d i a p s a l m a t a

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 --