrywide. Printed books stretching back to the fifteenth-century are also lumped together with "mass media," even though prior to the nineteenth century print runs rarely exceeded 1,500 copies and, as Adrian Johns and others have shown, the "sameness" of any given copy within an edition was disputable due to rampant piracy and the use of stop-press corrections. In fact, although the term wasn't first used until 1923 in a book on Advertising & Selling (OED), the category "mass media" now anachronistically subsumes any form that delivers its content to more than one individual: the alphabet as mass media, manuscript as mass media, sound as mass media.

Quick media studies background for readers not acquainted: scholarship on media effects often takes the "mass-ness" of mass media for granted. Here, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman's idea of media as "manufacturing consent" within a political populace is perhaps the best known and most widely influential example. However, influenced by the Birmingham school of cultural studies, other scholars like Henry Jenkins have challenged the notion that mass media and popular culture in general brainwash us, turning us all into consumeristic automata. Here, sites of resistance -- fan cultures, remixing, acts of appropriation -- are put forth to exemplify how the channels between creator and consumers are open, active, and contested, always subject to negotiation. For both groups -- the Chomskyan media effects crowd and those who attempt to legitimate popular culture -- the question turns on how active or passive the consumer is.

As much as I love Chomsky, I'm the kind of person who just has to believe in resistance -- in the freedom to resist, the freedom to challenge authority, power. Losing this capacity means losing the capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism. Thus I want to believe that remix culture is a complex negotiation of values -- that the "textual poaching" of fan communities tears down the autonomy of authors and the relentless "sameness" of the work they produce. But this has never sat well with me. If appropriative uses of popular culture in some way challenge the hegemony of the very stuff they're made of, then revolution is reduced to a novel arrangement of old conditions -- in fact, is thereby premised on the very conditions it hopes to challenge. Mash-ups, cut-ups, remixes and rewrites expose virtual potentials in popular culture -- alternative dimensions, hidden absurdities, its underbelly of nonsense -- but are rarely productive of new worlds in themselves. They make us want revolution; but they aren't necessarily revolutionary.

I don't think the problem lies in popular culture itself, but with our very notion of "mass media." Mass -- from the Latin massa, a lumpish clump of dough; what is "mass" about television, radio, print? So-called "mass media" content is produced by relatively small groups of people negotiating particular sets of values and institutions; it's disseminated to large, diverse groups of people, broken into individuals or small clusters spatially isolated from each other, and is increasingly consumed on multiple scalable platforms, at different points in time. Even in a media culture less fragmented than our own -- say, for instance, 1950s television -- content was consumed in anything but a lumpish way. The "masses" sat alone in their living rooms, physically and psychologically insulated; they read alone in crowds, on subways and buses. Even the dark, raucus space of a movie theatre, crowded with noisy strangers, is designed to produce singular moments of connection between a film and its viewers or, at most, the viewer and his or her date, locked into an affective triangle.

I find myself unquestioningly typing the phase "mass media" over and over again in a paper on Dracula. I stop myself. Why?

Another fragment. I've been reading Elias Canetti on packs -- packs of wolves, packs of people:

In the pack which, from time to time, forms out of the group, and which most strongly expresses its feeling of unity, the individual can never lose himself as completely as modern man can in any crowd today. In the changing constellation of the pack, in its dances and expeditions, he will again and again find himself at its edge. He may be in the center, and then, immediately afterwards, at the edge again; at the edge and then back in the centre. When the pack forms a ring around the fire, each man will have neighbors to the right and left, but no one behind him; his back is naked and exposed to the wilderness.

// Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, 93

Deleuze and Guattari "recognize this as the schizo position, being on the periphery, holding on by a hand or a foot" (A Thousand Plateaus, 33-4). While, contra the pack, the mass subject identifies the "individual with the group, the group with the leader, and the leader with the group," forcing one to "get close to the center, never be at the edge," the ring-shaped pack has no "inside" or "outside," since each point along its surface is wholly equal in relation to every other point and to its surroundings. By arranging itself in this way, the pack can fluidly traverse its environment, molding itself to the topography of the terrain and its inhabitants without its structure hardening into hierarchies of leadership, as happens with the "masses"; for each member is as safe or as vulnerable as the next.

Thinking about mass media as pack media breaks through the producer/consumer dichotomies without appealing to awkward portmanteau like "produsage." It refuses a hard distinction between those who make media and those who consume it, since the pack produces and consumes in toto, each producer also acting as a consumer, and each consumer also locked into a productive relationship with other pack members. It allows for thinking of individuals as operating together without dissolving themselves into the lumpish mass. And it helps us think through how culture -- media culture, popular culture, remix culture -- makes meaning from minute points of connection, rather than a one-size-fits-all one-to-many schema.

This is hacking the academy.

2010-05-28T13:15:00.007-04:00

I began writing something for Hacking the Academy, a collaborative "book" of blog posts &c. produced in one week, on why I'm done writing papers; how limiting I find their structure of argumentation (limiting in good ways, limiting in bad ways); why the process of doing digital work better fits how my brain works. But after using 25 minutes of my self-alloted hour, I decided just to make something.

Using a very simple jQuery shuffle plugin, I created a one-line permutation poem: "THIS IS HACKING THE ACADEMY." This line produces some great combinations. This hacking is the academy; hacking the academy is this; the academy is this hacking; is this hacking the academy? In the spectrum from sense to sense to nonsense, certainty to doubt, sit all my feelings about doing scholarship at this moment of media in transition, as well as this project, digital projects, and "hacking the academy" (or Hacking the Academy) in general.

Quick prototyping and creative, media-aware criticism is my hack of the academy. Learn; explore; do; teach others to do. This is hacking the academy.

'The Sound of the printed Letter': Orthography, Orthoepy, and Print Culture

2010-05-26T21:17:00.006-04:00

For fellow dictionary lovers: I've posted a late draft of my undergraduate English Honors thesis on the naturalization of orthoepy through orthography in early English dictionaries, completed at Hood College in 2007. I was impelled to do so not out of any delusion regarding its (in)significance -- really, no one should let an undergrad read that much McLuhan -- but because an excerpted portion on John Wilkins, one of my favorite Royal Society nutjobs, will be presented at "English Dictionaries in Global and Historical Context," held at Queen's University the first weekend in June.

I'm very bummed not to be able to attend, especially since a deep an inexplicable love for enormous dictionaries is what drove me into media studies and book history in the first place. However, I'm grateful that the organizers have generously offered to read the paper in my absence. Any conference attendees who find their way here are welcome to leave comments on the paper at the bottom of this post, or email me at whitney [put a dot here] trettien [put an @ here] duke [put another dot here] edu.

Both the thesis in its entirety and the excerpted portion are available here.

Abstract:

Early language reference works and, in particular, dictionaries are not passive mirrors reflecting linguistic trends but are themselves media objects, circulating among speakers and writers of a language. Shaped, to some extent, by the material constraints of print, they propagate a mediated view of language, constructing social attitudes even while presenting them as the inevitable progress of civilized communication. In four case studies, this paper explores this process of naturalization, arguing that dictionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by synthesizing speech and writing, attempt to construct a monolithic super-English – a third, typographic "classical tongue" that both conquers Britain's savage past and marches it toward a colonial future.

Beginning from premises established by Peter Ramus and Francis Bacon – two sixteenth-century philosophers whose work epitomizes the shift from manuscript to print culture – John Wilkins constructs one of the earliest universal languages in 1668. The printed characters in his scheme, based on an ideographic system, bypass speech to represent named objects directly. Although it never became the "new Latin" for scholarship, as he hoped, Wilkins' universal language lays the foundation for Samuel Johnson's Dictionary, the cornerstone of England's "metaphysical empire," in Adam Beach's words. By constructing a canon of printed texts and a standardized orthography based on John Locke’s linguistics, Johnson’s Dictionary frames "civilized" English culture in typography, shaping speakers' relationship with their language according to the standards of print. Shortly after the Dictionary’s publication in 1755, the elocutionist movement, lead by Thomas Sheridan and John Walker, more rigorously connects orthography and orthoepy in their pronouncing dictionaries, popular lexicons delimiting rules for a homogenized English pronunciation that, as John Jones envisioned, "sound[s] all Letters according to the printed Word." Circulating as both products and producers of print culture, these four dictionaries establish print as the ingenerate standard for both verbal and visual discourse, a naturalization that continues to influence linguistic scholarship today.

Plants, Animals, Quires; or: what I'm working on.

2010-05-11T10:47:00.008-04:00

[From the dedicatory epistle to Nehemiah Grew's The Anatomy of Plants (1682)]

Digital Humanities vs the digital humanist

2010-04-13T13:52:00.004-04:00

[Note: I'm cross-posting this, an article I wrote for the official HyperStudio blog, since this space allows for comments.]

What does it mean to be a Digital Humanist?

In a Dave Parry's widely-circulated, post-MLA2009 blog post, tauntingly titled "Be Online or be Irrelevant," Parry argued that social media should be front-and-center in Digital Humanities:

The more digital humanities associates itself with social media the better off it will be. Not because social media is the only way to do digital scholarship, but because I think social media is the only way to do scholarship period.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this claim sparked fierfce debate over the role, nature and future of digital scholarship. Who can claim to be a digital humanist? Do you have to have a PhD? How much coding do you have to know? Are humanities bloggers and twitterers participating in e-scholarship? At the root of it all: how do we (or do we not) want to delimit our community?

Last year, I completed a born-digital thesis for the Comparative Media Studies program here at MIT. It was written as a media archaeology that attempts to take its methodology seriously, excavating the deep history of text-generating mechanisms through a text generating mechanism and thereby forcing the reader to participate in the writerly, combinatorial practices I was theorizing. At the time, I considered my work deeply implicated in Digital Humanities: I was doing e-scholarship, I thought, making a webtext that rethinks the relationship between media form and media content. Wasn't this exactly what I spent my days doing as a research assistant for HyperStudio -- designing web-based scholarly tools that remediate our relationship with texts, artifacts and history?

