d i a p s a l m a t a

The end.

2016-02-26T16:10:00.000-05:00

This blog has been discontinued.

I've started a new project, a print/digital zine called Pounce!. You can subscribe to and read about that project here: http://zine.whitneyannetrettien.com

Thanks for reading.

Layouts, Patterns, Networks

2014-02-04T16:51:00.000-05:00

The next phase in building my prototype digital edition of a Little Gidding Harmony has led me into document layout analysis and digitization processes. As I move from research to writing, I'd like to use this post to untangle a few preliminary ideas – not really findings so much as speculations.

If you've ever used Adobe Acrobat to process historical documents, you're probably familiar with some form of layout analysis. It's the task of identifying different regions of interest on a scanned image of a document (text, image, graphic), then further labeling their different roles (caption, page number, title), usually in an XML file that's linked to the page image. To give you an example, I uploaded this page from a 1635 edition of the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter to the SCRIBO module, a neat little online tool for layout analysis. Here's the image it spit out:

This book has a somewhat complicated layout by modern standards, and the microfilm scan from EEBO is not great; still, SCRIBO did a moderate job of identifying text blocks and other elements. It does better with more standard layouts, like these facing dedicatory epistles in Robert Greene's Penelopes web (1587).

Extracting this kind of textual description from an image is useful for all sorts of purposes. It helps automate the process of transforming scanned books into clean digital text by removing paratexts that might gunk up the flow of the document, things like running heads or page numbers. It can also facilitate identifying all images within a magazine, or all article titles within a newspaper. Because layout analysis links description to coordinates on the digital image, it provides a way of mediating between the photographic facsimile and the extracted text when working with digitized books and manuscripts.

One of the things that fascinates me about this is its potential to bridge different kinds of book historical research. I tend to take a "material texts" approach to my digital work, grounded in, for instance, Randall McLeod's playful investigations into the deep materialities of printed books, or Johanna Drucker's attendance to design, or more distantly D. F. McKenzie's sociology of texts. But there's also of course a rich tradition of mining, abstracting, and visualizing large corpora of digitized texts, a tradition that might be traced back to the early quantitative book historical work of the Annales school. By drawing attention to the importance of the material text within a macroscale approach, pattern analysis has the potential to bring these two divergent branches – material book and immaterial texts – back together. Here, projects like VisualPage are leading the way by analyzing layout, form, and the use of space in poems printed in the late nineteenth century.

Yet I'm also interested in the limits of these tools, in finding their breaking points; for the point at which something stops working tells us much about the assumptions or aims of its design, as well as the structures (material, ideological) that circumscribe its possible uses. This task is particularly enlightening with tools that digitize books, because of course, as hardware, printed books and manuscripts are very different types of things from digital texts. Asking a machine – especially one that we, they, someone has designed – to "analyze" print's layout helps pinpoint the gap between our (modern) expectations of a book and its (historically specific) material reality.

Here, as in so many things, the Little Gidding Harmonies offer a perfect test case. Here's a page from the King's Harmony (1635), as interpreted by SCRIBO:

Not so great, but honestly, not so terrible either, given this is a web-based tool with a 20MB upload limit, and this page is a complicated mash-up of a variety of printed texts and images. (The archive-quality TIFF files I have for another, simpler Harmony are each around 42MB.) What interests me here is that large text blocks are being identified as images, outlined in orange – possibly because of discoloration, or because the pasting of the cut-up bits and pieces is ever-so-slightly uneven, and we would expect printed lines of text to be perfectly straight. This happens repeatedly when I upload other pages:

So, what does this matter? Well, there's a few obvious points to be made. Even as digitization – defined simply as taking a photograph of a book and disseminating it over digital networks – increases access to rare materials, here we see how the mechanisms that make digitized books legible (searchable, manipulable, visualizable) to researchers continue to reproduce both print biases and modern attitudes toward what a "book" or a "text" is. Though the difference this makes is subtle, it does mildly qualify the point that digitization helps bring rare, inaccessible, and otherwise non-canonical works – objects like the Harmonies – to a wider audience. Taking and posting photographic facsimiles online is one task within a broader array of practices that we might call "digitization"; if our tools for mining and analyzing these books can't read these facsimiles, then the Harmonies and other texts that are not easily machine-readable remain in the position of the unusual, the quirky, the idiosyncratic, unplugged and disengaged from the networks that enable us to study broader cultural trends. In other words, they hold more or less the same marginalized position that they do under scholarly regimes of print, where, unable to be easily anthologized or reproduced, they remain outside the systems through which knowledge circulates, accumulating cultural capital. This small difference may have big consequences for the kinds of stories we can tell about history at scale.

As I mentioned in my recent MLA paper, we see the same issue in image matching tools. Machines are good at – that is, we've designed machines to be good at (what determines what is slippery here) – identifying sameness, matching strings of characters or visual patterns. It's more difficult to trace subtle acts of remediation, whereby a woodcut pattern is copied in Thomas Trevelyon's 1608 manuscript miscellany, then embroidered in blackwork, or used in plasterwork. This is not a point against image matching; rather, it's a simple reminder that scale is determined by not only the capacity but the affordances of the network, by what the computer is capable of seeing and reading, such that more does not eventually lead to "culture" as such.

(The top image is from Geoffrey Whitney's A choice of emblemes (1586), STC 25438; the second is from Thomas Fella's manuscript miscellany, now at the Folger.)

I've (accidentally) described this problem as a criticism, but it's more interesting in the form of a question. Namely, what type tool would be suited to pattern matching in the Harmonies, or across networks of prints and textiles? How would we design it? What are the points of friction, material or structural, in the process of digitization?

As I've been playing around with different programs, I keep returning to the recent discussions I've been having with my colleagues Mary Caton Lingold and Darren Mueller. We're in the midst of collaboratively writing an introduction for an edited collection on digital sound studies, and we keep rubbing up against this problem of medium specificity. The digital experience, however you interpret that phrase, is remarkably textual, not just because we're emailing and tweeting and blogging and texting more, but also because we parse nearly everything in strings of characters. Vestiges of the command-line interface appear in the ubiquitous search box of the web; the metadata that responds to that search is encoded in text. If you want to perform similar search operations on sound, you have to translate it into another medium, either visual (the waveform, the spectrogram) or textual (user tagging). Though the Little Gidding Harmonies are books to be read as text, the task of making them machine readable is more like that of mining sound for semantic content. That is, it's an intermedial process of mapping character strings to their position within a page spread, and then matching these patterns within and across the whole. It requires abstracting from the book without losing the book.

Pattern is a word rich with meaning in the early modern period, especially for Little Gidding. Nicholas Ferrar, founder of the community, describes his friend George Herbert as a "pattern or more for the age he lived in," a phrase Ferrar applied to Little Gidding's lifestyle, too. The Harmonies themselves (note the sonic resonance of the word) are pattern books that marry form and content in the same way as Herbert's "Easter Wings" – a poem whose material history has been traced beautifully by Random Cloud (Randall McLeod) in "FIAT fLUX." The Harmonies also contain echoes of the pattern books used to embroider and knot networks of significance, "networks" of course originally referring to lace webbing. We (I?) can't seem to escape this dense interweaving of text and textiles when talking about transmutation from print to digital books. It's fun to dance in the history of etymologies – but more than that, these webs of signification continue to do cultural work. I'm drawn to the idea of a digital humanities invested in pattern rather than identity.

(From Flickr user crabchick.)

If you want to learn more about layout analysis for historical documents, you can dive into the HisDoc research project or PRiMA. LLC recently published an interesting article on using pattern redundancy analysis in historical printed books, based on work at the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Tours. There are also a few neat open source tools for OCRing text (Optical Character Recognition – the process of pulling text from a scanned image) that come packaged with document analysis, like OCRopus. I would of course love to hear about more digital humanities projects using layout analysis.

Towards a Prototype of a Digital Harmony

2013-11-19T16:43:00.004-05:00

I've been working on a prototype of a digital facsimile "edition" of the earliest extant Little Gidding Harmony. (If you don't know what a Little Gidding Harmony is, see this FAQ I wrote a few months back.) Two pages are currently accessible here. Don't click unless you have a fast connection and are using either Chrome or Safari. As per usual, IE is not recommended.

I put "edition" in quotes above because the Harmony is not really a text one would read today the way one would read, say, Shakespeare's King Lear. Most contemporary readers are interested in the Harmonies as concrete instantiations of a particular compositional process, rather than as textual products. Not only are we interested in process over product, but the product itself doesn't face the problems that so much of textual criticism has been designed to deal with. There are not multiple, variant editions of this Harmony; it's a singular, unique object. Nor is there an audience that requires an "authoritative" edition to read linearly, from start to finish. Even theories of editing that acknowledge the fundamental instability of texts – Jerome McGann and the "textual condition," Randall McLeod's notion of "transformission" – don't really capture what's happening with the books made at Little Gidding.

In fact, one could argue that the Harmonies were designed precisely to counter this instability. Thus the cut-up method is already an editorial intervention. The women of Little Gidding collated multiple printed Bibles with scissors and paste to produce their own uniquely "harmonized" edition. If we see the Harmonies from this perspective, then the task of a contemporary editor is not to pull the text into a coherent whole, but in fact to pull apart the already harmonized text. This decomposed edition would then enable an exploration of the community's cut-up process.

So in beginning to think about an "edition" of a Harmony, I was motivated less by theories of editing and more by visualization and mapping strategies. Rather than generating multiple variant readings of a text, this edition will aim to produce multiple views of the page's landscape, and different mechanisms for manipulating these views. On the one hand, it embodies aspects of my own research on the Harmonies; on the other, it is (or intends to be, eventually) a machine for producing new knowledge.

In designing this first draft of a prototype, I have attended to:

openings over individual pages. This is much harder than it sounds in web-based editions. Screen realty is limited and thus valuable; to choose openings (that is, two-page spreads) over individual pages is to trade large, legible facsimile text for a more birds-eye view of the book as a whole. Importantly, you really can't have it both ways. This is a simple yet, I think, not so obvious point. Even with a variable zoom on a full-screen facsimile photograph, you can't ever escape the framing mechanism of the screen itself. As Marie Baxter said in an excellent paper she presented at the Sixteenth Century Society Conference last month, digitized historical objects are a bit like caged animals in a zoo. We think of them as authentic representations, but our perspective is wholly determined by the cage-like screen.

topography over text. From the perspective of the contemporary researcher, the pages of a Little Gidding Harmony are more like maps than literary texts, tracing a set of routes and relationships between different points. For this reason, I began this prototype by using the Image Markup Tool, designed at the University of Victoria, to annotate a page image, identifying each individual cut-out piece. Ultimately, I decided I was unhappy with how these annotations appeared in the web view, and scrapped most of the HTML exported by the tool itself. (Some cut-outs are also polygonal shapes, rather than rectangles, meaning that some individual excerpts require two "image annotations" – which produces a mismatch between the visualization of the cut-up and my XML-encoded transcript of the Harmony.) However, starting from this point gave me a set of coordinates, which I was then able to use as the basis for developing my views. Moving forward, I'm looking into other mapping tools. More generally, I'm interested in the question: what happens when we think of the digital edition as a map? Or when we apply GIS technologies to non-geographical image maps? What would a literary edition look like if it were made using Hypercities? I'm inspired by the speculative and conceptual work being done by projects like Z-Axis at the Maker Lab. What happens if we think about these geographical mappings in terms of relationships between elements on the topography of the page?

cut-up fragments over coherent paragraphs. The only view that offers legible text is the parsed XML in the textbox on the right side of the screen. I do not like this view. My marked-up transcription contains a good deal of useful information for any researcher of Little Gidding. Unfortunately, none of it is well represented in the utterly dematerialized white-on-gray text you see here. As a next step, I need to rethink how to incorporate the transcription into this "edition." For now, though, I've decided to offer a kind of counterpoint to this plain text: the cut-ups, below. These are generated on the fly from a larger image of the Harmony's page using the coordinates from the source text layers – which means that any page for which we have these coordinates can be pulled apart into the cut-up pieces that compose it. Each piece is draggable. Since I'm interested in putting the Harmonies in conversation with contemporary rhetoric about digital remix, this relationship between the digital facsimile – its layers of paper flattened on the screen – and the code that de-composes it into its constituent parts is conceptually exciting to me; for here digital media re-performs the cut-up method itself, but with a difference. That difference pinpoints the disjunct between paper and code, and is worth a blog post in itself. Conceptual framework aside, though, I'm frankly not sure what to do with this functionality yet. Currently, I'm using it as a kind of sandbox for my own research; I don't know where it's headed, or even if I'll keep it.

As I mention in my brief description on the page itself, a good chunk of this prototype is held together with duct tape and chewing gum at this point. The code has not been streamlined but is in fact heavy and unwieldy. You'll need a decent computer and a fast connection to access it – and even then, all functionalities won't be available in IE, and probably a few other browsers. Nonetheless, I can see how it could be streamlined, in conjunction with my marked-up transcription. The next step is to begin working toward a cleaner, more robust framework, while tweaking some of the functionalities and thinking a bit more about how to incorporate the drag-and-drop cut-ups.

A big debt of gratitude is owed to Paul Dyck and Ryan Rempel for providing me with the XML of their digital edition of the King's Harmony. This allowed me to use tags that are standard at least across our two sites. It will probably create a headache down the road – but at least now it's a shared headache. Dyck and his collaborators' writings on their digital edition have also been inspiring.

Comments are always welcome.

Explanatory Notes on Gaffe/Stutter

2013-11-01T13:03:00.000-04:00

Earlier this month, punctum books released my project Gaffe/Stutter on its Dead Letter Office imprint, edited by the inimitable Eileen Joy. Taking its name from the US Postal Service's office for undeliverable mail, Dead Letter Office publishes work that remains in a state of suspension – projects that are abandoned or unfinished "yet retain little inkdrops of possibility." In that spirit, Gaffe/Stutter is series of diagrams, sketches, code, and fragments of HTML that, together, comprise the remnants of an uncompleted diagrammatic digital "edition" of Gilles Deleuze's magnificently schematic book, Logic of Sense. It's available as both a printed chapbook and a website. You can also download a PDF of the book for free (though the PDF won't make much sense unless it's bound, and I encourage you to support punctum books). Since the project is admittedly (and intentionally) opaque in its presentation, I want to use this post to give a little context and background.

The title comes from two concepts juxtaposed in Logic of Sense: the gaffe and the stutter. Deleuze introduces them at a moment in the text when he's interested in dualities, particularly (for present purposes) the dual use of the mouth for both eating and speaking. As our primary means for ingesting the nutrition that sustains us as animals, the mouth helps us repurpose corporeal stuff, converting matter into energy; as our speech organ, it produces incorporeal events, acts of verbal communication. Since "sense" is Deleuze's primary concern throughout the book (although we might say he's actually more interested in nonsense), you can see why this dual corporal/incorporal use of mouths interests him.

The relationship between these two uses is foregrounded in the difference between a gaffe and a stutter. A gaffe is when spoken words "go awry, as if they were attracted by the depth of bodies; they may be accompanied by verbal hallucinations," Deleuze points out, "as in the case of maladies where language disorders are accompanied by unrestricted oral behavior." Eating inedible things, grinding one's teeth – this is language brought into the material depth of bodies. The stutter, by contrast, "raise[s] the operation of bodies up to the surface of language":

We bring bodies to the surface, as we deprive them of their former depth, even if we place the entire language through this challenge in a situation of risk. this time the disorders are of the surface; they are lateral and spread out from right to left. Stuttering has replaced the gaffe; the phantasms of the surface have replaced the hallucination of depth; dreams of accelerated gliding replace the painful nightmare of burial and absorption. ("Fourth Series")

I don't want to give the wrong impression: these are relatively minor concepts in Logic of Sense. Neither of the two published exegeses on Logic mention them once, and they make no appearance in the index. Yet, as I was winding my way through the book's tortuous labyrinth of dualities, this juxtaposing of "gaffe" and "stutter" became a guiding light, helping to bring into focus the book's many other concepts. So when I started writing a preface to clarify the abandoned diagrams and code that make up the bulk of my "dead letter" to Deleuze, I kept returning to this potent pairing: body/language, to eat/to speak. For books, too, are objects where materiality meets the seemingly incorporeal process of making sense through language. In Renaissance humanism, reading was imagined as a form of digestion, as readers consumed texts in order to take in their ideas; this metaphor continues whenever we ask ourselves how much we've absorbed the meaning of a text (a phrase in opposition to, say, rote memorization). Even the physical shape of the codex seems to embody a relationship between depth and surface, the thickness of its spine against the flatness of the page. And in the book's gutter, that receding point across which the two pages of an opening reflect each other, is a concrete image for the horizon of sense – what Deleuze describes as sense's "frontier" or, following his reading of Alice in Wonderland, the mirror through which language passes:

To pass to the other side of the mirror is to pass from the relation of denotation to the relation of expression – without pausing at the intermediaries, namely, at manifestation and signification. It is to reach a region where language no longer has any relation to that which it denotes, but only to that which it expresses, that is, to sense.

The book's folds have long been the site for literary imaginings. As Stéphane Mallarmé (premier poet of the gutter) writes in his essay The Book as Spiritual Instrument, "Folding is, with respect to the page printed whole, a quasi-religious indication; the large sheets are less striking than the thick stacks of pages, which offer a tiny tomb for the soul." Blanchot and Derrida extend this meditation in works both titled The Book to Come, as does Deleuze himself in his treatise on Leibniz, Le Pli or The Fold, in which all of being becomes a kind of reading process, endlessly folding and unfolding the pages of the great and total Book of Nature. But we could look elsewhere for theories of the book's gutter – for instance, to George Herbert's famous pattern poem "Easter Wings."

In "Easter Wings," lines take flight, flipping the orientation of the page (or deterritorializing the page, if we want to stay with Deleuze and Guattari's terminology), reconfiguring the relationship between the printed text, its paratexts, the book, and its reader. As Randall McLeod writes, "untied, the wings of the book unfold as an angel in the grasp of the woman to whom the book was given. The diptych is not a merely visual field; it is also tactile and metamorphic." McLeod ends his essay with an image of hands folded in prayer, like the wings of the poem or the bound pages of a book – his own visual metamorphosis of the essay that precedes it.

This is about the point at which Gaffe/Stutter begins to make its own kind of sense. Stuttering and stammering across the surface of the page is a series of diagrams and code, pointing in one direction; pointing in the other is the preface, words that, as written language, spin a kind of meaning not present in the stutter of code. Yet this linguistic depth bumps up against the materiality of the page, as words twist and leap across gaps and the gutter of the book. Although Johanna Drucker's wonderful new pamphlet Diagrammatic Writing wasn't available when I was writing the preface, her work gives a perfect description of what I (with some inspiration from Herbert and McLeod) was attempting: "the associative field within the text creates endless opportunities for branching or breaking the line to follow lines of thought / breaching the code of compositional conduct."

If the chapbook is a dead letter to Deleuze, the website revives the original (and unfulfilled) dream of producing a diagrammatic reading of Logic of Sense – but in such a way that a webtext of the dead letter becomes its fulfillment.

Although Deleuze's terminology (and its deployment in contemporary work) can be alienating, his ideas have, for me, been incredibly productive. My favorite moments with his work are not when it seems to be offering us a new vocabulary for doing the same types of traditional close readings, but rather when, as with McLuhan's or McLeod's work, it presents a kind of schema for making things – for plugging into a set of ideas and rewiring them. In the C for "culture" section of L'Abécédaire, a series of interviews on topics from A to Z, Deleuze tells the story of how, after The Fold was released, he received two curious letters: one from an organization of origami artists, the other from surfers. Both claimed intimate knowledge of folding: "We understand, we completely agree," the surfers said, "because what do we do? We never stop inserting ourselves into the folds of nature."

Quoting Plato, he concludes in the clip above (which starts around 8:19) that philosophers are not writing about abstractions but about concrete things – things in the world, which we all engage with at some level. Gaffe/Stutter is my very small attempt to turn the product of reading – the digestion of knowledge – back into a process, materializing my path to understanding by making something.

Scattered fragments on crowds, equality

2013-10-04T16:48:00.000-04:00

The following are some dispersed reflections on three literary scenes that've been bouncing about my skull lately. This post is an attempt to verbalize their collisions.

I don't have an argument or an opinion. Proceed at your own risk.

* * *

Toward beginning of Book V of The Faerie Queene – the Book of Justice in Edmund Spenser's sprawling Renaissance epic – the knight Artegall encounters a giant high atop a hill, holding an enormous balance. A crowd has clustered "thicke" around him, as he threatens to "reduce vnto equality" all things, leveling mountains and raising valleys in the most biblical fashion.

The knight Artegall, ever about the status quo, is shocked and disturbed. "Thou that presum'st to weigh the world anew, / And all things to an equall to restore," he chides the giant, "In stead of right me seemes great wrong dost shew"; for of course God has already weighed out the world for us in its perfection. And who are we to want to change it? Stay the course; "heauenly justice" will reveal itself to us foolish mortals in due time.

In one gloriously communistic screed, the giant utterly refuses:

Thou foolishe Elfe (said then the Gyant wroth)
Seest not, how badly all things present bee,
And each estate quite out of order go'th?
The sea it selfe doest thou not plainely see
Encroch vppon the land there vnder thee;
And th'earth it selfe how daily its increast,
By all that dying to it turned be?
Were it not good that wrong were then surceast,
And from the most, that some were giuen to the least?

Therefore I will throw downe these mountaines hie,
And make them leuell with the lowly plaine:
These towring rocks, which reach vnto the skie,
I will thrust downe into the deepest maine,
And as they were, them equalize againe.
Tyrants that make men subiect to their law,
I will suppresse, that they no more may raine;
And Lordings curbe, that commons ouer-aw;
And all the wealth of rich men to the poore will draw.

This is a remarkable pair of stanzas. This won't end well for the giant, we know that much; he's too much of a threat to the political order of the poem. But Artegall tries to debate him nonetheless. "The hils doe not the lowly dales disdaine; / The dales doe not the lofty hils enuy," the knight reasons. God "maketh Kings to sit in souerainty; / He maketh subiects to their powre obay"; who is the giant to try to change natural hierarchies?

A literal weighing of words ensues, but it's too late for the giant. This isn't a war of words, but of wills – more specifically, of who gets the right to have a will. And with one swift shove, Talus, Artegall's iron killing robot, shoulders the giant off the mountain, breaking both his body and his balances. "So was the high aspyring," Spenser concludes, "with huge ruine humbled."

By all logic, the scene should end there. The threat is contained, political order is restored, Artegall and Talus can go on their merry way. But it doesn't. The crowd – that "vulgar" group that had "cluster[ed] thicke" about the giant "like foolish flies about an hony crocke" – revolts:

They gan to gather in tumultuous rout,
And mutining, to stirre vp ciuill faction,
For certaine losse of so great expectation.
For well they hoped to haue got great good,
And wondrous riches by his innouation.
Therefore resoluing to reuenge his blood,
They rose in armes, and all in battell order stood.

Not only do they revolt, but their willingness to stand up for the giant leaves Artegall at a loss. He's a noble knight; he can't fight a "lawless multitude." He sends Talus to inquire.