Since its completion, though, I've found my work doesn't have much resonance with the Digital Humanities community. Labs like those at UVA or GMU direct their energies toward large-scale, database-oriented resources such as NINES or scholarly aids like Zotero -- tools that, in themselves, tend to support research whose end is in print. Meanwhile, to many university presses, "e-publishing" still means PDFing printed journals. Somewhere in the push to build an infrastructure supporting web-based research (an infrastructure which, I should underscore, we need, and I use), we lost the idea of web-based scholarship. It's a difference between means and ends in academic work.*

A few months ago, I exchanged emails with Cheryl Ball, editor of Kairos, regarding another webtext I was working on. I naively asked her what had happened to all that early '90s excitement over multimedia essays. Her response (accompanied with a chuckle, I could tell) was that it only seems like nothing has been done in these areas because "most folks have ignored the work that rhetoric and composition has been doing on multimodal scholarship since the late 90s." While the "literary-critical digital humanities scholars" have pushed to produce archival, collaborative resources to support scholarship, others (often producing scholarship digitally, and in doing so rethinking what scholarship itself means.

So what was I doing? My born-digital thesis was not a scholarly resource: I wasn't and never intended to present or curate a collection of digital artifacts for others to browse. My work was critical and individualistic, conscious of its methodology and historical moment. It strove for self-awareness. In this respect, it had more in common with the essays on Kairos than with the work of NINES; yet it never emerged from the disciplines of rhetoric and composition. I was more interested in challenging notions of "old media" literacies, or even "literacy" itself, than exploring those of "new media."

I was positioning my work as Digital Humanities, but Digital Humanities didn't really want to claim it. Ultimately, my nomadic thesis found a home in the digital arts community, where it's been shown and circulated as "art." Perhaps this shouldn't surprise me -- artists are people used to rethinking the fraught form/content relationship.

I want to use this example to revisit Parry's question about social media -- a question that I think, now, can be reformulated as one of methodology. On the one hand, the Digital Humanities community -- the community formed around institutions and labs and grant cycles and funding structures -- has set itself up as a production house, a place where the infrastructural work of digitization, marking-up texts, and producing tools to facilitate research gets done. Many of these tools, like text mining applications, attempt to rethink the boundaries of texts and artifacts in a digital space, and all -- even the most minimal PDF work of university presses -- have made scholarship easier and quicker. On the other hand, though, is the promise of a more radical, and radically individual, break with university structures: Parry's social media-savvy digital humanist. This is the twitter-blogger who follows her passions across interdisciplinary boundaries, the Facebooker who makes the personal the political and in doing so humanizes the humanities. Against the disciplined Digital Humanities and its large-scale iniatives, this model is lower-case and personified, enacting micro-revolutions that reframe our mundane interactions with new media as points of connection and collaboration. If the digital humanist emphasizes pedagogy, it's not through class websites and digital resource-based assignments, but by signing students up for a WordPress account, giving them a camera and saying, "Here; make something."

I'm not sure Digital Humanities, even a big-tent Digital Humanities, has room for all these digital humanists. Samuel Pepys as digital humanist, Doris Lessing as digital humanist -- they quickly crowd the field. Conversely, I'm not sure these digital humanists fit under a tent; for what I'm proposing is not interdisciplinary, but fundamentally antidisciplinary -- an uprooted methodology that's productive, always in process.

* To be clear, I admire the work done on NINES and similar large-scale archival projects. I use these resources, have worked on similar projects, and see them as integral to the work of the "digital humanist" I posit later in the post. I'm not challenging their value, but their primacy within Digital Humanities as a discipline.

Leibnizian dreams in reason's limbo.

2010-04-12T18:03:00.002-04:00

The most fertile methods today concerning the mythical text in general are regulated by an algebra and, more precisely, by a combinative algebra. There exists to begin with -- or, better yet, it is possible to constitute -- a set of discrete elements, of units. Out of this reservoir circulate combinative sequences that can be mastered. Hence the theory of musical forms that is certainly the most general available organon, both practical and constructible, for these operations. This algebraic method is, to my mind, a local realization three centuries later of the Leibnizian dream of an alphabet of human thoughts for which its author had forged an ars combinatoria -- first invention, precisely, of combinative algebra as well as of a logic of the note, of any discrete note. From which Leibniz derived the ideathat music was indeed the language closest to the universal language, or to the mathesis universalis. This was an idea to which philosophers turned a deaf ear, but which was heard by musicians, since at Johann Sebastian Bach's death, Leibniz's De Arte Combinatoria was discovered at the composer's bedside (which, in return, permits us to read several fugues). All this occurred in the midst of the classical age, at a moment when the discourse of rationality was definitively replacing the mythical text. The art has now become a science, a productive and fertile method, the operational realization of a project left in reason's limbo during that period.

//Michel Serres, "Language & Space: From Oedipus to Zola," in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (45-6)

reading allegorically / reading symptomatically

2010-04-10T14:19:00.009-04:00

At ACLA earlier this month, my colleague (and housemate) Lindsey Andrews presented on Melville's Moby Dick -- on C. L. R. James reading Moby Dick, on her reading James, and on the process of literary criticism itself. I'm no Americanist, and certainly no Melville scholar; but I think what she has to say about how literature makes meaning, and how we make meaning from literature, is pretty brilliant:

Throughout the history of American academic literary criticism, Moby Dick is most often read as allegory. Though we’ve heard some of our own speakers discuss the refusal, on the part of many of Melville’s novels, to be allegorized, which I think is right in the case of Moby Dick, this is not the dominant trend. Even the back flap of my own copy of the novel begins: Moby Dick is at once a thrilling adventure tale, a timeless allegory, and an epic saga of heroic determination and conflict. But for [C. L. R.] James, even in 1953, and Melville-through-James, novels aren’t allegorical, and they aren’t symbol-filled surfaces through which one looks and aligns the symbol with the deep (true) meaning. Novels don’t "mean," they produce, and the act of criticism, too, produces. If in the moment of Moby Dick’s own exposure of its being written we see the possibility of being other, followed by the actualization of a world of the Pequod, it becomes clear that that world itself contingent on the multiplicity of virtual worlds, unrealized worlds, that it leaves in its wake. A novel could never be an allegory of the real world because it’s a part of it; it’s always a synechdoche, a real encounter in miniature. So, criticism, then, doesn’t “read” the inherent allegory in the novel; it makes an allegory of the accumulation or extraction of parts. And, more than that, it immediately exposes the allegory, refusing to allow meaning to accumulate in the form of an allegory; instead, it collapses or explodes its allegorical status, making it literal (i.e. in the act of producing a “symbol” in the novel, it also explains it, collapsing the very allegorical form to which it made a pretense of a claim). And criticism produces this explosion precisely from this possibility of being other; or more explicitly, from the impossibility of being the same. Criticism actualizes the multiple virtual worlds of the novel.

I (we both) have been thinking much about reading allegorically and reading symptomatically -- about how deeply ingrained these methods are in students of literature, and how ultimately dissatisfying they tend to be in a world in which the humanities are increasingly under attack for their irrelevance. I struggle with this most in the early modern side to my scholarly personality, since political allegory and symptomatic readings form the basis for practically all criticism on Renaissance literature. How can we read novels not simply as reproductive of particular cultural milieus, but as themselves productive machines, machines of possibility -- as Lindsey puts it, as virtual worlds, actualized through individual moments, singular acts of reading?

[Filippino Lippi, Allegory of Music (c. 1500)]

Deleuze is clearly a guidepost here. In Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, he rejects archetypal readings of Kafka's bizarre characters:

We won't try to find archetypes that would represent Kafka's imaginary, his dynamic, or his bestiary (the archetype works by assimilation, homogenization, and thematics, whereas our method works only where a rupturing and hetereogenous line appears). Moreover, we aren't looking for any so-called free associations (we are all well aware of the sad fate of these associations that always bring us back to childhood memories or, even worse, to the phantasm, not because they fail to work but because such a fate is part of their actual underlying principle).We aren't even trying to interpret, to say that this means that. And we are looking least of all for a structure with formal oppositions and a fully constructed Signifier; one can v come up with binary oppositions like 'bent head-straightened head' or 'portrait-sonority' and bi-univocal relations like 'bent head-portrait' or 'straightened head-sonority.' But that's stupid as long as one doesn't see where the system is coming from and going to, how it becomes, and what element is going to play the role of heterogeneity, a saturating body that makes the whole assembly flow away and that breaks the symbolic structure, no less than it breaks hermeneutic interpretation, the ordinary association of ideas, and the imaginary archetype.

// Deleuze, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (7)

[Franz Kafka]

Kafka's becoming-animals -- his critter burrows and cockroach squeal-language, his literalization of symbols -- parallel the buffoonish "rude mechanicals"of Midsummer Night's Dream, who insist on presenting their own representation. "All I have to say is to tell you," the Moon says, stepping on stage covered in symbols of his 'moon-ness', "that the lanthorn is the moon, I, the man i' the moon, this thornbush my thornbush, this dog my dog."

Metamorphosis is the contrary of metaphor. There is no longer any proper sense or figurative sense, but only a distribution of states that is part of the range of the word.

It would be a great error to refer the points of connection to the aesthetic impressions that subsist in them. Everything Kafka does works to an exactly opposite end, and this is the principle behind his antilyricism, his anti-aestheticism: 'Grasp the world', instead of extracting impressions from it; work with objects, characters, events, in reality, land not in impressions. Kill metaphor.

// Deleuze, Kafka 22; 70

I'm extremely attracted to this model of criticism, and am beginning to see it as crucially related to the kinds of "distant reading" talked about by Peter Middleton and Franco Moretti, as well as Jonathan Boyarin's "ethnography of reading." To read allegorically -- to read beneath the surface of the text, seeing the text as instantiating some cultural milieu -- is to elide the material moments when fingers hit paper, where eyeballs meet text; it's to forget that the text is text. In If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino famously retraces the process of reading itself: "Find the most comfortable position," he tells you, the reader; "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel ... Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought." Suddenly, the very bodily positions that novels are thought to dissolve become crystallized, and the reader becomes aware of her own reading: the book in her hands, the position of her legs, the smells of the room, how hard the spine cracks back when she flips the page. This is the metamorphosis that kills metaphor, the Moon pointing at itself and its own insistent "moon-ness" -- this is how we read, even when we pretend it's not. Although indicating an about-face for most literary scholarship, these radically individual, material encounters with a textual artifact are where criticism begins; and, sometimes, where it should end.

Book history, text & context.

2010-04-04T21:28:00.004-04:00

Reading Ron Silliman on "The Political Economy of Poetry"; thought the juxtaposition he makes between contextualizing vs. textualizing literature might resonate with those interested in book history or histories of readers. In 1929, Valentin Volosinov writes:

The actual reality of language-speech is not the abstract system of linguistic forms, not the isolated monologic utterance, and not the psychophysiological act of its implementation, but the social event of verbal interaction implemented in an utterance or utterances.

Thus vebal interaction if the basic reality of language ... A book, i.e., a verbal performance in print is also an element of verbal communication. It is something discussable in actual, real-life dialogue, but aside from that, it is calculated for active perception, involving attentive reading and inner responsiveness, and for organized, printed reaction ... (book reviews, critical surveys, defining the influence on subsequent works, and so on). Moreover, a verbal performance of this kind also inevitably orients itself with respect to previous performances in the same sphere, both those by the same author and those by other authors. It inevitably takes its point of departure fro msome particular state of affairs ... Thus the printed verbal performance engages, as it were, in ideological colloquy of large scale: it responds to something, objects to something, affirms something, anticipates possible responses and objections, seeks support, and so on.

Any utterance, no matter how weighty and complete in and of itself, is only a moment in the continuous process of verbal communication. But that continuous verbal communication is, in turn, itself only a moment in the continuous, all-inclusive, generative process of a given social collective ... Verbal communication can never be understood and explained otuside of this connection with a concerete situation.

In 1942, New Critics Rene Wellek and Austin Warren write:

What is the 'real' poem; where should we look for it; how does it exist ... ?

One of the most common and oldest answers is the view that a poem is an 'artefact', an object of the same natures as a piece of sculpture or a painting. Thus the work of art is considered identical with the black lines of ink on white paper or parchment or, if we think of a Babylonian poem, with the grooves in the brick. Obviously this answer is quite unsatisfactory. There is, first of all, the huge oral 'literature'. There are poems or stories which have never been fixed in writing and still continue to exist. thus the lines in black ink are merely a method of recording a poem which must be conceived as existing elsewhere. If we destroy the writing or even all copies of a printed book we still may not destroy the poem ... Besides, not every printing is considered by us, the readers, a correct printing of a poem. The very fact that we are able to correct printer's errors in a text which we might not have read before or, in some rare cases, restore the genuine meaning of the text shows that we do not consider the printed lines as the genuine poem. Thus we have shown that the poem (or any literary work of art) can exist outside its printed version and that the printed artefact contains many elements which we all must consider as not included in the genuine poem.

The distinction here -- used by Silliman to draw out an interesting argument about context vs. text, in relation to the poem as a "commodity" art -- is between reading as a radically singular moment, or an incomplete encounter with a concept that exists in totality elsewhere, in some ideal. Besides the obvious implications, this seems like an interesting angle, by a practicing poet, on the values of book history, histories of reading/readers, and bibliography.

On Being Productive.

2010-04-02T16:44:00.005-04:00

I'm a quasi-neurotic, close-to-type-A personality who sorts things like a damn squirrel. I keep calendars and measure my days by the marks made on my to-do list; as I read, I thumb the edges of the page, keeping a running tally in my head of what fraction of the book I've completed. It isn't something taught-- I just have to do it to refresh my own sense of being-human. If I don't, I start pacing my house, chattering aloud with the things in my head while plucking the little hairs under my chin until they bleed.*

In other words, my days -- every day, weekends not exempt -- are spent in various states of Being Productive -- a phrase that has, for better or worse, come to define every waking moment of my life, and sadly a few of the sleeping ones, too. It used to be that Being Productive was a matter of calculating which Activity would be Most Productive for me at any given moment, so that any losses would balance out in long-term gains in health and overall happiness. For instance, if I didn't feel like I could get any writing done, I would cut my losses and go hiking, or clean, or make yummy food. That way I maintained a certain form of Productivity (i.e., exercise, fresh air, being healthy & organized) that would facilitate other forms of Productivity later (i.e., writing with a newly-fed, newly-exercised brain).

This perhaps sounds ridiculously corporatized, this Productivity calculus, but it worked. I would take whole weekends off, telling myself I needed a "mental health day" -- a phrase I got from my mother, who would, once a month, let my brother and I stay home from school and do something we actually wanted to do, like fly kites or go to the beach or read Nancy Drew books in a hammock while eating mountains and mountains of cookie dough. Now, though -- lately, at least -- my calculus has failed me. I urgently feel (it may not, probably is not, true, but I feel it desperately) that I have so much work that I can no longer (I feel like I can no longer) justify a few hours spent hiking; it's just too much, even the enjoyment becomes a point of anxiety -- must consume, consume, consume those blooming cherry blossoms before they go -- quick quick, you could be doing work so make it worth the time (I tell myself). Relaxation no longer figures as its own form of Productivity.

I'm not sure how this change came about, but it's really sick.

Rather than encouraging Productivity, like my little calculus did, this new method is the dead-end of diminishing returns: I worry more than I do; I mumble things like how can I salvage this day? Since I no longer see, for instance, doing dishes as part of my "To Do" list, I find myself shuffling these chores-of-living off into separate lists, lists which accumulate without getting marked off because, really, they're lists of things I don't see as worth doing, given everything else I have to do. I stupidly get mad at my partner for not helping more with these lists -- doesn't he see that I just can't mark that as "Productivity"? -- and let things that make me feel healthy, things which used to make my other practices more fruitful, become worthless. How -- when -- why did relaxation become worthless to me?

Don't leave some comment like "Welcome to grad school." I just finished two years of graduate study at MIT, a place that proudly touts is model of education as akin to drinking from a firehose. And did this while working -- something I also did all the way through my undergraduate education, which included a double major, two senior theses, participation in an honors program and a very active life outside school as a community activist. In short, I'm someone who can navigate the white-water rapids of a busy life -- more than that, I'd credit my absurd little Productivity calculus with my often extreme ability to get shit done. Defining moments of relaxation as essential to and in fact part of my own Productivity brilliantly allowed my moments of reading/writing became hyper-focused, and unburdened my moments of relaxation from the fretting over Not Being More Productive that crushes so many students.

I was balanced; I could live in the present moment and enjoy it wholly. How did I lose that?

I love to garden; I spend my time gardening thinking about what a waste it is, in one world, even as I know how much I desperately need it, just to be me.

How do others cope?

My twitter feed is just rotten with people worrying about their Productivity. It bothers me, it bothers me so much -- we feel the weight as so crushing today, to mark oneself as someone doing something, so we can get into schools and get jobs and get tenure and get noticed -- we obsess over these things. Shut up, you know you do. I don't think anything in particular (media, universities, systems and structures) is to blame; well, no, maybe it's us that's to blame. There's a fine line between commiseration and competition, especially when it comes to public fora like blogs or Facebook, especially in academia. Perhaps we pressure ourselves to pressure others; maybe we do need to just turn off, shut up and focus for a little while.

At least, I do, if I'm ever going get back in the groove of Productivity.

*Don't mistake obsessive organization for being a neat freak. My bathroom has dangerously high levels of germs, my Camry can only seat one because of the piles of old food wrappers, and my bedroom is little more than a mountain of clothes in various states of disgust. Also, I wear clothing with stains on them. A lot.

Conversation about Digital Humanities & disciplinarity

2010-03-31T10:30:00.001-04:00

A quick note to invite participation in a conversation about Digital Humanities and disciplinarity over at the blog linked up with Shakespeare Quarterly's forthcoming issue, "Shakespeare and New Media," currently under open review through MediaCommons. Katherine Rowe asks:

But it is as useful for the field [of Shakespeareans] to ask ourselves how we behave just like everyone else on the web: puttering or sprinting or wandering along heterogeneous paths of habit, exploration, or avoidance that we share with others outside academia. ... Take this post as an invitation to expand on the question.

I think it's healthy that this forum is off-site from blogs of the usual Digital Humanities crew, since it opens up a space for cross-disciplinary conversation. Anyway, check it out.

This thornbush my thornbush, and this dog my dog.

2010-03-28T14:49:00.008-04:00

As a student of literature, one of the things I love about theory -- and trust me, I am no defender of theory-for-theory's-sake, at least not of ramming every text through the mill of some idiom -- I feel like I had to get that off my chest before I can mount a defense -- so, starting over, one of the things I love about theory is its ability to freshen up any reading.

Over the past year, I've read more Deleuze and Guattari than I ever thought I would, certainly more than I ever wished to. I have ongoing problems: problems with understanding, problems with systematizing fundamentally anti-systematic work, problems with playing one's politics out on paper. I have problems (so many problems, all senses of the word "problems") discussing Deleuze and Guattari with those who explicitly identify as "Deleuzian," or perhaps "Deleuzoguattarian," "Guattarodeleuzian" (poor Guattari always gets the shortshrift in litcrit) -- the cart always ends up before the horse. But putting these problems aside -- and refusing to run theory parallel to literature -- my recently Guattodeleuzian-ized eyeballs have been seeing texts that never existed for me before, within texts that did. Like Midsummer Night's Dream.

What can one say about Midsummer Night's Dream -- any Shakespeare -- that hasn't been said already? (I'm sorry, early modern pals; I'm not a Shakespearean.) Themes and threads, eyes and ears, translatability, mutability, "the changing of costumes," plays-within-plays, love and fatalism. There. You know the play. Drop something about the queering of heterosexuality and a few quotes on postcolonialism, and you're entirely up-to-date on the scholarship.

Then I read it again, this time lounging on a warm rock in a perfect garden on a perfect day, imbibing a perfect glass of honey-sweetened pineapple juice. Wearing a flow-y skirt that ruffled in the breeze. In short, it could not have been any more stereotypical: someone should have taken a picture and captioned it "FAIR-LOCKED NYMPH-ISH GIRL MOUTHS PRETTILY OF FAIR-HAIRED NYMPHS UNDER CHERRY BOUGHS; POETRY LIVES!" That's how cliché the experience was. Only missing the garland of flowers.