Which lawlesse multitude him comming too
In warlike wise, when Artegall did vew,
He much was troubled, ne wist what to doo.
For loth he was his noble hands t'embrew
In the base blood of such a rascall crew;
And otherwise, if that he should retire,
He fear'd least they with shame would him pursew.
Therefore he Talus to them sent, t'inquire
The cause of their array, and truce for to desire.

Of course, the killing machine Talus can only "inquire" with brute force. He swats the multitude away like flies:

But soone as they him nigh approching spide,
They gan with all their weapons him assay,
And rudely stroke at him on euery side:
Yet nought they could him hurt, ne ought dismay.
But when at them he with his flaile gan lay,
He like a swarme of flyes them ouerthrew;
Ne any of them durst come in his way,
But here and there before his presence flew,
And hid themselues in holes and bushes from his vew.

Toppling a singularly teetering mass of a giant is easy: one push, and he's over. Rooting out a scattered flock of discrete entities is infinitely harder, indeed nigh on impossible for a knight whose primary m.o. is brute force. Ultimately, the same politics that disdainfully reduces the crowd to a "rascall crew" and a "lawlesse multitude" endows it with its capacity to resist; for in a system that regulates through social hierarchy, there's an immense amount of power in anonymity. Which is to say: ballooning idealism destroys the giant, yes – but it also gives dispersed, unaffiliated peoples a reason to aggregate, to transform themselves into a pack, a "crew." When they return to a state of hidden dispersal at the end of the canto, it's as a newly configured multiplicity, held in relation to each other by the same idealism that destroyed the giant. The world of the poem – the ideas that fuel it – can't fully eradicate them, or contain the threat they present to a political system that turns out to be as dangerously unstable as the giant's idealism.

* * *

There's another scene I've been thinking about a lot lately, this one from D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love. When I first read this novel years ago, I loved it – I thought Lawrence created women characters with a subtly not often found in modernist novels. I've since re-read the book twice and, as so often happens, I think the younger me was clueless; there are few things I like now in any of Lawrence's women. The ones who aren't simpering fools use their own sexual self-importance to manipulate the idiot men who surround them. But, that aside, my copy still holds a paper clip on a page from the chapter "Breadalby," in which a few characters are having a debate about equality.

"If," said Hermione at last, "we could only realise that in the spirit we are all one, all equal in the spirit, all brothers there – the rest wouldn't matter, there would be no more of this carping and envy and this struggle for power, which destroys, only destroys."

After a brief but awkward silence, Birkin, who has a history with Hermione, refutes her brutally:

"It is just the opposite, just the contrary, Hermione. We are all different and unequal in spirit – it is only the social differences that are based on accidental material conditions. We are all abstractly or mathematically equal, if you like. Every man has hunger and thirst, two eyes, one nose and two legs. We're all the same in point of number. But spiritually, there is pure difference and neither equality nor inequality counts. It is upon these two bits of knowledge that you must found a state. Your democracy is an absolute lie – your brotherhood of man is a pure falsity, if you apply it further than the mathematical abstraction. We all drank milk first, we all eat bread and meat, we all want to ride in motor-cars – therein lies the beginning and the end of the brotherhood of man. But no equality.

"But I, myself, who am myself, what have I to do with equality with any other man or woman? In the spirit, I am as separate as one star is from another, as different in quality and quantity. Establish a state on that. One man isn't any better than another, not because they are equal, but because they are intrinsically other, that there is no term of comparison. The minute you begin to compare, one man is seen to be far better than another, all the inequality you can imagine is there by nature. I want every man to have his share in the world's goods, so that I am rid of his importunity, so that I can tell him: 'Now you've got what you want – you've got your fair share of the world's gear. Now, you one-mouthed fool, mind yourself and don't obstruct me.'"

Here, Birkin seems to accuse Hermione of the same mistaken notion of "equality" that gets the leveller giant shouldered off a cliff: namely, she thinks equality is fundamentally quantitative, a matter of balancing the books. But leveling mountains and raising valleys and even distributing wealth doesn't make us "equal," Birkin argues, at least not in any meaningful sense of the word. In fact, over-emphasizing our quantitative differences oddly short-circuits the narrative of "equality" for Birkin, since it is precisely our otherness from each other that forces us to recognize our "spiritual equality," which is in fact a space of "pure difference" devoid even of the concept of equality.

When we talk about "access" or "transparency" or "building community" in projects of all sorts, I sometimes think about Birkin. Providing all individuals a point of entry – whether through a book, a website, a public meeting, a petition, whatever – is a form of mathematical equality; it doesn't get us to the kind of social connections, human connections, that enable us to look at each other as meaningful because of the insuperable inequality of our various positions. Not only does it not get us there, it isn't even – for Birkin, at least – a step in the right direction. It's a distraction.

* * *

Still, there's that balance-wielding giant. Were it not good that wrong were then surceast, / And from the most, that some were giuen to the least?

It's hard to argue with a question like that, as Artegall found out. It's a question that anticipates the objections of the Birkins of the world, the knights who've got theirs, so what matter the multitude's disenfranchisement? "Heauenly justice" will prevail. The giant himself can't survive – his idealism is quite literally too big for its own good – but, as the multitude's dispersal shows, he can't quite be destroyed, either. In the nameless figures who "hid[e] themselues in holes and bushes," away from the gaze of Talus, his utter rejection of all but the most equivalent of communisms persists, anachronistically taunting Birkin: your "spiritual equality" is only as good as the material inequalities that continue to render it worthless.

* * *

Sometime in July 1648, at the height of what would become known as the Second English Civil War, an anonymous pamphlet entitled The Faerie Leveller began circulating in London. In it, the editor reprints the egalitarian giant episode of The Faerie Queene, prefaced with instructions on how to read Spenser's verse – originally published in 1590 – not only as "altogether Allegoricall," but as foretelling (and perhaps even enacting) future royalist victories over the Levellers.

In other words, the egalitarian giant's communistic screed was reprinted as Royalist propaganda against the a mid-seventeenth century communistic movement that rebelled against the enclosing of the commons. The pamphlet was then circulated as evidence of idealism's false hope. You can try to push mountains all day, it taunts, but the knight always wins.

"They [the Levellers] were discryed long agoe in Queene Elizabeths dayes," the pamphlet notes, "and then graphically described by the Prince of English Poets Edmund Spenser, whose verses then propheticall are now become historicall in our dayes." To prove Spenser's prophecy becomes history, the editor provides a "key" for interpreting the work, casting King Charles as Artegall, the King's forces (or Gregory the Executioner) as Talus, and of course Oliver Cromwell as the giant. Rather than foreclosing possible interpretations, this historical framing tries to elucidate the correct one for its own particular moment, thereby helping in "the undeceiving of simple people, too apt to be induced into an high conceipt and overweening opinion of such Deceivers [the Levellers], and too ready to be seduced by their specious pretences of reducing all to a just equality." Anagrammatic rearrangements of titles – "Oliver Cromwell" as Com' our vil' Leveller; "Parliaments Army" as Paritie mar's al men – participate in this "undeceiving" by revealing the enemy's "true" nature.

By crystallizing the open emblems of Spenser's late-sixteenth-century verse into historically-specific figures, The Faerie Leveller brings the hidden meaning of its source text forth into its own present, even as it calls upon that present – composed of individual readers, embroiled in a war whose chances looked increasingly grim for the royalist cause – to reenact the "propheticall" narratives of England's past.

* * *

Leveling at its maximum is like the stillness of death, where one can hear one's own heartbeat, a stillness like death, into which nothing can penetrate, in which everything sinks, powerless. One person can head a rebellion, but one person cannot head this leveling process, for that would make him a leader and he would avoid being leveled. Each individual can in his little circle participate in this leveling, but it is an abstract process, and leveling is abstraction conquering individuality.

// Søren Kierkegaard

* * *

There's another literary crowd that's been lurking on the edges of my mind lately: the eerie group of crash-gawkers in Ray Bradbury's "The Crowd." The first to the scene of every car accident, they hover around the victim, crowding him, "sucking and sucking on the air a man needs to live by":

They crowded and jostled and sucked and sucked all the air up from around his gasping face until he tried to tell them to move back, they were making him live in a vacuum. ... It was all a very silly, mad plot. Like every accident. He squealed hysterically at the solid wall of faces. They were all around him, these judges and jurors with the faces he had seen before. Through his pain he counted their faces.

If violence scatters the Faerie Queene's lawless multitude, here it pulls the crowd together like a magnet, drawing dispersed individuals into a tight and eerily threatening knot. It's a strange kind of torture they enact; for, although they aren't responsible for the accident itself, they seem to enable the victim's death by moving his or her body, sucking up all the air with their incessant, prodding opinions. "That crowd always came so fast, so strangely fast," the narrator notes, "to form a circle, to peer down, to probe, to gawk, to question, to point, to disturb, to spoil the privacy of a man's agony by their frank curiosity."

We later learn the recurrent members of the crowd are all dead people who were killed in accidents themselves. It's a detail I wish Bradbury had left for the imagination, as it makes the crowd too explicable, too knowable as ghosts or spirits or posthumous entities; when the thing that attracts me to the image of the crowd is its unknowability, and the power that gives it. If we re-think the crowd as an assemblage of anonymous entities that cluster around an accident, we discover the violent side of the crowd: it gobbles you up like the Blob, replacing individual vitality with the zombie-like death of being a member of a pack. We also discover a bridge between the end of the egalitarian giant episode and Birkin's rant; for Bradbury's crowd seeks the ultimate form of equality – death, the state that levels us all to extreme and profound material sameness.

"And that's the way it's been since time began, when crowds gather. You murder much easier, this way. Your alibi is very simple; you didn't know it was dangerous to move a hurt man. You didn't mean to hurt him."

A Gentle Critique of DHthis

2013-09-10T11:32:00.003-04:00

On the roll-out of DHthis, a new crowdsourced publishing platform based on the Slashdot model:

1) The conversation about developing a kind of Slashdot for digital humanities went on in "public" spaces, i.e. web-based spaces accessible to anyone with a computer and a connection -- Twitter, comments on blogs. Many people participated in these conversations. Yet five individuals decided to take it upon themselves to develop the idea more or less behind closed doors, without consulting others involved in the initial conversation (except, as I understand it, the original JDH authors, who were asked to beta test the site). The project was then rolled out with the kind of suspense-building secret hashtags used by the likes of Apple and Microsoft. Is this our definition of "open" in digital humanities?

2) DHthis claims to be the "first entirely crowdsourced outlet for digital humanities" -- yet the tabs at the top ("Gender," "Humor," "CFPs," etc.) are static. Who's being left out of this conversation?

3) Relatedly, "DHpoco" is one of the tabs at the top. Given that the five people who developed this site are all involved in DHpoco, this strikes me as blatant kingdom-building. Again, I ask: who's being left out of this conversation? Who isn't let behind those closed doors?

...now, to be painfully clear, I'm being sarcastic in tone, intentionally so. I've stayed silent during the recent DH spats online, because they always seem to be just that -- spats, petty quarrels that ironically end up promoting division in the name of community building. The important parts of the conversation cut across tedious debates about "who's in" and "who's out."

So, first, I wanted to use this post to draw attention to the ways we talk to each other -- how we toss around our accusations, and what warrants kneejerk suspicion.

But, that being said, I do think DHthis is a step backward in an important conversation. It's worth taking a non-sarcastic look at why:

1) The roll-out appeared self-promoting, in a way that put individuals over a collective.

2) The design of the site seems to lay stakes in the territory debates, rather than lifting them.