[William Blake; Titania, Puck and the Fairies Dancing; 1786]

And yet -- it wasn't that Shakespeare that I found in the garden, but a weird postmodern monster. What I'd previously underlined as metathemes of performance -- for instance, the play-within-a-play trope that runs through the comedies, drawing attention to the artificiality within theater -- suddenly seemed to be much more radical statements on the impossibility of representation; or more precisely, on the unrepresentability of and in language, which can never be rationalized. The "crew of patches," those "rude mechanicals" who put on the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe before the wedding parties in Act 5, don't just ironically comment on the indirectness of performed speech, but on the problem of signification -- on the paradox of fiction's existence at all. Snug is not a lion, but Snug-qua-lion-qua-Snug; Snout is not a wall, but the wall that breaks down "the (fourth) wall" between audience and stage, inviting Bottom/Pyramus to directly address Theseus with a literal narration of events to come. In fact, by stating that "this loam, this roughcast, and this stone doth show / That [he is] that same wall," Snout transforms signifiers of his "wallness" – intended to encourage a suspension of disbelief – into ironic markers of "Snout-ness," drawing attention to the very human body it he seeks to erase.

In short, the play's hearing in the present moment tugs in two directions at once, toward both signification and a simulacrum that can never fully signify. This constant dissembling of the play's own mechanics through the "rude mechanicals'" excessive narration -- their constant pointing into an anticipated future through language -- means that the play can never cohere to form a whole; "performance" insists on bursting out in moments that deny the very possibility of "performance" itself. It is and yet cannot be Snug performing the lion that makes the ladies quake; it is, but cannot be, the afraid audience who, lion-qua-Snug insinuates, must always be feared as fearful superiors.

There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the [play]) and a field of subjectivity (the [audience]). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a [play] has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several [audiences] as its subject.

Signifiance is never without a white wall upon which it inscribes its signs and redundancies. Subjectification is never without a black hole in which it lodges its consciousness, passion, and redundances.

//Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (23; 167)

The Moon can never been the moon; the Moon can never be an aggregate of symbols. A horned human covered in twigs runs from the stage.

MOON: All that I have to say is to tell you that the lanthorn is the moon, I, the man i' the moon, this thornbush my thornbush, and this dog my dog. (V.1.241-3)

This is deterritorialization; it's a pulling-apart and rendering-literal of signifiance. It's a play-that-refuses-the-possibility-of-a-play.

[Emil Orlik; actor Hans Wassmann as Nick Bottom; 1909]

There's gads of paintings of Puck, Titania, even Bottom. No one draws inspiration from Snug-qua-lion-qua-Snug.

Faciality is always a multiplicity.

// D & G, ATP 182

This isn't a criticism of those scholars doing the other kind of work, the play-within-a-play thematic work. Hell, what I'm circling around is not so different from what others have been saying -- someone most likely wrote this very thought, in a parallel dimension. The more interesting question is how, if at all, contemporary critical theory -- so rooted in continental philosophy of the twentieth century -- should be applied, enacted, performed in/through or read onto texts that speak from four centuries ago. My newly-freshened eyes are finding the paradoxes of logic in Shakespeare; for whom is this message?

What's left to say, after the Moon exits?

The Electrochemical Society reads Mallarmé.

2010-03-23T10:07:00.002-04:00

The paper intervenes every time an image on tis own, ceases or retires within the page, accepting the succession of the others, and it is not a question, unlike the usual state of affairs, of regular sound effects or verses -- rather of prismatic subdivisions of the idea, the instant when they appear and during which their cooperation lasts, in some exact mental setting. The text imposes itself in various places, near or far from the latent guiding thread, according to what seems to be the probable sense.

// Stéphane Mallarmé, Preface to Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard ("A roll of the dice will never abolish chance"), 1897

// From Transactions of the American Electrochemical Society, Volume XXXVII, Thirty-Seventh General Meeting, Boston and Cambridge, Mass. April 8, 9, and 10, 1920

Appositions e-conference, review of Shakespeare Digital Humanities sites, purple shutters

2010-03-14T18:52:00.007-04:00

A few things:

Appositions, an e-conference in Renaissance / Early Modern lit and culture, is going on *right now*. The theme this year is "Digital Archives & the Field of Production"; included in the line-up is an early version of my paper on the fore-edge paintings. Actually, fore-edge painting [singular] might be more appropriate: it focuses on a image of King Charles II, found along the edge of a mid-seventeenth-century Bible and Book of Common Prayer at the Houghton Library. Hidden under gilt edging until the book is opened, it presents an interesting case study for histories of reading that extend beyond the two-dimensional space of the page, as well as digital scans of "books" that defy the flatness of the screen. In any case, lots of great work on things like "hypertext" Wyatt, "diplomatic transcriptions" in digital reproductions of documents, and more -- so check it out.
I've written a short review of some Shakespeare-related Digital Humanities sites for a special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, "Shakespeare and New Media," edited by Katherine Rowe. But here's the cool part: essays are entered into an "open review" process, in which scholars, colleagues and the public at large can comment using CommentPress. I'm excited to be a part of this process and hope you early modern and/or Digital Humanities folks will participate.
I've painted most of the front of my house bright, shiny purple. That is all.

digital storytelling, Zola, experimentalism, & the scientific method

2010-02-17T16:33:00.007-05:00

I managed to make two panels at CHAT today before I had to dash back to Duke for class -- one on audience size in digital projects, the other on digital storytelling. I won't rehash them, since others have already done that better than I could. I encourage you to visit these posts, or follow the #uncchat twitter feeds.

Instead, after a brief summary, I wanted to follow up on a few mental sparks lit during the "Soundbyte" session on storytelling. The panel has two titles on the CHAT website: on one page, "Scientific Method and Narrative Form"; on the other, "Transforming Narratives." Both descriptions pit the "electronic literature expert," embodied in Kate Hayles, against the "computer scientist," Michael Young, who works with the Liquid Narrative research group at NC State. The panel itself intended to "explore the intersections and the opportunities" of such a pairing.

Young started the conversation, using analytic theories from cognitive science and linguistics to construct a computational, generative model of narrative. As I tweeted earlier, his approach to storytelling reminded me very much of Nick Montfort's talk to HyperStudio on designing his new interactive fiction programming language: like Montfort, Young is interested in building comprehensive systems for users to engage in, interact with and act within stories, themselves conceived as an unfolding series of events (i.e., plotlines) constructed by an (external) author-agent. As Young underscored, this approach to storytelling is governed by the "clash between control and coherence," as users must be given the freedom to make choices within a nonetheless scripted narrative.

Hayles provided a counterpoint to the kind of causal, plot-driven method of Michael Young. In several mini-close readings of three pieces of digital fiction -- Michael Joyce's Twelve Blue, Judd Morrissey's The Jew's Daughter, and Kerry Lawrynovicz Girls' Day Out -- she pointed out that that visual metonymy of "threaded" details (Twelve Blue), the complex temporalities of textual palimpsests (The Jew's Daughter) and fragmented subtexts (Girls' Day Out) all offer complex, non-causal methods by which narrative can emerge in digital fiction. She concluded by asking whether any of these stories could be described as algorithmic or generative, and whether audiences would accept these more nuanced narrative strategies.

I think the differences between these points of view -- which is really the difference (for me personally -- this isn't a value judgment) between what's interesting about literature, and simply what isn't -- came out in one of the questions. Someone asked: when talking about causality and literature, where does the scientific method fit in?

Michael Young said he was inspired by the scientific method -- that he, like other scientists, takes a theory, builds a model of that theory, then runs human subjects through a controlled experiment to see if it validates his hypothesis. The challenge, he added, is to design a model that is controlled enough that you can attribute the result to the theory itself, and not outside factors.

Now this is fascinating to me. I recently read Émile Zola's novel Germinal, alongside Claude Bernard on experimental medicine and Zola's essay "The Experimental Novel" in which he explicitly positions his work as a novelist in terms of producing a scientific experiment -- that is, of setting up a controlled, contained environment in which characters act out their own socially-determined possibilities. The results are nothing less than a total scientific understanding of human psychology:

[T]he novelist is equally an observer and an experimentalist. The observer in him gives the facts as he has observed them, suggests the point of departure, displays the solid earth on which his characters are to tread and the phenomena to develop. Then the experimentalist appears and introduces an experiment, that is to say, sets his characters going in a certain story so as to show that the succession of facts will be such as the requirements of the determinism of the phenomena under examination call for.

// Zola, "The Experimental Novel," 8

We are making use, in a certain way, of scientific psychology to complete scientific physiology; and to finish the series we have only to bring into our studies of nature and man the decisive tool of the experimental method. In one word, we should operate on the characters, the passions, on the human and social data, in the same way that the chemist and the physicist operates on inanimate beings, and as the physiologist operates on living beings.

// Zola, "The Experimental Novel," 17-8

In a widely-read essay on the differences between realism, which narrates, and Zola's form of naturalism, which mechanically describes, Lukács criticizes Zola's methods as merely accumulating detail for the sake of some external (and, although he doesn't use the word, experimental) purpose, at the expense of the "inner life" of literature. He writes:

When the artistic literature of a period does not provide actions in which typical characters with a richly developed inner life are tested in practice, the public seeks abstract, schematic substitutes.

// Lukács, "Narrate or Describe," 124

In failing to provide an adequate narration of the "inner life" of the human, Zola's experimentalist naturalism inadvertently spawns "abstract, schematic substitutes," by which it seems Lukács means detective novels and hardboiled pop fiction. I wonder, though, if we can't map this distinction onto the differences articulated by Young and Hayles, in a panel of course called (on at least one site) "Scientific Method and Narrative Form." If Young's computational model of storytelling is the new Zola-ian experimental fiction -- and I think his own description of his work as a "controlled experiment" makes the analogy fairly solid -- then the fictions Hayles describes are the new "abstract, schematic substitutes": a literature sunk deep in an obsession with words, with language and the materiality of letters. It's perhaps no surprise that digital storytelling splits along these lines. Although we tend to think of Young's form of algorithmic literature as arising from video games and more recent forms of "interactive" narration, it may have a longer lineage to turn-of-the-century schools of naturalism, narratology and the push to scientize literary fictions as experiments played out by constructed human subjects, as a means of sparking understanding in socially-determined reading subjects. In fact, programmable interactive fiction systems may just be the latest stop in the search for a perfectly controlled, and perfectly controllable, narrative microcosm.