3) But, more generally -- and far, far more importantly -- the problem that Adeline and Roopika originally identified in JDH was its self-presentation as "experimental," and the problems of transparency (or lack thereof) that arise therein. While I gently disagree with how that critique was couched, this ultimately was a gift to our online community, as it started a rich conversation about what constitutes openness -- a concept that everyone seemed to agree needs problematizing in DH. David Golumbia challenged the rampant buzzwordism built into "experimental" journals. Natalia Cecire and Michelle Moravec pointed out the problems inherent in the ostensibly positive concept of "flexibility." Josh Honn -- who has been immensely helpful to me in thinking through these issues, myself -- linked to an interesting article critiquing the concept of "openness. Collective soul-searching about how we want to publish as a community ensued. In fact, it continues in Ernesto Priego's post this morning.

DHthis -- a platform thrust into the world as a solution to the problems of gatekeeping, with little critical sense of how vote-based crowdsourcing actually tends to amplify the problems of minority voices getting lost in the shouting -- seems to be a step backward, both in the pace of the discussion and in terms of identifying tangible solutions.

There is so so so much more to be said about this. I want to be clear that don't ascribe ill intentions to the designers -- not at all. I just don't want the important, ongoing conversation about 'transparency', a conversation whose pace is necessarily slow, to get lost in a tool roll-out.

Chromoxylographic Coding

2013-08-26T11:55:00.001-04:00

While taking Terry Belanger's course on book illustration processes at the Rare Book School this summer, I became enchanted with chromoxylography: the printing process in which a color image is built up from the successive printing of multiple woodblocks, each responsible for a single color. Not only are color wood engravings beautiful but -- as I discuss a bit below -- the process of making them strikes me as a wonderful metaphor for how we code.

So what are chromoxylographs? Although you can find examples of color woodcuts or wood engravings in many centuries, the form peaked in the nineteenth-century as a relatively cost-effective way of reproducing high-volume yet beautifully detailed color illustrations, especially within the burgeoning market for children's literature. The work of Edmund Evans -- who engraved the drawings of Kate Greenaway, Randolph Caldecott, Walter Crane and others -- is particularly spectacular.

[Walter Crane, The Baby's Bouquet [1879]. Engravings by Edmund Evans. A scan of every opening is available here and through Project Gutenberg.]

(Sidenote: Evans wrote an autobiography, published by Clarendon Press in 1967 as The

Reminiscences of Edmund Evans. Although Oxford's editor laments the lack of historical information in his otherwise "rambling" prose, the book is full of charming tales of Evans as a young apprentice in the printing industry -- how he once ran some illustration proofs to a somber Dickens, sitting alone in his darkened house; how Thackeray was an asshole to him (Evans hoped to meet the esteemed author in heaven, so he could ask him why he'd been such a jerk); his musings about how excited he was to meet angels, so they could tell him what it was like to live in pre-Christian Rome, and what the heck electricity is. He thought Darwin's theory of evolution was God's gift to England; and he may or may not have been crushing on Kate Greenaway. Rambling or not, it's an informative and delightful short read.)

Its hard for us, accustomed to high-definition of digital photography and today's color screens, to wrap our minds around the difficulty of reproducing a tonal image. I've found it helps to imagine printing as a kind of binary system: either the page is inked, or it isn't. There's no such thing as "gray" when you're printing black on white, only the appearance of gray produced through crosshatching, or with more subtlety through later processes like aquatint etching. So if you want to print a color image, you have to either print every single color separately -- not a very economical choice; beautiful chromolithographs of this sort often went through the press dozens of times -- or devise a way to create the appearance of multiple shades from a few basic colors. This latter method points toward chromoxylography.

So what is the process of producing a color wood engraving? First, the engraver would cut the basic outline of an illustration into the endgrain of a block of wood. This is the key block, responsible for the black (or brown) outline of the image. Then the engraver would pull a proof of this block and send it to the illustrator to be colored by hand. This hand-colored proof becomes the basis for designing and cutting each block of color. Thus a basic outline -- a sense of the entirety of the image, both in shape and color -- must be in place before the engraver translates the polychromatic (analog) painting into a series of single-color (binary) blocks. Once you have your set of blocks, they can be reproduced as metal stereotypes, which would last through many tens of thousands of printings.

[This is a close-up of the bannister in the illustration shown above. Although the image quality is pretty poor, you can make out 4 colors: red, yellow, blue and black (the key block). The different greens are produced from blue and yellow. There's a better quality reproduction of this image in the color plates of Bamber Gascoigne's How to Identify Prints; here, I've reproduced his example by taking a picture of my own copy of The Baby's Bouquet.]

Note that, as a process for reproducing color, this is really not much different from the additive RGB system used in most modern screens. No doubt many interesting things could be said on the relationship between the two, if I knew more about the development of RGB and the 8-bit color system (anyone want to collaborate on an essay?). For now, it's sufficient to note that most of the color we see in reproductive media (in Benjamin's sense of "reproduction") is an illusion produced by combining lots of discrete units of a very limited palette.

[A nice example of color wood engraving. You can see many more lovely examples here.

Aside from the inherent interest of chromoxylography, it strikes me as a concise metaphor for how we code -- especially how we code for web applications. When we want to make a website do something, we start with an illustration, a vision -- in my case, this is usually a sketch drawn in a book I keep for storyboarding ideas.

Then, sitting at my computer with my sketchbook open beside me, I produce a kind of "key block" outlining the basic elements of the site and their functionality in relation to each other. Usually this takes the form of some very basic JavaScript or jQuery attached to blank blocks with bright background colors. Like the printed key block proof, this proof-of-concept draft enables me to begin imagining how to translate my notebook sketch -- a document not constrained by my actual programming skills -- into the limited set of actions available in a given programming (or mark-up) language.

This process of translation is really where the metaphor begins to make sense; for programming is an exercise in magic through constraint. As with chromoxylography, there's something distinctly beautiful in the efficiency of programming -- something that makes the object produced under limitations more curious than the illustration it aims to reproduce. I marvel at how an engraver mentally juggled his knowledge of color and shape -- the interactions of blue and yellow under varying line widths -- in order to produce a delicate, shifting green, in the same way that Donald Knuth, in his famous defense of code as art, marvels at the little bits of trickery discovered in another's source code. Being an expert wood engraver and being a decent programmer both require one to hold continually in mind the Big Picture -- and to do so while seeing that Big Picture as the sum of all its many tiny interlocking parts. It's being able to zoom in and out without changing focus or losing your place in a massive puzzle.

I've been thinking about this metaphor -- chromoxylographic coding, coded chromoxyolography -- as I finish putting together my syllabus for a (creative) writing class I'm teaching on Digital Narratives. The course starts with each student writing a short story, fiction or nonfiction. Then, over the course of a dozen or so weeks, we rewrite our narratives in seven different media: print (i.e. a designed object for print), hypertext, sound, image, game, unfolding in time (a Twitter drama, a blog novel, netprov), and unfolding in space (ARGs, mobile narratives). Each rewriting, or remediation, will be fairly self-contained: our hypertext versions won't use sound or image; our sonic iterations won't have accompanying text. The point is to test the same basic narrative under a variety of fairly strict conditions, seeing what works with what narrative structure, what doesn't, and generally pushing the limits of narration itself.

About halfway through designing the course, it struck me that we're using a type of chromoxylographic process: our initial stories are our key blocks, while each remediation shows the same narrative in a single color. Alone, each color block might only faintly hint at the story of the key block; the final project -- in which students can combine different forms -- then brings all these single color blocks together into a multimedia story. Thus the success of our digital storytelling depends on how well we learn to blend different lines of color, mixing sound with image, the interactivity of clicking with the ludic nature of play. While this stripped-down iterative approach leaves the process of producing actual multimedia narratives until the end of the course, I'm hoping that testing each form under strict conditions will lead to a tighter, more purposeful use of digital media in the final projects.

Prints & Needlework (I): Embroidered Portraits

2013-08-06T11:43:00.000-04:00

The wonderful Vim Pasupathi recently posted on Twitter a photo of a lovely little embroidered portrait, held at UCLA's Clark Library:

[Embroidered portrait at UCLA's Clark Library. Image taken by Vim Pasupathi and used with permission.]

The Clark's catalog identifies this man as the Thomas Dekker.* Not that cute kid on all those 90s TV shows, but the early modern dramatist.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say this is definitely not Thomas Dekker. For one, this man seems to be clothed in ermine, possibly some kind of parliamentary robe. Second, he's standing in front of a lavish manor house -- not an uncommon thing for the owner of such an estate to have painted behind his shoulder, but surely an odd choice for a probably low-born playwright. I'm guessing if we identified the house or the plant behind him (any thoughts?), we'd have a shot at identifying the man. Barring that, or a deeper investigation into provenance (maybe there's another Thomas Dekker?), the best we can do is say that this embroidered portrait seems to depict a late-seventeenth-century member of the nobility who wanted to be remembered for his lavish home, long locks and (the laurels indicate) his poetry.

Vim's intriguing find has spurred me to do something I've wanted to do for months: begin posting some of my in-progress research on the relationship between prints and textiles in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Although there are many wonderful books on early modern textiles, and many more on that thing we lumpishly call "print culture," the rich connections between prints and needlework are sorely understudied. What work has been done tends to examine them only in triangulation with some third factor (gender, literature), giving a somewhat skewed perspective as to the depth and variety of needlework extant from the period.**

So: what's up with embroidered portraits?

To answer that, I have to tell you a story.

A few summers ago, driving back from the Northeast, I decided to take a detour off I-95 to visit Agecroft Hall. For those who don't know -- which in my experience is, surprisingly, just about every scholar I mention it to -- Agecroft Hall is a Tudor manor house located outside Richmond, Virginia. Not a replica of a Tudor manor house, an actual Tudor manor house. It was bought at auction for $19,000 in 1925 by an Anglophile tobacco heir, Mr. Thomas C. Wiilliams, who then had the decrepit structure disassembled beam by beam, crated across the Atlantic, and reassembled outside Richmond, where it was to be the storied centerpiece of a planned housing development that Mr. Williams wanted to build on his family's farm. Think neo-feudal suburban chic for the upwardly mobile.

Sadly, Mr. Williams died before he could fully enjoy his (new?) home, and the estate stands now as a museum, complete with a Tudor knot garden and a variety of period furniture, including a lovely painted bed and a tapestry from Mortlake. If you're interested, Bob Vila can tell you all about it.

[Agecroft Hall, in Richmond, VA.]

I visited on a hot August day, with the temperatures soaring over 100F. The only people there, besides me, were a wilted family of four, alternately confused and bored, and our tour guide, a lovely elderly woman with a fan's enthusiasm for all things Elizabethan. As she led us up the carved staircase (imported from Warwick Priory), she pointed to a small case along the hallway. In it was this gem -- an embroidered portrait of Charles I:

[Embroidered portrait of Charles I, currently held at Agecroft Hall]

Although its hard to tell from this digital image (a scan of a postcard), the work is extraordinarily fine -- not at all like the more cartoonish embroidery of "Dekker." Whereas our "Dekker" seems to be the product of an amateur needleworker, this portrait of Charles I was most likely produced, and reproduced, in a professional workshop. In fact, the Met holds a very similar copy:

[Embroidered portrait of Charles I, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.]

You can see how detailed the stitching is in the Met's high-res image (for more close-ups, visit the Met's page):

[From the Met.]

This image of Charles will be familiar to friends of the seventeenth century. Reproduced from a 1632 royal family portrait by van Dyck, it was widely disseminated in print through Wenceslas Hollar's engraving, which became the frontispiece for the Reliquiae Sacrae Carolinae after the King's execution.

Rebecca Hackett has a great discussion of these two embroidered portraits and their relationship to the cult of the Martyr King. Circulated as miniatures to be hung in cabinets or on walls, these portraits served as displays of loyalty among exiled royalists -- signs of one's allegiance to the unjustly executed monarch. Of course, a print could (and did) just as easily serve that purpose. So why do we find so many embroidered portraits of the King?

To answer that question gets at the uniqueness and interest of embroidery as a medium for portraiture in the early modern period. In an age that lacked (for all intents and purposes) color printing, needlework in silk or wool offered up richly colorful reproductions, cheaper than a van Dyck but more delicately textured than a black-and-white print. As this frontispiece shows (from a copy of the Eikon Basilike at the Beinecke), readers might paste or sew fabric over an image to make it more colorful or special; here, someone has used scraps of purple and white satin to "dress" the king with color:

[Copy of Eikon Basilike at the Beinecke Library.]

Moreover, unlike ink and paper, embroidered portraits could be wrought in a variety of materials that related to the subject. A number of extant needlework portraits of the Martyr King claim to have been worked in Charles' own hair --

-- thereby linking his reproduced face to his actual body: to own a portrait of the King was, in a sense, to own a bit of the King himself. Other embroidered portraits might incorporate actual jewels into the subject's costume, as in this beautiful miniature of Queen Elizabeth I, wrought with gold and silver thread and embellished with pearls:

[I'm grabbing this image from here. It was sold at Sotheby's in April 2004 for $153,600 but I'm not sure where it went.]

Her face and hands are bits of painted vellum -- skin for skin.

The wide range of colors and textures available in silk, as well as the relative durability of sewn thread over blobs of paint, seems to have made embroidered portraits an especially attractive embellishment for books, and many extant examples are found on bookbindings. This copy of Francis Bacon's Essays (1625, now at the Bodleian) is worked with a portrait of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, copied from an engraving by Simon de Passe. As this edition is dedicated to the Duke, the portrait brings the book's inner order to its outer cover, acting as both a visual index of the book's contents and an authoritative stamp of approval: Villiers watches over the book. (I believe this was a presentation copy -- so in fact Villiers is watching over himself watching over the book dedicated to him.)

[Embroidered binding on a copy of Francis Bacon's Essays (1625), at the Bodleian.]

So common are portraits on embroidered bookbindings that Cyril Davenport counts them as one of the three main categories of needlework bindings in his classic study of the subject. Here's a post-Restoration example (also from the Bodleian) of a Bible covered with an embroidered portrait of Charles II. Catherine of Braganza is depicted on the back.

[Embroidered binding on a copy of the Bible. Late 17th-century; now at the Bodleian.]

Of course, once a portrait was worked on a book cover, it might easily be cut out and reused on valances or cushions -- or images from other textiles might be remade into book covers. This charming portrait from a seventeenth-century cushion is framed in a mirror, as if the cushion's owner is staring at a reflection of himself.

[From a 17th-century cushion in the Elizabeth Day McCormick Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Image from Artstor.]

Though hardly as delicate as the Charles I portrait now at Agecroft, you can see how the medium lends itself to a certain tactility not available in print. I would love to see this in person; no doubt the spangles glimmer in the the light.

Yet, even though embroidery offered what print lacks, both forms were crucially linked in the early modern period. The thing we call "print culture," especially the availability of high-quality engravings, made these kinds of embroidery possible for a wider audience of amateur needleworkers, just as the demands of needleworkers critically shaped what "print culture" was -- the kinds of images that were printed, how and where they were sold -- in the latter half of the seventeenth-century. In fact, I've come to think that, in a very real sense, we can't understand book use in early modern England without knowing a little something about needlework, too.

After all, books are sewn objects.

* * *

Coda

As I was finishing up this post, echoes of earlier selves began to haunt me. I remembered the work of Jenny Hart, an embroidery artist who specializes in whimsical portraits -- portraits that look very much like our lop-eyed "Dekker" above -- and the interview I conducted with her as an assignment during my master's program. (My professor, Henry Jenkins, later posted the interview on his blog.) I loved embroidery before I became an early modernist -- I was convinced we should read needlework as a medium, although I didn't know what that meant yet (still don't; but we forge ahead) -- and, at the time, I was still myself an amateur needleworker. As a teenager, I had embroidered Leibniz onto a skirt (which I still love and wear -- it's held up well over the years!) --

-- and I later reproduced one of my favorite photographs of Louie Armstrong belting out a note on a red polyester skirt. (I recently dragged this out of the back of my closet to wear during my talk on sound with my jazz historian colleague Darren Mueller at the Digital Humanities 2013 conference; it seemed perfect for the occasion!)

Definitely the work of an amateur. But, there you are: needlework portraits, reproduced from prints. How did I get (back) here? Like a Tudor manor house absurdly dropped into the middle of Virginia, my past refuses to quietly fall into disrepair; it insists on being rebuilt one beam at a time, same same but different. I cringe a bit, sharing this with you. Especially that interview. But -- maybe -- this act of sharing will lead to a purge. Maybe after this, personal history will disappear, and my brain cells will be free to study whatever they want! Quantam mechanics! City planning! The ancient Egyptians! The world will be wide open!

..... more likely, I'll just keep trying to make embroidery relevant to everything else I study. Whether pulped for paper or burned for firewood, the panels of Agecroft Hall can never not be the wood of a Tudor manor house.

* I've only seen the short online entry. Its likely some catalog card or curator at the Clark could shed more light on why this was once identified as Dekker, and who it might actually be.
** If you find any the posts in this series useful to your own research, that's awesome. Please get in touch. I simply ask that you cite the post in anything you publish on that topic. Although I'm mostly posting images of cool things I've found, it's still the case that what you're reading is not the result of 5 minutes of wikipedia-ing but is based on many, many hours (days, weeks, months) of reading, studying, emailing and poking around libraries and special collections.

Artifactual Hardware

2013-05-08T20:44:00.002-04:00

What I am advancing is a media-critical antiquarianism. There has always been a double bind in antiquarian data processing between distance and empathy, resulting from the gap between the physical presence and the discursive absence of the past. Antiquarians have tried to bridge this gap by touching and tasting the immediate, material object. For antiquarians, history is not just text but the materialist emancipation of the object from an exclusive subjection to textual analysis. Antiquarianism acknowledges the past as artifactual hardware, so to speak, upon which historical discourse operates like a form of software. In a digital culture of apparent, virtual, immaterial realities, a reminder of the insistence and resistance of material worlds is indispensable, and all the more so from a media-theoretical point of view. Far from being an imperfect approximation to historical discourse, the antiquarian attitude deserves to be treated on its own terms. The antiquarian's almost haptic taste for the moldy, decaying fragment (mummies, parchments, remnants of bodies and objects) is close to physical data processing: according to André Bazin, the real (le réel) of the photographic image resides with the corpse. If we redeploy the analytical tools developed by the so-called 'new historicism' in literary studies from textual analysis to material cultural studies, we find not merely archival data on history (the symbolic regime of the archive, the scriptural regime of sources for historians) but also -- as opposed to the textuality of (narrative) history -- the otherness (even resistance to interpretation) of the material fragment, the relic.

// Wolfgang Ernst, in Digital Memory and the Archive, 43-44 (edited by Jussi Parikka)

Interleaving History: an Illustrated Book of Common Prayer

2013-04-19T13:17:00.002-04:00

[The following is cross-posted from the Folger Shakespeare Library's blog, The Collation. Thanks to Sarah Werner for including it, and for her help with formatting. If you'd like to leave a comment, please do so at the original post.]

In Henry Fielding’s novel Tom Jones, Partridge and his friends go to see a play. As they watch a man light the upper candles of the playhouse, the predictably inane Partridge cries out, “Look, look, madam, the very picture of the man in the end of the common-prayer book before the gunpowder treason service!”

The picture Partridge refers to is most likely this—

—a widely circulated and often reproduced image of Guy Fawkes sneaking toward the House of Lords, matches and lantern in hand. (Click on any of the images in this post to enlarge them in Luna.) It’s easy to read Partridge’s bumbling analogy as a comedic misinterpretation of the seriousness of the Gunpowder Plot—after all, he seems to see no difference between a flame intended to ignite barrels of gunpowder and one used to light candles in a playhouse (!). There’s a second level to his comedy, though, lost to most modern readers: namely, that by the eighteenth century this iconic depiction of Fawkes simply was as common as lit chandeliers. Found interleaved in many (if not most) extant post-1662 copies of the Book of Common Prayer, this image, along with another showing Charles I’s execution and a third celebrating Charles II’s return, iconically punctuated the state services added to the end of the restored Prayer Book.

While the Folger holds many fine examples of extra-illustrated Prayer Books, I’ve been researching a copy that makes particularly interesting use of the practice of interleaving liturgical texts with images. Like many others compiled in the seventeenth century, this Prayer Book is bound within a collected volume that includes several religious texts, including a Bible, a copy of Sternhold and Hopkins’ Psalms, an Apocrypha, John Speed’s genealogical tables, and John Downame’s concordance. Unlike other composite volumes, however, this book—really, an aggregate of multiple printed books bound together—is heavily interleaved with loose prints, diagrams, maps, illustrations extracted from other texts, contemporaneous portraits of religious and political figures, even an elaborate (and as-yet unidentified) manuscript monogram. In fact, most of the leaves of the Bible in this copy have been removed and replaced with images culled from different sources, including William Slatyer’s illustrations of Genesis (a set of 40 plates published in the 1660s) and an unidentified German book, possibly some form of illustrated Bible that includes scriptural passages in both German and Latin. In short, the owner(s) of this volume went far beyond the standard practice of interleaving one’s Prayer Book with a few ready-made prints of Guy Fawkes!

In the process of weaving together these materials, the books owner(s) tended to recode textual information as visual iconography, and they did so in a way that narrated scripture and liturgy through seventeenth-century political history. A perfect example of this can be seen in a string of pages at the end of the Book of Common Prayer. Pasted on a blank leaf, interleaved after the prayer “After Victory or Deliverance from an Enemy,” is an illustration of the Battle of Downs, at which the Dutch navy defeated the Spanish in the English Channel:

Pasted on the verso is a thanksgiving prayer describing England’s second deliverance from the Spanish Armada.

(I haven’t yet attempted to source this, though text and image seem to be from the same book; if you know what it is, please leave a message in the comments!) Appropriately enough, this entire sequence comes at the end of the section on prayers to be used at sea. The inclusion here is unusual; perhaps the family that composed the book was involved in the Battle at Downs or was particularly invested in naval politics, a hypothesis supported by the inclusion of interleaved maps elsewhere in the book.The Prayer Book continues with a thanksgiving for deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, illustrated with the typical engraving mentioned above, followed by the prayer to be said on the day of Charles I’s martyrdom. Rather than using the standard martyr illustration, however, the owners have interleaved an image of Charles I seated in front of a globe, a pen poised in his hand over Scotland.

This engraving, by Marshall, is very similar to the same artist’s frontispiece to Reliquae Sacrae Carolinae, the collection of Charles I’s writings published immediately after his death. Next is interleaved a copy of Marshall’s famous frontispiece to the Eikon Basilike—

—followed finally by the more standard engraving of Charles I’s execution, captioned with scripture.

The entire sequence ends with the prayer commemorating the Restoration, accompanied by a regal portrait of a crowned King Charles II.

Far from simply inserting the usual imagery, the book’s owner(s) creatively use a variety of illustrations to narrate the collection of state services at the end of the Prayer Book as the story of Charles I’s martyrdom. Thus the Battle of the Downs—at the time, considered a political embarrassment for Charles—becomes a victorious “deliverance” equivalent with Elizabeth’s 1588 defeat of the Armada, while his execution becomes merely the full stop on a royal life that was always already martyred to the English church. Since some of the printed editions included in this composite book seem to predate Charles I’s execution, the positioning of images within the text, as well as the book’s remixing of pre- and post-execution materials, serves to renarrate and thereby restore Stuart religious politics.