So why does this matter?

First, none of my comments should be taken as a criticism of the kind of work that Young (or someone like Montfort) does. I deeply appreciate the ways in which digital storytelling models merge hardware, software, structure and text into a perfect little machine driven by user experience. It's a thing of beauty that, unlike the novel, never forgets its own medium.

At the same time, these methods are not new. Placing past methods in conversation with the present helps delimit the boundaries of the conversation by probing our own assumptions. For instance, a longer reading of Zola alongside interactive fiction systems would perhaps illuminate the nuances in a term like "virtual worlds" or "simulations," both narrative models which I think Zola would shy away from in favor of a more determined notion of experimentalism -- that is, of seeing his narratives as controlled experiments which assemble and operate on literary objects with the explicit goal of furthering our understanding of the human subject. What can the machinery of Zola's novels -- very like video games or film in their accumulation of detail and excessive attention to environmental conditions -- teach us about the built-in hypotheses in our digital storytelling models? And (the question that I personally find more interesting) what literary methods escape the scientizing of literature? What forms of narrative exceed the experimental method?

In her response to the question on the scientific method and narrative -- the question that started this tirade of mine -- Hayles pointed out that experiments often begin with a state of initial confusion, in which the observer is bombarded with information that must be sorted out, not unlike reading a novel such as Gravity's Rainbow. The payoff only comes after a significant amount time, and only emerges through nuanced and multilayered textual strategies. This strikes me as right, and perhaps provides a way of bringing these two divergent strands of thought back together. Only through the act of interpretation can stories, interactive narrative environments, or scientific experiments find, and make, meaning in the world.

CHAT Festival at UNC-Chapel Hill this week

2010-02-15T15:02:00.003-05:00

An order innate to the book of verse exists inherently or everywhere, eliminating chance; it's also necessary, to eliminate the author: now, any subject is fated to imply, among the fragments brought together, a strange certainty about its appropriate place in the volume. It is susceptible to this because any cry possesses an echo -- motifs of the same type balance each other, stabilizing each other at a distance, and neither the sublime incoherence of a romantic page, nor that artificial unity that adds up to a block-book, can provide it. Everything is suspended, an arrangement of fragments with alternations and confrontations, adding up to a total rhythm, which would be the poem stilled, in the blanks; only translated, in a way, by each pendant.

// Mallarmé, "Crisis of Verse"

I'll be at the CHAT Festival at UNC-Chapel Hill this week. Some interesting talks are planned, and my thesis is displayed amongst the "digital art." If NC folk will be there, come say hi. I'm the one with the blonde dreads.

I'm finding that strange work, my thesis -- which now looks intensely ugly to me, though I still have unnatural love for it -- is increasingly pinned down as art, rather than criticism. Like the "art world" -- whatever that may be; its discourses, at least -- are more open, more used to, perhaps even expect to encounter form as rhetoric. Something inside me cringes at this. I'm not against tagging myself as an artists; I'd just rather not be penned in on either side of that fence.

Anyway, come out if you're around.

Is Google Good for History? revisited: a case study in Pepys

2010-02-03T14:53:00.008-05:00

Doing a million little tasks at once these days -- a kind of academic death by a thousand cuts that we're all familiar with -- one of which is securing image permissions for an essay I co-wrote with Martin Foys on the re-, dis- and unmediations that frame, shape and even softly determine our readings of two literary classics, Beowulf (Martin's portion of the essay) and Samuel Pepys' Diary (of course, mine).

Part of my argument rests on a re-reading of the now legendary story of John Smith, a poor beleaguered student who (the tale goes) spent years decoding the Diary's shorthand, never knowing that the "crack" to the "code" was sitting on the library's shelf all along, "just steps away from where he worked." The scare quotes do intend to scare: as I found in my research, a number of buried references to the Diary crop up throughout the eighteenth century, indicating the work was not entirely unknown until Smith's transcription. In fact, a now all-but-forgotten biography of William Weller Pepys, A Later Pepys by Alice Gaussen (1904), includes facsimile scans of a plan to transcribe and publish the Diary that presumably pre-dates Smith's work, thereby (I argue) exploding the typical origin story. The need for textual provenance is retroactive, applied only after a seventeenth-century manuscript is circumscribed by print scholarship -- "edition-ized" for academic consumption, as it were.

How did I find these traces of an eighteenth-century Pepys which have puzzled scholars for a century -- including the two editors who devoted a large chunk of their lives to studying this text? It has nothing to do with intelligence, and I (sadly) have no tales from the archival crypts. You can chalk it all up to Google Books.

In the introduction to their edition of the Diary (the only unbowdlerized edition ever published, and therefore for the purpose's of contemporary scholarship, the only edition), Latham and Matthews note finding a single reference to Pepys' Diary pre-transcription: a puzzling fact, they say, since (the narrative goes) the Diary mouldered on the stacks for 150 years before finally being "discovered." How could this individual have had 1) access to the Diary to quote it, and 2) knowledge of Pepys' shorthand to read the text?

I googled the quote and unearthed a few more references in early nineteenth-century periodicals, indicating that a particular entry on "tea" was somewhat known among the late-Enlightenment literati. Tracking the beast as far as Google Books would let me, I finally stumbled over the biography mentioned above, I think through the word "transcription," and found the two facsimiles of a pre-Smith plan to transcribe the Diary.*

This research -- an exciting alternative history of a canonical story -- would not have been possible without Google Books or a comparable search engine and database of OCRed texts. So is Google good for history? Uh, hell yeah. That should be a given by now, folks.

Here's where the story get sticky, though. Thinking my work was done, I finished up the essay without ever consulting the physical book (don't judge me, we all do it), even took a screenshot of the facsimiles from the biography, now out of print, and dropped them in as figures for the essay. The time for permissions rolls around, and we realize the scans are too low resolution for publication. So I order the dusty 1904 tome be dragged up from Duke's storage facilities; open it up to scan the figures myself; and find this:

What I thought were scratches from the scanner, or -- honestly, I don't know what I thought they were; my intuitive curiosity as a literary historian and digital humanist failed me -- turned out to be full pages. The dunce that scanned the text for Google Books didn't bother to unfold the paper; and, since Google Books doesn't have any mechanism for indicating moving parts and fold-outs on their flattened scans, whatever was tucked between the folds was lost to the database.

I've talked about interactivity in the digital archive here before; this incident brought the issue home for me. Like all media, tools like Google Books inevitably (re-)frame our research, opening exciting new possibilities; but in doing so, other potentials are foreclosed. Beyond the dampening effect on research into the codex as a form, the digital archive's absences produce an image of "print culture" that slides frustratingly toward the very reductive models that many book historians have challenged in recent years. We need to start thinking seriously about what aspects of the book are elided by the screen; how a text's materiality is mediated by scans; and how the structure of databases disallow us from documenting these bookish anomalies.

Databases are themselves media structures, and the historical artifacts we read in and through them have to take this into account. Perhaps more importantly (and I'm saying this to myself, as much as anyone else), we need to learn to be better skeptics of our own resources, finding new methods for verifying our research when using digital scans. While ultimately this incident didn't put a dent in my argument, it will make me think twice next time a see an odd little scratch on Google Books.

*If you want the whole argument, you're going to have to read the book when it comes out this summer.

railway guide rambles & disciplinary dichotomies

2010-01-18T15:45:00.009-05:00

Reading from Pogglioli's Theory of the Avant-Garde, I just came across a chance mention of Evgeni Zamyatin's We (1921), often noted as a precursor to (and the inspiration for) Orwell's 1984. Zamyatin, Pogglioli writes, "imagines a distant posterity considering the timetable or general directory of the railroad as the unequaled and supreme masterpiece bequeathed them by this [the twentieth] century." Here's the part in We he's citing (the narrator is speaking from the 26th century, a time of Taylor-inspired standardization):

As schoolchildren we all read (perhaps you have, too) that greatest literary monument to have come down to us from ancient days -- "The Railway Guide." But set it side by side with our Table, and it will be as graphite next to a diamond: both consist of the same element -- carbon -- yet how eternal, how transparent is the diamond, how it gleams! Whose breath will fail to quicken as he rushes clattering along the pages of "The Railway Guide"? But our Table of Hours! Why, it transforms each one of us into a figure of steel, a six-wheeled hero of a mighty epic poem. Every morning, with six-wheeled precision, at the same hour and the same moment, we -- millions of us -- get up as one. At the same hour, in million-headed unison, we start work; and in million-headed unison we end it.

// Zamyatin, We [seems to be a very bad, but free, text here; audiobook in English is available here]

Railway guides, timetables, train schedules -- these are spatializations of time that strictly standardize its passage, chopping the hours into minutes, the minutes into seconds, the hills into latticed tracks. Indeed, this is Zamyatin's satire, a world gone Taylor-mad with its six-wheeled precision. Yet.. there's something not untrue about the railway guide being our greatest literary monument. It's romantic, experiential, subjective; it's directed to audiences in motion, interpretive communities tra(i)ned in railway literacies; and most of the guides themselves are beautiful. From a poetic stance, the train timetable is a pinnacle of achievement in the marriage of form and content -- perhaps the most perfect data visualization ever created. Leaves of forgotten William Blake fall from between its pages.

There's been a lot of discussion online about disciplinarity in media studies and digital humanities. It's useful; and it's boring. Unlike the sciences, the humanities have the benefit of openness, flexibility, creativity, the proverbial "Big Tent." We don't need to depend on false dichotomies to sustain ourselves (although we do a grand job acting like we do). We can mine texts; we can tag texts; we can read texts; we're even granted supreme authority -- the audacity -- to interpret them, using whatever tools may be at our disposal.

And when we leave our offices and classrooms, where railway guides are historical/artifactual/industrial/literary/representative/significatory/everthing-but ... we don coats, fumble for metrocards, and wait wait wait for that "TRAIN ARRIVING IN 5 MINUTES" sign to flash -- the most mundane avant-garde in the world.

This isn't a response. It's just what we do.

the accretion of minute elements of signification

2010-01-17T21:01:00.005-05:00

Checked to see if Duke Libraries has Umberto Eco's latest, The Infinity of Lists; was, appropriately, directed to the Direct support and general support maintenance manual including repair parts and special tools list, a US Army technical manual.