I first came to this fascinating book through my research on the Little Gidding Harmonies, a set of cut-and-paste biblical concordances produced in the 1630s and 1640s at the religious community of Little Gidding. While I don’t have space to get into the connections between these books, it’s worth noting that both the Harmonies and the Folger’s volume share an interest in absorbing other printed materials—books, pamphlets, engravings—into their physical framework. The owner(s) of the Folger volume were careful to make their collection appear to be a unified single volume, going so far as to extend the margins of the Psalter and the German illustrations with pasted strips of paper in order to match the page width of the rest of the book. Prints that aren’t large enough to be interleaved are carefully cut out and pasted onto fresh paper, and each page is visually framed with red ink lines. Like the Little Gidding Harmonies, this book is invested in disguising its multiple origins, even as it trades on the excess signifying power of, for instance, the Marshall engravings it recycles.

If (returning to Tom Jones) Partridge’s offhand remark satirizes how common images of the Gunpowder Plot had become, then the volume at the Folger indicates how uncommonly such images could be used. Through a highly material process of cut-and-paste composition, the owners of this book transformed a set of mass-reproduced religious texts into a wholly new document that uniquely reflects—or perhaps carefully projects—their political and religious affiliations.

FAQs on the Little Gidding Harmonies

2013-03-14T20:03:00.000-04:00

As was announced last week on the Houghton Library's blog, the Houghton's Little Gidding Harmony has been digitized. It was done with money I was granted by the Episcopal Women's History Project for the express purpose of producing a high-resolution electronic facsimile of this very special book. I'll be using these images in a digital project I'm working on about Little Gidding.

That digital project will be part of my dissertation, which is on the Harmonies -- specifically, on the cut-and-paste construction of these books as a form of early modern female authorship. Broadly construed, my work situates the Harmonies within the ever-growing canon of early modern women's writing and media production, both text and textile. Given my interest in Little Gidding, and my occasional blogging about it, I have, since Houghton's announcement, received quite a few emails and tweets about the Harmonies. I'm delighted to see interest in these unique books, and decided to write up answers to a few frequent questions I get about them. Feel free to ask me any additional questions in the comments.

Uhm.. what? These are "cut-up" books? Like, Burroughs? What does that mean?

Right; I should probably start with the basics. Little Gidding was an Anglican community that flourished in Huntingdonshire in the 1630s and 1640s. It was started by Mary Ferrar and her son Nicholas Ferrar. Nicholas was a former Member of Parliament and had been involved in the debacles of the Virginia Company during the 1620s. Disillusioned, he and his aging mother bought a dilapidated manor house in Huntingdonshire in 1625, where they, along with their extended family, lived a simple yet highly regimented life of prayer and devotion.

Sometime toward the end of the 1620s, the family began making Gospel Harmonies. They did this by cutting apart the gospel accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in printed editions of the Bible, then pasting them back together into 150 chapters that tell the story of Christ's life in chronological sequence. In other words, they are remixing four separate accounts of the same events into a single linear narrative. Later Gospel Harmonies deal with the great variance found across these four books by using different typefaces and colored inks to construct multiple reading pathways through these 150 chapters; but the Houghton Harmony, which is the earliest known, does not. All the books cut their source texts at a level of great detail, chopping apart phrases, even words. Thus they were not remixing entire pages of text at Little Gidding, but small units of textual information. However, they remained fairly faithful to the verse sequencing that has structured English Bibles since the publication of the first Geneva Bible of 1560.

Many of the Harmonies are illustrated, mostly from Netherlandish/Flemish engravings (or English copies of them). Some of these illustrations are simple, and take the form of cutting off the caption and pasting it and the image separately on the page --

-- others are highly complex collages of multiple figures carefully cut from their original context.

[These two images are not from a Gospel Harmony, but a kind of illustrated, harmonized concordance of the five books of Moses in the Old Testament, produced in 1640 after Nicholas Ferrar's death. This book was presumably owned by Archbishop Laud, and bequeathed to St. John's College, Oxford, upon his death, where it remains today. These photographs are my own.]

However, complex collage techniques were already present in the Houghton volume. In what acts as a kind of title page for the Houghton Harmony (interesting aside: later, the Harmonies develop actual manuscript title pages, designed to mimic the appearance of a printed title page), the women have cut apart the title page of Adriaen Collaert's Vita, Passio et Resurrectio Iesu Christi (Antwerp, ca. 1600) -- a set of 51 engravings after Maerten de Vos, the primary source of visual content in this Harmony:

The book's actual title has been extracted, and a Christ figure has been added from another engraving. Two other figures beside Christ have been cut from their original context, with text pasted between them and where they "should" go in the uncut print. Though far simpler than later collages found in the Harmonies, this attentiveness to design and the general relationship between figures and their own symbolism shows that this volume was far from a simple book used for public readings. Rather, composing it was part of a broader devotional practice that enacted spiritual relationships through actions like cutting and pasting. In other words, the process of making these books, of adorning them, was as important as the product of the adorned book.

Why did they make these strange books?

There is of course a long tradition of harmonizing the gospels, or producing concordances of scripture. Joyce Ransome has recently argued that the Ferrars may have initially made their own cut-and-paste book with the goal of sending this "dummy" manuscript to a printer, to be typeset and published as just such a concordance; but they were pre-empted by the publication of Johan Hiud's The Storie of Stories (1632). Ransome's argument is tempting, and is backed up by evidence within Ferrar's correspondence.

Regardless of whether the community wanted to publish their books in print form, though, the desire for a chronology of Christ's life, divided into 150 chapters, emerged from the community's reading practice. Passages from the New Testament were read aloud daily, with the goal of completing all four gospels over the cycle of one month. The entire psalter was also divided into chunks and read aloud daily, over the course of various set reading times. The Ferrars needed books that facilitated these communal reading practices -- books that were composed entirely from scripture (many other published harmonies were bloated with additional commentary), and ordered in a way that matched how they read together. In other words, they needed a kind of "Little Gidding edition" of a Common Prayer book. The Houghton Harmony fulfills this purpose.

Later Harmonies get insanely complicated in how they structure reading in their design, and in the visuals they employ. As such, they become artifacts in their own right, somewhat independent from the context of the community and more oriented toward the demands of their royal patrons. Nonetheless, the practice of harmonizing seems (appropriately enough) to have emerged from this collaborative oral reading practice.

Wait -- royal patrons?

The Houghton Harmony is annotated by King Charles.* Here's a particularly charming example:

The King has noted an error, then crossed out and corrected his own annotation, writing, "I confess that I was too hastie / for it is verrie well, but two / littell omissions that I haue marked." It seems Charles borrowed this particular book after he heard about it from a neighbor of Little Gidding. He liked it so much that he asked for his own to be made. That book is known as the King's Harmony and is now at the British Library; Paul Dyck and his collaborators Stuart Williams and Ryan Rempel have turned it into a digital edition, using digitized microfilm provided by the British Library. After signing up, you can log in to see it for free; here's one color page from it (most of the rest are black/white microfilm):

The King's Harmony initiated a long relationship between Little Gidding and King Charles I. The community made many books for him, his son Charles, Archbishop Laud and possibly others associated with his court, even after Nicholas Ferrar's death in 1637.

*Sidenote: a bit of a mystery is attached to Charles' annotations of the Houghton Harmony. Another volume, now at the Bodleian, also appears to have been annotated by Charles, although the curator has not provided me with independent confirmation. The presence of Charles' hand in the Bodleian volume disrupts the usual sequence of events linking Little Gidding to the court. C. Leslie Craig addressed this mystery many years ago in an article in the Harvard Library Bulletin, titled "The Earliest Little Gidding Concordance."

How did you find out about these books!?

Like "how long have you had your hair," this is one of those questions whose frequency confuses me!

But, the answer is simple: Bill Sherman mentions the Little Gidding Harmonies in his excellent book, Used Books: Marking Renaissance Readers (2008), in a chapter on a manuscript Book of Common Prayer designed to look like a printed book. The citation stuck in my mind (as have many things about Sherman's work), and I've been researching Little Gidding more or less ever since.

Who else is working on these books?

Adam Smyth has recently written an article in ELR on George Herbert and the Harmonies, and continues to work on the Harmonies as part of larger project on book destruction in the early modern period.

Paul Dyck has published an article on the King's Harmony in The Library and in the George Herbert Journal, as well as a series of excellent articles with his collaborators on turning the Harmony into a digital edition.

Joyce Ransome's 2011 book on Little Gidding, The Web of Friendship: Nicholas Ferrar and Little Gidding, has a chapter on the Harmonies. She has also published an article on the Harmonies in The Seventeenth Century.

Margaret Aston has a chapter on Foxe's Book of Martyrs and the Harmonies in Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies after Elizabeth L. Eisenstein (2007).

While the Harmonies didn't attract much attention in the twentieth century, a few intrepid scholars wrote about them. George Henderson's "Bible Illustration in the Age of Laud" describes some of the source texts used in the Harmonies. Stanley Stewart has a chapter on the Harmonies and Herbert in his book George Herbert; I wish future Herbert scholars had read it more carefully. Earlier in the century, C. Leslie Craig and Nancy Cabot both published on the Houghton Harmony.

Carmen Ortiz-Henley recently completed a dissertation on the Harmonies, and Michael Gaudio is writing a book on their use of religious prints.

I haven't used many qualifying adjectives in the sentences above because these articles/chapters are all superb, and well worth reading. I'm sure I'm missing others.

(Note that, if one searches "Little Gidding," one quickly unearths a trove of later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century hagiographies of Nicholas Ferrar. This is because in 1881 John Henry Shorthouse published John Inglesant, a heady historical novel of the type we don't read much nowadays, but which was popular at the time. In it, the eponymous hero (note his last name -- subtle) visits Little Gidding and falls in love with the beautiful and pious Mary Collet, Nicholas Ferrar's niece (and the primary "author" of many Harmonies). Witness the beauty of his affection:

Inglesant ends up fighting a Mr. Thorne for Mary's love, but she knows he can't give himself over to the rural life led at Little Gidding (of course); and so they part ways. It's exactly the kind of pure, sentimental love that struck a chord with Anglican revivalist readers of the time; suddenly, Little Gidding found itself famous. Preeminant Anglican T. S. Eliot's visit and subsequent poem "Little Gidding" advanced the community's reputation as a place where quiet, uniquely English devotion was practiced, and it's been a target of religious nostalgia ever since. In fact, a Christian commune was re-established on the site of the original manor house in the 1970s. While Little Gidding's renewed fame led to a fair amount of work on Nicholas Ferrar, the Harmonies and, importantly, the role of women like Mary Collet in making them got buried in the virginal stillness of her "great lustrous eyes[,] moist with tears." In short: when it comes to Little Gidding -- or, really, anything having to do with the seventeenth century -- don't trust what was written in the nineteenth century.)

I have a lot more to say about all of this -- especially about the Harmonies as the products of women's labor -- but fear I am already way past TL;DR. Thanks to anyone who has ever shown an interest in these beautiful books. As Adam Smyth has said, "their time has come."

"So, what's up with MLA?"

2013-01-25T18:22:00.000-05:00

Today was 2013's first meeting -- I should say reunion, since I've been out of town for several months now, and the two people I work with, Mary Caton Lingold and Darren Mueller, are not just colleagues but friends, and it's a joy to share work-time with them -- of SoundBox, a project I co-steer at Duke. This is a digital humanities project, in the loosest sense of the term, that explores alternative ways of making scholarship more noisy. We spend a lot of time thinking what digital humanities is and has been as a field, but ultimately we're more invested in a fluid, creative-critical approach than in disciplinary formulations. We're all "who cares, let's get to work" kind of people.

As we were wrapping up the business side of our chat, Darren, who is a PhD candidate in Music at Duke doing interesting research on the history of the LP, asked me something along the lines of, "So what's up with all the DH stuff coming out of MLA?" Being in a music department, he (understandably) has never been to MLA's annual meeting, and didn't "get" why, for the last few years, it seems to leave a tidal wave of blogposts, tweets and Storified narratives on "DH AS A DISCIPLINE" in its wake. And -- again, being in a music department -- he felt excluded.

"We're over here doing digital humanities," he said. "I just don't see what that has to do with MLA. I'm a music scholar."

I didn't have a great answer for his question, since, to be honest, I'm not sure why MLA has become an important venue for DH work.* My introduction to MLA, years ago, was a senior professor at another conference -- a conference scheduled at the same time as MLA (I didn't know this then, since I barely had a notion that MLA existed) -- rolling her eyes while proclaiming, "MLA, who needs it. What a blowhard organization." I was master's student, in media studies (not English). I didn't get the joke (was it a joke? I don't know), but I laughed anyway. Sure, MLA. Who needs it. Haha.

Turns out, if you're trying to do DH these days, you need it. Not a scholar of literature? Too bad. Or so it can seem.

I post this, because Darren's simple question gave me pause. It should give pause to anyone involved in the current round of "who's in, who's out" hand-wringing. MLA -- due in large part to the wonderful work of Kathleen Fitzpatrick, the organization's Director of Scholarly Communications -- has made important steps toward inviting lit folks into a conversation about new forms of scholarship (reviewing, publishing, producing), and MLA Commons has introduced a new dimension to the digital circuits we (I was going to write "we DHers," but will leave it simply "we") track. Other disciplinary institutions may follow suit. But MLA is not where DH gets defined. MLA should not be where DH gets defined. Hell, I don't even know why so many DH panels end up at MLA. "The Dark Side of Digital Humanities" sounds like it belongs at ADHO's Digital Humanities conference, or some other venue addressing DH as a discipline.

Because that's the point, right? Of the hand-wringing? For better or worse, DH is a discipline now -- with universities granting degrees in it, and federal organizations dedicated to funding it -- and that brings boundaries, and how the boundaries get drawn sparks turf wars. It's a boring narrative, really, and I don't have much stake in any of it; but if we're going to agree DH is a discipline, we should start having conversations about its disciplinarity at appropriately disciplinary venues. MLA is not that.

There's a lot of exciting work happening at Duke that I would consider digital humanities, in the broadest sense of the term. As Darren has pointed out to me, Mark Anthony Neal's use of social media -- his twitter stream, blogging and weekly webcast Left of Black -- is one stellar example, showing how humanists can use web technologies to spark relevant, thought-provoking and cross-disciplinary conversation, linking together a variety of audiences and publics. (Similar examples were showcased last year at the conference "Black Thought 2.0: New Media and the Future of Black Studies.") Is Professor Neal "doing digital humanities"? Is he a digital humanist? I never see his work cited in DH communities; he's not "in," so to speak. And -- amazingly; shockingly -- this is of absolutely no consequence. His work will continue to connect people, whether it's tagged as DH or not. Because it has cultivated an audience. And because it is relevant to that audience.

While at MIT, I worked at HyperStudio, a digital humanities lab that began many years ago with Berliner Sehen, a still-innovative multimedia learning environment for exploring what it means to be "ein Berliner." The lab has also worked on projects about US-Iran relations, the Comédie-Française in Paris, and with Pete Donaldson and Alex Huang's Global Shakespeares project, which once looked at Asian performances and film adaptations of Shakespeare but which has since branched out to include other areas of the world. HyperStudio has been extremely international in its focus, from its inception -- in fact, it emerged to address the pedagogical needs of MIT's language departments. HyperStudio should be cited more in current discussions global DH. As a result of working in such an environment, my perspective may be skewed: but I tend to think a field's transformation should not lead to an erasure of its deep, complicated histories.

I don't intend to dismiss the importance of the conversations that have happened at MLA, or in the flood of recent blogposts about DH, transformed or otherwise. But we should keep Darren's question in the back of our minds.

* I'm being a bit facetious. There is, of course, a history here. See Matt Kirschenbaum's justifiably oft-cited "What Is Digital Humanities, and What's It Doing in English Departments?"

Circuit-Bending Digital Humanities

2013-01-18T11:58:00.001-05:00

Below is the text of a talk I gave this week at the Research and Innovation Institute of Centre Pompidou in Paris. Thanks to Alexandre Monnin for inviting me to the seminar, and to the other presenters Aurélien Berra, Aurélien Bénel and Alexandre Gefen for sharing their fascinating work.

Note that the text of the talk is based on (and incorporates sentences from) a chapter I wrote for a forthcoming MIT Press volume on digital humanities, edited by Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg. I kindly request that, should you wish to quote this text, that you don't quote from this post but from the chapter once it's published. Thanks to the editors for allowing me to post this mashed-up, remixed oral(-ish) rewrite of the original.

* * *

In 1939, at the height of America's Great Depression, five square kilometers of ashen wasteland outside New York City transformed into this –

– the magical wonderland of the New York World's Fair.

This World's Fair was the first explicitly future-themed World's Fair, and everything about it gleamed with visions of a clean, streamlined techno-utopia. At its center, towering over the landscape, were the iconic Trylon and Perisphere – an enormous sphere-and-spike structure, featuring the world's longest escalator, going up into the spike, and a utopian diorama of "Democracity," a future suburban metropolis, inside the sphere. Spiraling out from its center were various visions of the "World of Tomorrow," where corporate innovation in transportation and communication technologies transformed every aspect of modern life. Colorful Ford Zephyrs drove visitors along the multi-tiered "Roads of Tomorrow"; General Electric showcased the air-conditioned, automated "Homes of Tomorrow," full of novel gadgetry like dishwashers and laundry machines; fairgoers lined up to make their first long-distance telephone call at AT&T's pavilion, or, at RCA's pavilion, to see their first glimpse of clunky mirrored projection cabinets called "televisions." Even sex and burlesque was automated in the World of Tomorrow. As the official guidebook described the theme:

The eyes of the Fair are on the future – not in the sense of peering into the unknown and predicting the shape of things a century hence – but in the sense of presenting a new and clearer view of today in preparation for tomorrow.

Debuting alongside television sets and long distance telephony was – oddly enough – this rare book, a 310-year-old Biblical concordance:

Produced in 1630 at Little Gidding, an Anglican commune just outside Cambridge, this book was made by cutting apart printed books and images related to the Four Gospels of Christ, then pasting them back together into a cohesive, linear narrative. In other words, while it look s printed – and indeed one nobleman who visited Little Gidding could not believe the group was not secretly hiding a printing press – in fact it is composed entirely of the bits and pieces of other books that have been dissembled, sliced apart, then pasted back together to form a new artifact, called, most appropriately, a Harmony. Later Little Gidding Harmonies exploit the form and function of differing typographies and colored inks to construct multiple reading paths through the story, acknowledging textual variance in their material design while nonetheless synthesizing these differences.

What (I wonder) did 1939 World's Fair visitors see when they looked at this book? I'm not asking for a description of the artifact itself; I mean what did the book signify to them -- what kind of conceptual or ideological structures framed the object they saw before them, in 1939, at a future-themed World's Fair?

There's a few ways we could answer this question. One way is to ask someone who was there in 1939 – a conceivable task, since many of our parents or grandparents were adults at the time, and some of them may have visited the British Pavilion at the World's Fair, and may even – though this is of course a stretch – remember seeing this somewhat odd book. Of course, if we found someone who was in fact there, and did remember the book, we'd be asking them this question in 2013, a good 74 years after the event – so the memory transmitted would be distorted by the ripples of time, especially by experiences of later times in which technologies proclaimed as "the Future" in 1939 had already slid into the past.

Another way to answer this question would be to attempt a form of time travel using the various mechanically-inscribed memories we have of the event. In other words, we could watch footage from the World's Fair, read the World's Fair Guidebook and newspaper accounts, sift through photographs of the British Pavilion, searching for some mention of this unusual book.

Of course, the problem with this kind of time travel is that we can't step outside our own sense of what 1939 was like – our knowledge of what became of its techno-utopian visions. In other words, this video doesn't come to us "live, from 1939!" – as if it were a direct transmission from the distant past – but comes to us here, now, in a room in Paris in 2013. We watch it in the stubborn, intractable, intransigent present, at a moment when the futurism of the 1939 World's Fair has become retro-futurism: a form of kitsch nostalgia. In fact, we laugh at GM's Futurama, or the "Democracity" diorama, precisely because the peaceful, prosperous, freedom-loving techno-utopia that the visionaries of 1939 projected onto this, our own moment, never actualized. We're not driving hovercraft vehicles, or driver-less cars; talking robots don't do my laundry, or wash my dishes.

Our bemusement comes from more than the failure of their vision, though. In the 74 years between then and now, the charge that certain technical objects carry, their magnetism, has changed; and when those poles shift – the poles that orient us to our own media ecology – then "the future" as such changes, too. And when our sense of "the future" changes, so too does our relationship to the past. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Little Gidding Harmony, an object that debuted with little remark, at least none that has been left to posterity. In all likelihood, the British government thought it interesting enough to showcase it at the British Pavilion not because of its innovative cut-and-paste composition but because it was annotated by England's ill-fated King Charles I. In other words, it was an artifact to be marveled at not because of what it was, or what it depicted, but because of who handled it. It carried the charge of royal hands. Looking at the book today, though, I'm less struck by Charles I's annotations (as historically impressive as they are) than I am by the fact that the women of Little Gidding seemed to have engaged with a form of what we would today, anachronistically, describe as "remix culture." Not only were they remixing paper objects, a good 350 years before digital culture brought us the concept of "remix," but they had developed an extraordinarily sophisticated hypertextual reading system that encouraged the kind of multimodal, multimedia interaction that we now think of as the hallmark of twenty-first century technical episteme. Indeed, my interest in understanding our digitally-inflected episteme – an episteme, by the way, shaped by the futurism of the 1939 World's Fair – has caused me to see this book with new eyes, eyes crucially different from those seeing it in 1939.

We marvel at the people of the past marveling at now mundane technologies, trying to imagine what it was like to see television for the first time, or to make the first long-distance telephone call; trying to imagine what they imagined we would be, and calculating the gap between that and what we have become. There seems to be no exit from this infinite loop of history, no way to break this moebius strip of retro-futuristic wonder. Despite, or perhaps because of, the proliferation of inscriptive technologies – technologies that record, store and transmit history – a seemingly insurmountable gap yawns between the past and our present.

I wanted to start with this example today, at a seminar on digital humanities, for a few reasons.
First, and most simply, because this moment that I've dwelled over was, in many ways, very like our own. In 1939, a decade of worldwide economic recession was squeezing institutional budget lines, with the arts and humanities (predictably) feeling the most pressure. Sweeping in to fill this vacuum were corporations like IBM and RCA, who partnered with scientists and engineers at relatively newly-founded polytechnical institutions like MIT and Caltech to develop the most advanced corporate laboratories in the world – laboratories that drove innovation in computing and communications technologies.

Exploiting this flurry of new electronic technologies, academic libraries began transferring the Western world's cultural heritage to a radical new medium called "microfilm," fitting entire libraries onto a collection of small spools that took up no more space than a few filing cabinets. Some decried the new medium -- in fact, if you want some fun bedtime reading, I suggest the minutes from meetings of library associations during this period, which are (quite humorously) replete with complaints from grumpy librarians, resistant to microfilm. Meanwhile, societies like the National Microfilm Association cropped up to promote the new medium, countering complaints by arguing, in part, that microfilm would help preserve cultural heritage artifacts and offer wider access to rare, inaccessible materials. (Sound familiar?) One thinker, Vannevar Bush, was so inspired by the possibilities of the new medium that he imagined it as the basis for his now-famous Memex, a new collective memory machine by which users could mechanically traverse massive, interlinked libraries of information, storing their individual pathways through this microfilmed data. You might say Bush envisioned a kind of "microfilm humanities" of the 20th century.