Lately my own life has tended toward the cohesive fragmentation of an infinite list. Not surprising, since it's the beginning of a new semester, in which I'll be exploring everything from female sovereignty in the Renaissance to gothic fiction in the rise and history of the novel, with a little bit of "experimental" literature thrown in for fun. Yes, it's a very English kind of semester -- my first in over two years. I'm treating it as a test. I want to see if still stand (handle, take, suffer) my own chosen discipline.

The accretion of minute elements of signification into crowds, arrays, and clusters allows a reverberation of these cultural particles between them and together, the connotations of one into flying off the lick of another. ... Elements in a paratactic list always open up into a matrix of immanent universes. Each of the elements in a list is hypotactically stacked in relation to the immanence of what it is next to, what it abuts to and differs from. such hypotaxis is virtual, that is, for its actualization it demands power to the imagination.
// Matthew Fuller, Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture

Best Ideas Under the Sun(R)

2010-01-12T19:56:00.000-05:00

Days Inn planes of immanence.

Bergson on memory in two hours and one page

2010-01-12T19:07:00.000-05:00

Rick Moody doesn't define digital literature.

2010-01-11T13:10:00.002-05:00

Nick Carr is back, and he wants us all to know crappy our digital poems are:

"When printed books first became popular, thanks to Gutenberg's press, you saw this great expansion of eloquence and experimentation," says Carr. "All of which came out of the fact that here was a technology that encouraged people to read deeply, with great concentration and focus. And as we move to the new technology of the screen ... it has a very different effect, an almost opposite effect, and you will see a retreat from the sophistication and eloquence that characterized the printed page."

// Nick Carr, on NPR

on Twitter

2010-01-10T21:27:00.003-05:00

Spent the day re-orienting myself to the web, after several weeks of reading and writing.

Now on Twitter; most of my Delicious links will be shared there, especially the pretty prints I find.

"The sight of Alpine variations, the leitmotif of a chamois, the luxury hotel and the lace crevasses fascinate people of a commonplace condition."

Threw rocks on ice to see if it would crack. It didn't. Bored with the world, but who isn't. Next semester: bring it on.

"Media studies scholars do not say, 'I study the media of Walmart trucks.'"

2010-01-10T18:32:00.005-05:00

The term “new media” rhetorically suggests that the internet is the next media in a lineage of technological means by which communication happens. To over simplify, the suggestion would be that first is the photograph, next is radio, followed by moving pictures (silent film), from which one gets talking moving pictures (film), leading to talking moving pictures broadly distributed (television). In some respect, this is the history that Bolter and Grusin trace in Remediation: each technological moment makes a rhetorical claim to be an improvement on the one prior, mediating and presenting the real in a more realistic manner. In this sense one can have several media operating at once; newspapers, magazines, television, film, radio are all media, mediums for content distribution. When the term “new media” is deployed, it is used in this manner to suggest that the current means of communication, the digital network, is just another moment in this lineage. Whether or not one sees this as evolutionary or revolutionary really does not matter: it is treated as part of a progression. The argument that computers will become the magical black box for the presentation of all media (the uber-medium) is just one symptom of this kind of analysis.

// David Parry, Flow.TV

praising our own steaming shit

2010-01-10T11:11:00.002-05:00

Humanists work hard, but at all the wrong things, the commonest of which is the fetid fester of a hypothetical socialist dreamworld, one that has become far more disconnected with labor and material than the neoliberalism it claims to replace.
Humanism does not deserve to carry the standard for humans, for frankly it despises them.
We don't make reform our mission because we secretly hate the idea of partaking of and in the greater world, even as we purport to give it voice, to speak of its ills through critical esoterics no public ear could ever grasp. Instead we colonize that world—all in the name of liberation, of course—in order to return its spoils to our fetid den of Lacanian self-denial. We masticate on culture for the pleasure of praising our own steaming shit.
// Ian Bogost, via Jenna McWilliams

Wittgenstein, Burroughs, and Cut-up Philosophy

2009-12-28T20:48:00.010-05:00

Wittgenstein isn't the first thinker that comes to mind when you read Burroughs. In fact, Burroughs' fiction (which shows an unfortunate penchant for the phrase "rectal mucus") would probably disgust and horrify the culturally conservative Austrian. Yet I keep finding uncanny similarities between the two.

It begins with the obvious biographical details. Both had a wealthy upbringing in a prominent "new money" family (his grandfather's adding machine fortune for Burroughs, iron and steel money for Wittgenstein); both enlisted in the army, but were disillusioned by military life; both pursued ongoing homosexual attachments and chose to expatriate for most of their lives. Burroughs and Wittgenstein also share an uncomfortable relationship within their respective disciplines and with academia in general, skitting around the periphery of university culture. Not surprisingly, both are often deeply misunderstood by their critics, even today.

Most interesting to me, though, is their shared methodology. I've often discussed Burroughs' cut-up writing here -- the process by which he literally slices up and rearranges bits of writing from his Word Hoard, a trunk of manuscripts. In the cut-ups, Burroughs and his collaborator Brion Gysin masterfully manipulate a text's physical materiality (the paper) to achieve a much more emergent, literary materiality that foreshadows that of combinatory digital literature and poetry. (I even devoted an entire section of my thesis, whose design consciously mimics the "four square" cut-ups of Brion Gysin and Burroughs, on cut-ups. It's a bit of a distraction to my argument, but was fun to write.) What I've never mentioned is Wittgenstein's cut-up method:

Wittgenstein had a peculiarly laborious method of editing his work. He began by writing remarks into small notebooks. he then selected what he considered to be the best of these remarks and wrote them out, perhaps in a different order, into large manuscript volumes. From these he made a further selection, which he dictated to a typist. The resultant typescript was then used as the basis for a further selection, sometimes by cutting it up and rearranging it -- and then the whole process was started again.

// Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, p. 319

[Page 109 from what is known as the "Big Typescript," a dictated, typewritten selection of cuttings which were then further marked up by LW. At times, the symbols are, if this discussion is any indication, unclear. Wittgenstein was burned by mistaken symbols earlier in his career when the first printed edition of the Tractatus didn't replace the typewritten stand-ins for actual logical symbols.]

This physical engagement with the text as an object to be manipulated mirrors the fundamentally combinatory nature of his later methodology. As he wrote of his approach to doing philosophy,

I can set out this law in an hypothesis of evolution, or again, in analogy with the schema of a plant I can give it the schema of a religious ceremony, but I can also do it just by arranging the factual material so that we can easily pass from one part to another and have a clear view of it -- showing it in a perspicuous way.

For us the conception of a perspicuous presentation is fundamental. It indicates the form in which we write of things, the way in which we see things. (A kind of Weltanschauung that seems to be typical of our time. Spengler.)

This perspicuous presentation makes possible that understanding which consists just in the fact that we "see the connections".

// Wittgenstein, quoted in Monk, p. 311

[Two of Wittgenstein's cuttings, used to shuffle the order of his sections. All of LW's manuscripts, including his cuttings, are available in a digital facsimile edition (the Bergen Facsimile Edition) online.]

In other words, don't describe but show, or even do. Only by distilling his or her work into a series of examples and thought experiments to be mentally manipulated by the reader can the philosopher impart lasting wisdom -- a belief neatly paralleled by Wittgenstein's own combinatory writing habits.

As with the cut-up novels of Burroughs, this active, reader-dependent approach produces notoriously recondite writing. At times the Philosophical Investigations seems little more than strings of opaque examples marked by a near absence of philosophizing, a refusal to state a thesis or outline an argument; and, like The Ticket That Exploded or Nova Express, the presence of multiple voices, narrators and interlocutors makes it difficult to pin down what Wittgenstein "really" thinks. (He also shares this with Kierkegaard, another favorite of mine.)

[A page of Burroughs' cut-up work. From here.]

On the one hand, the complexity and confusion of this style of writing seems at odds with Wittgenstein's most famous statements on philosophical methodology -- namely, that clarity is key, and "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" -- but for him, as for Burroughs, the method is the clarifying, cohering factor in his work. Which is to say: if you're looking for a system, a set of summarizable theses, it simply is the methodology. Don't say; do. If you're confused about a term, act out its language game; envision the forms of life it engages, perform a thought experiment. Once this lifts the fog, well, then you zip your lip, cap your pen, and go do something more useful.

Cut ups are for everyone. Any body can make cut ups. It is experimental in the sense of being something to do. Right here write now. Not something to talk and argue about. Greek philosophers assumed logically that an object twice as heavy as another object would fall twice as fast. It did not occur to them to push the two objects off the table and see how they fall. Cut the words and see how they fall.
// Burroughs, "The Cut Up Method"

This is a statement Wittgenstein would, I think, be deeply sympathetic with.

Of course, Burroughs' cut-up novels are deeply engaged with this process of experimentation, often cycling through the same few anecdotes while shuffling the characters and settings. How many times does a character in The Ticket That Exploded enter an alien land, meet an alien guard, then experience some kind of linguistic isolation that can only be reconciled through physical contact with the "other," the foreign being? As with the Philosophical Investigations, the reader can enter and exit Burroughs' fiction at any point, because understanding does not emerge through linear narration; rather, the world of the novel presents a series of thought experiments that, together, produce an image of how the world works -- the forces that are occluding clear thinking, and methods for clearing the fog.

While I haven't found any indication that Burroughs read Wittgenstein extensively, he does cite the Tractatus in a sorely neglected but important passage from Ticket:

Wittgenstein said: "No proposition can contain itself as an argument" = The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe is the prerecording itself which is to say any recording that contains a random factor.
// Burroughs, The Ticket That Exploded, p. 166

Unwittingly -- and in one enigmatic sentence worthy of the Philosophical Investigations -- Burroughs takes the Tractatus and moves it into the realm of Wittgenstein's later thinking.

There's more to be explored here on the similarity between their philosophies of language; but I'll save it for another post. Until then, I'm capping my pen.

Language -- It's a Virus (oooh!)

2009-12-28T20:41:00.002-05:00

Sven Birkerts doesn't own a cell phone.

2009-12-22T13:03:00.004-05:00

Here's an interesting recent interview with the Sven Birkerts, notorious defender of the book-as-the-primary-carrier-of-high-culture and author of The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. While he's still "deeply invested in the idea that books represent something else besides the transmission of knowledge," he (reluctantly, sadly) admits to owning a few electronic gadgets. (But not a cell phone -- no, never a cell phone.)

Q: You wrote a book called “The Gutenberg Elegies” about digital culture and concluded it with a call to refuse it. I imagine you’re not in favor of digital culture.

The book was written right when the first great wave of electronic technology was rolling in. People on many fronts were very quickly turning against stodgy old print. I had an investment in print culture as a teacher, writer and bookseller. I began to wonder what we were so happily abandoning and jumping on board with. The resulting series of meditations raised a lot of questions and ended on a very skeptical note.

Some years later, the publisher wanted to do a new edition. Ten years had passed. In traditional time, 10 years is nothing. In terms of what we’re going through culturally, it’s an enormous time period.

Things had also changed for me. Since I had argued against the “salvation” offered by all that is digital, I had been identified as a Luddite. Many people imagined me living in a cabin with no electricity, making my own ink. But I live in the contemporary world, including as a writer. In order to carry on with my writing life, I had to make concessions. This book was written originally on a Selectric typewriter. When I wrote the introduction to the revised edition it was on a laptop.

He makes a few good points, although it continues to come as no surprise that someone who doesn't engage with new technologies fails to fully grasp the subtleties inherent in their various literacies and practices. Birkerts is still towing the old line about groupthink, majoritarianism and the decline of "deeper art" into "entertainment art", apparently missing the many niche forms of creativity that have flourished and indeed been sustained and revitalized online. (Would I know of any the experimental artists and poets I've come to love without UbuWeb?) In any case, the interview is an interesting place to revisit these old debates.

Digital Shakespeares and the Decay of Linklists

2009-12-21T11:06:00.000-05:00

I'm putting together a review of a few online/"digital humanities" Shakespeare resources and am quite frankly astonished at the amount of material out there. I knew there'd be a lot -- but this, this is a lot. In fact, quite a few of the sites I've found consist entirely of linklists, constructing a massive network of resources that point to other resources, that point to other resources, that point to other resources.

Most fascinating for me has been sifting through the layers of decaying dead petals that have fallen from these big, bloated blooms. In a way radically different from books, a linklist can persist long past the time the sources that gave it meaning have crumbled, leaving brittle, empty husks strewn over cyberspace. So often these websites are removed forcibly as the late-90s "free" (read: ad-riddled) webhosting services -- places like AOL Hometown and GeoCities, names evoking physical locations -- shut their doors, leaving thousands if not millions of ghost pages indexed for search engines.

A disproportionate number of Shakespeare sites seem to be hosted on these types of servers, probably because they were put together by public school teachers or amateur Shakespeare enthusiasts who don't have access to other free forms of webhosting (like university servers). Those that haven't gone the way of the dodo are peppered with Google Adwords and banners, to the point that I very much suspect profit, rather than unadulterated love of the Bard, was the webmaster's primary motive.

Among the pages that persist, many are produced by university professors or librarians in a fit of inspiration, then sit dormant. These are my favorites. Like little time capsules, a slice into the mountain of time, they serve as small archaeologies of the cutting-edge circa 200-whatever. Take, for instance, this site designed by Professor James Hunter of Edgewood College for his Spring 2005 course:

Now, I happen to think this site is amazing, both for its content (if you ever need to develop a Shakespeare course, here it is in its entirety!) and its delightfully kitsch design (woodgrain ovals! who knew!). And, although there are quite a few dead links, most of them are still kicking, but haven't been updated since 2005; certainly nothing born after mid-2005 is linked. Here's a case where links still live but stagnate, age, decline in relevance without, in fact, anyone doing anything.

"To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, / To the last syllable of recorded time."

Can there be any stronger argument for the live-ness, the ecology of media forms? We don't approach texts or objects in vacuums, but from a particular stance situated within a culture-soaked time. As becomes clear online -- clearer than with books, at least -- mediations of Shakespeare need do nothing whatsoever for their value, meaning, reference and relevance to radically change.

Arguments with Latour

2009-12-20T00:01:00.001-05:00

Whoever last owned my copy of Latour's We Have Never Been Modern clearly had a bone to pick:

Luckily, Bruno was able to redeem himself:

Snowy Florida

2009-12-19T14:30:00.003-05:00

I've been silent the last two weeks because of an unexpected and last-minute trip to south Florida to visit with family. Although I was offline, I did get a chance to read Dolce & Gabbana's A Thousand Plateaus in its entirety. It was good beach reading. (No, seriously. It was!)

Here are a few things Boca Raton taught me:

One can live in a tropical jungle, and (with enough money) still have a snow party under the palm trees. Your spoiled-brat children will demand it every year. And really, what is a Florida Christmas without a few Frostys?
Iguanas: cute in a cage, scary on your patio.
Fish can jump pretty high. Must be all the toxins in the canal?
Canned goods expire faster than you might think.

In any case, I have two new digital projects going on, and have gathered some great new Burroughs resources to share in the next few weeks. In the meantime, enjoy my mad uke skills.

Back with more soon.

Videos: Linotype Machine

2009-12-06T16:35:00.003-05:00

Some cool videos on typesetting and working the linotype machine. I wasn't able to embed my favorite; it can be found here. Printing history, ho!

History of Timeline Visualizations, Part II

2009-12-03T09:07:00.001-05:00

... was just posted over at HyperStudio's website.

Visible Archive Series Browser

2009-11-25T13:38:00.001-05:00

Visible Archive Series Browser from Mitchell Whitelaw on Vimeo.

Shakespeare Quartos, Shifting Digital Archives

2009-11-22T20:20:00.005-05:00

[Cross-posted at HASTAC under the title "The Digital Reading Room -- er, Archive".]

Amidst all the exciting news in the digital humanities world this week, the Shakespeare Quartos Archive was quietly launched. This is big news for early modern book nerds and digital humanists alike. Promising "at least one copy of every edition of William Shakespeare's plays printed in quarto before the theatres closed in 1642," SQA* substantially expands the British Library's Shakespeare in Quarto project and includes an interactive interface that allows for side-by-side image comparison, text overlays, exhibits, tagging and user annotation.

I spent some time browsing the Hamlet prototype this afternoon, and am impressed with the site's basic functionality. The quartos -- which are scans of full openings, not just single pages sliced from their codex context -- open into a clean workspace that acts more like an application, allowing the user to open, close and manipulate multiple panels. It seems easy to jot down notes on a particular line or segment, and the annotation overlays are customizable and unobtrusive. Oh, and how great is this: you can easily change the opacity of a page to compare it against another! Exploiting the potential of digital materials, huzzah!

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the difference archiving digital materials, digital archives, and digitally-active archivists. Archiving born-digital materials remains a problem, and is being worked over relentlessly by people much smarter than me; digitally-active archivists simply (I "simply" like it's a simple thing -- I only mean to indicate a contrast) use new tools to disseminate old materials; while digital archives are much stickier of a wicket. Does the term refer to a repository of digitized, or born-digital, materials? Must they be institutionally-run, or can blogs, wikis and personal sites constitute a "digital archive"? What makes an archive digital, and what makes a collection of digital materials an archive?

For most of the term's life, it's referred to a traditional print/paper archive gone digital, like the Rossetti Archive or the William Blake Archive. Sometimes, though, a "digital archive" is a more amorphous collection, a kind of memory bank put together through user contributions. The September 11 Digital Archive out of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason is a prime example of this, allowing users to upload images and documents or type in their own stories. Although produced for different ends, both of these kinds of digital archives are driven by access: the user, much like the scholar paging a book from special collections, is encouraged to browse and view materials, but any special manipulation must be done on the individual's machine after download.

More and more, though, digital archives are providing spaces and tools for taking notes, collecting materials and collaboration. No longer just a digital paging desk, new archival sites are attempting to provide a kind of "digital reading room" -- as well as a magnifying glass, a pair of gloves, and a few other scholars to help you with your work. On the one hand, these new tools are exciting -- I geeked out over the opacity feature on the Shakespeare Quartos site, dropping images over one another to find the subtle differences in printing -- and they are, of course, helping us see old materials in a new light while providing new models for collaborative, collectivist scholarship. On the other hand, no matter how awesome an opacity feature is, it will never be Photoshop; no matter how slick an authoring or notetaking tool may be, it will never beat whatever word processing software one already uses. Part of the reason the buy-in is so difficult for digital humanities communities is that, for all we gain in terms of collaboration, we lose just as much in ease of use, variety of features, and portability of one's own research materials. Here, the analogy of the reading room -- a space of archival containment, where one must view the materials under the watchful eyes of the archon, using only pre-approved tools provided by the library -- is eerily apt.

Damn! Once again, I started off positive and ended up cranky. How does that always happen? I'm genuinely excited by Shakespeare Quartos, and want to see more digital archives move in this direction. But I'm also a trouble-making contrarian that would enjoy a more frank discussion around the pros and cons of these shifts toward all-inclusive, one-stop-shop archival communities. After all, unless we can get folks using them, they're just fancier repositories.

*Funded by the NEH and JISC, the project is a joint collaboration between the Bodleian Library of Oxford, the Folger Shakespeare Library and the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

a film made of paper and scotch tape

2009-11-20T00:01:00.002-05:00

David Gatten, who is teaching some cool courses here at Duke next semester, makes what sound to be amazing films out of material bits of language. Check him out talking about the latest in his series Films for Invisible Ink, a film "with pretty much no image, just white space":

The entire film is made from a single piece of paper that had part of Darwin's Origin of the Species on it. What I did was I put scotch tape down all over the text, then I boiled the page. What happens when you do that is the glue from the scotch tape soaks up the ink, so I had a lot of pieces of tape with words on them. Then I had a really pulpy, fibrous mass of the backing of the paper that the words had been pulled from. Then with a close-up lens on an optical printer, basically a device that turns your camera into a microscope, I filmed up close thee words of Charles Darwin and the paper fibers from the paper I pulled them off of.

LINKS!: digihum, CYOA, text adventure cover letters, nineteenth-century jokes

2009-11-19T22:10:00.005-05:00

Links, split into two categories.

Digital Humanites / Media

The gathering of digital humanities resources (hereafter shortened to digihum, which kind of sounds more awesome, or delicious) continues. Dan Cohen has a list of digihum Twitterers going, and has recently launched Digital Humanities Now, "a real-time, crowdsourced publication" that "takes the pulse of the digital humanities community and tries to discern what articles, blog posts, projects, tools, collections, and announcements are worthy of greater attention." I'm really digging it, especially since similar conversations about the state of the field have been popping on HASTAC.

Oh, and HASTAC forum on Grading 2.0!

Digihum-related, more of the history of blogging the Middle Ages. Again, it's great to see these histories documented. Moar, plz.

Nick Montfort on Nick Montfort on Nick Montfort. Not as kinky as it sounds. But does make me want to write some more IF.

Choose Your Own Adventure visualizations are making the rounds. Speaking of which, Letters of Note -- an amazing blog of amazing letters -- has a letter by computer game designer Tim Schafer to David Fox, in which he applies to be the designer for LucasArts by writing his cover letter as a text adventure game.

Bookishness / History

Julie Melby at Graphic Arts always has great stuff. This week she posted some scans of William Thackeray's pencil drawings, scribbled into the margins of his volumes of The Mirror.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Ptak Science Books' musings about 17th-century Dada art and William Burroughs' (who I have spent way too much time thinking/writing about today) self-portrait.

Oh, and sometimes nineteenth-century Congressman make cute jokes.

Detourning Langston Hughes' Archive

2009-11-16T19:33:00.010-05:00

As I mentioned a few days ago, my colleague Pete Moore and I are working on a digital re-reading of Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." I think it's getting pretty swank.

Right?

Each of the lines of text on the left is clipped from a scan of a different edition of Hughes' poem, from the original two-column layout published in The Crisis (1921) to contemporary anthologized texts that, quite frankly, look bland by comparison. (Surprisingly, while collating the different versions Pete discovered just how much the lineation and even punctuation varies in this canonical poem -- a point that nicely validates our emphasis on the material appearance of the lines.) On the right, a set of linked poems, critical interpretations, images, songs and videos form a constellation of responses to Hughes, both contextualizing and re-situating his work. Together, the call and its responses operate as a kind of detourned archive.

Yet the project itself does creative work as an artistic re-imagining of the poem. The design does this most explicitly. Centered visually on the metaphor of the railway time table or train table, the lines of Hughes' poem become the "Arrivals," coming in from all different decades, while the responses become "Departures" that feed back into the interpretation of the poem. (Design note: each of the lines flips interactively, like an old-school train schedule -- a beckoning call to riders, waiting to depart. Also, Hughes came up with the idea of the poem while riding a train.) What's so great about this metaphor is that it spatializes the linear, temporal model of time and, by extension, of call and response. As an interactive field of flipping clips (each line appearing one at a time), the space of the screen performs the time-based experience of reading and responding to the poem. Criticism, then, becomes an improvisational intervention into this noisy, expressive field.

The design took some time to gel, and went through several iterations. At first, we were thinking about doing one-line arrivals that would open into one-line departures, that would slide back into an arrival, unfolding a kind of accordion on the screen:

As much as I loved seeing each clip side-by-side (and the snazzy hover-over flip that would twirl them all at once -- so satisfying...), it didn't seem to make a lot of sense. So we started thinking more seriously about the two-panel design in the images above. Ever since my only quasi-successful experiment in two-panel design for my thesis, I've been hesistant to use them; but it seems to work here. Instead of expanding infinitely, the poem and its departures are contained in a space, much as a real train timetable is. The image in the background (of the Eads Bridge) sets it sailing.

Is it art? Is it criticism? Don't know. And don't care. It was fun, and I think it speaks. It calls; I want to respond.

I'll post a live link once I've got it completed and debugged.

History of Timeline Visualizations

2009-11-11T21:45:00.006-05:00

While I've physically left Cambridge in general and MIT in particular, I continue to blog for HyperStudio, MIT's digital humanities lab. Readers with an interest in digital humanities might want to mosey on over and check out my brief and unabashedly teleological history of timeline visualizations, part uno.

Part two was just completed, and will be posted in the coming weeks.

Note that the HyperStudio website is currently getting majorly overhauled, so think of this as a little taste of what's to come. I'm putting together a backlog of posts on the history of visualizations, spatial history and early computing, to be released once the new site is complete. So stay tuned.

(PS: Many thanks to everyone's favorite book blogger, peacay at Bibliodyssey, for help finding information on early timelines. He's amazing!)

Dictionary-inspired Poetry

2009-11-09T00:01:00.000-05:00

A new digital / Flash / game / poem from Jason Nelson, "Evidence of Everything Exploding." With dada art and dictionaries, it's like it was made for me.

Also, "respiratory system -- resuscitator," a tale from Webster's by John Shea. Not digital, but definitely dictionary-inspired.

I've also been sleeping with Sleeping With the Dictionary, a collection of Stein-ian poems by Harryette Mullen, passed along by my colleague Pete Moore. We're working together on a train/Trane-inspired digital remix of Langston Hughes' "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" that centers on the call and response of later poets. It's pretty awesome. More on that soon.

109 Lighting Books, by Airan Kang

2009-11-08T00:01:00.000-05:00

Airan Kang from Jun Lee on Vimeo.

via Rhizome.

Screed of an Anti-Collaboration Curmudgeon

2009-11-06T12:50:00.004-05:00

Over at HASTAC, Michael Widner recently posted on collaboration as a scholarly revolution:

Collaboration is one of the concepts frequently discussed among those in the humanities and those studying social networking. How do we facilitate it? What tools make it effective? What cognitive models should we use? How can the drive for it inform pedagogy? These and many other questions we explore on a regular basis with the assumption that collaboration is likely to create new, useful knowledge, is a necessary skill for our students to learn, and is probably the direction toward which current technological tools are driving us, so we need to understand it. Nevertheless, one place where collaboration is rarely, if ever seen, is in the conventional research done by humanities scholars.

He points to the work of scholars like Franco Moretti and Jonathan Gottschall as bringing the collaborative methodologies used in the sciences into the humanities, acknowledging that the hurdles are still high. In fact, "it requires a revolution."

Michael's clearly right. Something is going on with collaboration, and has been for a few years. It's hard to get a digital humanities project funded, or even considered, without it having a significant collaborative component -- actually, I can't even imagine a non-collaborative NEH-funded project. The solitary scholar producing her own digital work in isolation just doesn't exist within the funding and laboratory infrastructures set up in digital humanities, since they've largely been modeled after the sciences.

I posted a bit of a curmudgeonly comment (sorry, Michael!) to the effect of: what's the point? Plenty of people a lot smarter than I have made strong arguments for collaborative humanities work, to the point that we've now accepted that more collaboration ==> can be good; but when did the equation flip to all good work ==> must be collaborative?

Another way of putting this: we now know the value added by collaborative work. It opens up the research process, helps one find interdisciplinary connections and, with digital tools, can aggregate the wisdom of crowds. But what's the value lost?

Take wikis as an example. Wikis are astonishingly useful tools. They help us gather information in one centralized location; they operate associatively, allowing linking; their structure is flexible; and of course, they facilitate collaboration by allowing more than one editor-contributor. I've used wikis as both a student, a teacher and a researcher. I would encourage others to do the same.

But I don't go to Wikipedia to drink the well-aged words of a brilliant individual. And I've yet to see an academic essay written collaboratively on a wiki that isn't dry as a bone. This isn't a coincidence: precisely because they're collaborative, wikis transform texts -- texts that, in the hands of an individual writer, would be creative, crafted, idiosyncratic -- into pure information, bullet points.

This isn't inherently a bad thing. Sometimes you want pure information. (Can you imagine William Burroughs' Wikipedia? Impossible! And, I would submit, this is a good thing.) Other times, though, I don't want the clearest route to an idea, from point 1.1 to point 1.10. Writing produced alone, by the individual struggling with an idea -- and I'm not romanticizing the image, mind you -- can take its reader on an amazing journal, down brambly paths, butting up against dead-ends, trapping her in its cul-de-sacs. This, for me, is the added value of humanities work -- this is the pleasure of humanities work, that we get to indulge so solipsistically in thought. For all their vaunted "collaboration," our colleagues in the sciences aren't granted this privilege. In the rush to digitize (a word that so often means "scientize") the humanities, I wouldn't want to lose it ourselves.

Links: info viz, paper heads, anxious reading

2009-11-06T08:37:00.003-05:00

* Lauren Berlant's thoughtful post on anxious reading, teaching and learning.

* Jeffrey J. Cohen's history of blogging the middle ages. We need more documentation (i.e. histories) of academic activity online. So much gets lost so quickly.

* Alex Juhasz is making a YouTube "book."

* A head made of paper.

* Information visualization Flickr group that actually includes some gorgeous historical examples.

* Professors think they're pretty hot when it comes to using technology in the classroom. Students don't. What else is new.

Floundering As/For Flatfish

2009-11-03T15:31:00.005-05:00

When we're having trouble articulating our arguments, why do we (by which I mean I) say we're (I'm) floundering? Because I do, and I am; but it has nothing to do with this:

Who's the flounder here? Me? ...Then what's running me down and stabbing me?

I want to be the spearfisher who catches the flounder -- the flounder should be the argument. That is: I, the knife-handed hunter, hone in on my prey [read: thesis], the flippy-floppy little flatfish hiding in the sand.

Then why am I floundering?

Isn't "floundering" synonymous with 'spearfishing'? If that's the case, then I am kind of floundering (or I want to be "floundering" [fishing for flounder] but am actually floundering [flopping under the spear of a fisherman]). Maybe floundering on one side of the stick is the necessary prelude to floundering on the other.

Bottom line: it might flip, and it might flop, but once the fish is speared, it's a dead-gone thing.

Disembodied Leg Prints, ca. 1650

2009-11-01T18:21:00.004-05:00

[From A Booke of Drawinges Performed acording to the best order for vse & Breuity that is yet Extant, ca. 1650; from British Printed Images to 1700.]

[Illustration in Samuel Clarke, A Generall Martyrologie (London, 1651); from British Printed Images to 1700.]

[Plate 1 from a drawing book, Un Libro da designiare; 1654 etching; from British Printed Images to 1700.]