So, on the one hand, I wanted us to stop thinking about the newness or future of digital humanities and instead pause over the deep, complicated history of technologically-inspired "movements" within the scholarship.

But, more broadly, I wanted to focus this talk on history as such.

Our sense of time – its ebb and flow between a recorded past and an imagined future – is one aspect of our research and indeed our everyday lives that digital technologies are transforming most. Yet, surveying the digital humanities literature, you wouldn't think this is the case. With the notable exceptions of the work of Bernard Stiegler (whom I know shares a special affiliation with this institute) and several exciting thinkers within the subfields of media archaeology and media history – none of whom, I think, would primarily identify as "digital humanists" – few scholars affiliated with what loosely might be termed "digital studies" have delved into the temporal significance of digitizing our historical record. But it is significant nonetheless. One way of understanding these changes is to turn back to a concrete example: the Little Gidding Harmony.

I've been studying the Little Gidding Harmonies for several years now, and am in the very early stages of a project that I hope will eventually lead to the digitization of each Harmony in a richly interlinked, high-resolution digital facsimile edition, showing the source texts used to cut and paste together each page. (I expect that this project will build on the wonderful work of Paul Dyck, whose web-based edition of one Harmony is in fact, appropriately enough, an edition of a digitized copy of the book's microfilm.) The Little Gidding Harmonies, and editions like these, are, as I see it, the "bread and butter" of digital humanities, helping to provide universal access to books or other documents which – because of their highly multimodal, multimedia form – simply cannot be reproduced in print. Bringing these objects to a wider research audience in turn shifts our understanding of, for instance, early modern women's writing, as suddenly artifacts previously buried in the bowels of the archive become visible to us in this new medium (even as other documents become invisible). We might liken this remediation of our cultural heritage to a shifting spotlight: one platform elucidates a certain subset of documents from a particular period, another offers a very different perspective on the same historical moment.

This aspect of digital humanities as an Enlightenment project, shedding new light on old documents, is widely known and now widely accepted; few would dispute the value of such projects, and granting institutions, at least in the US, are eager to fund them. I want to zoom in, though, and consider what it means, historically and materially, to produce and disseminate a digital facsimile as the primary representation of a document. In other words, how are electronic facsimile editions transforming our experience of texts as material objects? What will be the material existence of this electronic representation of a seventeenth-century collage?

First, and most obviously, this edition will include high-resolution digital photographs of the book – photographs that are, it's worth noting, frozen moments in the life of that book, mediated by both the lens of the camera at the time the shot was taken and the screen on which I view the image later. These digital photographs will be stored on a server and posted online for others to access.

Though I have never seen or touched these servers, there is a noisy weight to them: they suck up electricity, blow out hot air, spreading sound and heat into their surrounding environment.

The more web users access the images, the more the servers work and thus the more energy they use – a fact which, in aggregate, has a global impact on the planet's environment but no impact on the digital artifact itself. In others words,while my physical handling of the Little Gidding Harmony at the Houghton Library inevitably left minute traces of that moment on the book – of my body, the bodies surrounding me and the room we inhabited together for a brief afternoon – my online examination will leave the digital artifact unaltered in its appearance; yet it will still leave its trace on the globe by contributing, in a small way, to climate change and the depletion of the planet's natural resources, both fossil fuels for electricity and the metals and minerals used to manufacture the servers. (Note also that server racks do not have a particularly long life, but would require replacing anywhere from every three to every twenty years to avoid bit rot and technical obsolescence – yet another way digital storage temporally and spatially defers its material impact.)

While the environmental impact of these images concerns me – and is also far too little mentioned or studied within digital humanities – the key point here is not that one form of interaction is less environmentally damaging than another (for the climate control required to preserve rare artifacts arguably has an even greater carbon footprint than viewing a digital facsimile online). Rather, I want to underscore that this deferral of a physical impact away from the object or the moment of interaction indicates a major shift in how we experience and perceive history. Viewing the Little Gidding Harmony in the Houghton Library, I am witness to its existence across multiple centuries – to its physical aging and preservation – as well as to its co-presence in a "now" in which it continues accrete the material stuff of its environment. Viewing the digital images, though, I observe an eternally returning present moment, the moment when the book was photographed. The representation is not subject to the same now as me, then, but rather drags its own frozen moment in time across a multiplicity of nows.

To state that digital facsimiles present an eternally-returning frozen "now" is more than ethereal philosophizing. If I download a page image from the digitized Harmony to my local hard drive, or even just access it online, the date and time of the download become the "date created" in the photo's metadata or the date accessed in my cache, giving the appearance of an image updated with every viewing.

Thus while the image as a representation remains frozen in time, the image as information is temporally on the move, copied from my server today to the local disk drive of a website visitor tomorrow, to another set of storage hardware next month in a constantly fluctuating rematerialization of data. (These fluctuations occur even without my intervention as my hard disk drive shuffles data, cutting and pasting new over the old – a palimpsest of frozen moments in the history of my storage device.)

Almost a century ago, Walter Benjamin identified "reproducibility" (Reproduzierbarkeit) as a key feature of modern media, a concept updated by Lev Manovich as "variability," the idea that new media objects "can exist in different, potentially infinite versions"; such terms, though, do not capture the temporal dislocations that occur when a digital representation of an historical artifact becomes a primary access point into the past. By hoisting entire archival collections online, digitization projects transform history into a series of recursively-updated, selfsame snapshots.

This sounds like I am launching a critique of digital humanities projects, and to some extent, I am. But hidden in every critique is a manifesto, the potential for change. Instead of treating these micromoments of temporal and physical remediation as insignificant or hidden bits of metadata, I suggest that we embrace these temporal transformations in how we conceive of and design digital humanities projects.

In other words, I suggest we approach the process and outcome of digitization as itself a creative act of mediation, allowing our knowledge of both digital materiality and the materiality of the artifact being digitized – its provenance and production – guide us in how we conceive of and design digital work. What would such a project look like?

I have (or have attempted, at least) a few digital projects in this vein; I'll share one quick example of a completed and published one to show you what I mean. A few years ago I stumbled across this quote in a The Anatomy of Plants, a late-seventeenth-century book on plant science by a fellow named Nehemiah Grew, the first botanist to use a microscope to study the intricacies of vegetal structures.

Basically, Nehemiah Grew here is analogizing the structure of plant life to the structure of a book – an odd analogy, even for one of England's oddest centuries. I became (one might say...) mildly obsessed with this quote, and began tracking down every bit of text, from the four centuries preceding it, that might plausibly relate to or help me understand why Grew used this (to my eyes) delightful analogy. In the process, I realized that I was doing to the archive what Grew did to plants – that is, dissecting it piece by piece, and subjecting it to a microscope, looking not at large-scale cultural or historical transformations but at micro-moments, all the way down to single quotes. As I was conjuring my research into an article, I realized I wanted to capture the syncronicity between my archival journey and Grew's scientific experimentation, and wanted to do so in a way that gave readers access to at least a visual sense of the material history of these investigations. This was the result.

My approach to wanting to produce a digital edition, or digital project, about the Little Gidding Harmonies has been very similar. That is, the more I learn about how the women of Little Gidding remixed printed materials to produce their Harmonies, the more I want to honor these cut-and-paste methods not just by presenting a static facsimile, but by inviting visitors to participate in some form of remix themselves. After all, my own research process has been not unlike that practiced at Little Gidding: I've gathered their books around me, cutting and pasting them apart (conceptually – not physically!), identifying source texts and prints down to the level of individual cut-outs using a massive spreadsheet of color-coded information.

I'll then paste all this data back together into a cohesive narrative that tries to make sense of the history and culture of these unique books.

The point here – the point, that is, of blurring scissors, wheat paste and CTRL-X – is not to be insensitive to the differences between "then" and "now," but to engage in a purposeful and intentional anachronism. This temporal dislocation is tactical, designed to dredge up protocols of earlier "remix" cultures that were lost to later centuries. I want to ask: what do book historians learn by dragging the mechanisms of remediation across material history like a raking light, pulling its texture into sharp relief?

The most immediate lesson pertains to our own moment in time. Though less prominent in recent discussions, remix culture has been central to how many in the digital humanities have defined themselves against traditional humanities methods, with UCLA's "Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0" claiming that "anything that stands in the way of the perpetual mash-up and remix stands in the way of the digital revolution." Many scholars have (as well-trained humanists are wont to do) sought precedents for cut-and-paste criticism in experimental practices like the cut-ups of Bryon Gysin and William Burroughs or, more recently, Alfred Jarry's pataphysics, thereby rooting digital humanities in the perpetual avant-garde of the twentieth-century.

Yet "remix" is a capacious concept. Though composed as a multimedia mash-up of printed materials, the Little Gidding Harmonies did not use cut-and-paste methods to disorder but to harmonize meaning, weaving the many narrative threads of the gospel into a single tapestry. Situated within – in fact remediated by – the context of the web, the seemingly conservative aesthetics of this unusual seventeenth-century book (ironically) unravel the intellectual ethos of radical experimentation woven around slicing, dicing and mashing up media objects in our own time. In doing so, this juxtaposition encourages those interested in historizing digital humanities to hone the meaning of "remix" and, perhaps more interestingly, invites alternative histories of creative, cut-and-paste criticism.

Bringing the Little Gidding Harmony into a playful digital space also elucidates otherwise invisible moments in the book's history, such as its appearance at the 1939 New York World's Fair. As I mentioned previously, the book's appearance at the fair seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the scholarship on these books, indeed seems to have left little impact on fairgoers themselves, overwhelmed as they were by the more glamorous sites and sounds of the "World of Tomorrow." Yet I was fascinated when I first learned this little factoid. Why? As technological innovations today invigorate an interest in these early modern examples of remix, the book's presence at the first future-themed World's Fair suddenly seems newly significant. Remediating history can thus powerfully change its topography.

Of course, this holds for the study of Little Gidding itself. While Little Gidding and its founder Nicholas Ferrar have long been lauded within Anglican histories, and even saw a brief spat of public fame in the late nineteenth century, scholars have long neglected the community's remarkable Harmonies. One twentieth-century critic even described them as "dreadful monuments of misdirected labour" – ! However, the rise of digital humanities – a field which argues for the value of process over product, collaboration over individual authorship, and "maker" culture in general – has reinvigorated interest in these unique, amazing works of cut-and-paste scholarship, helping people like me build the argument that manual labor (labor of the hands) can be a unique form of intellectual labor, whether performed with scissors and paste or at a programming terminal; and that this form of materialist making is worthy of study in its own right. In this way, a shift in disciplinary values cuts new pathways into the past.

What I've been describing here is a form of recursive historiography – that is, a method of journeying from the present to a related moment in the past, then back to the present, allowing each stop, each iteration of a particular topos like "remix," transform our relationship to all others in the series. (I'm borrowing this term, by the way, from Markus Krajewski, through the work of Geoffrey Winthrop-Young.) Think of it as a form of circuit-bending the humanities. Rather than history as a narrative form of time travel, in which the historian enters into and communes with the timeless vacuum of the archive in order to pinpoint our origins, a circuit-bending approach to history short-circuits the technological residue of earlier centuries. Garnet Herz and Jussi Parikka describe such an approach in a fascinating recent article on media archaeology, writing that, in circuit-bending, "the black boxes of the historical archive and consumer electronics are cracked open, bent, and modified" in order to disturb, renew, or otherwise intervene in their operations.

I think it's important – and I suspect Hertz and Parikka would agree – that we take this statement literally. Rather than metaphorical actions, verbs like "cracked open, bent, and modified" describe the circuit-bending acts of the hacker (an)archaeologist, rewiring the past to hear or see or read or perceive something new.

An example (again drawing in part from the work of Winthrop-Young) may help explain what I mean. In a recent essay, Wolfgang Ernst describes seeing a low-cost 1930s German radio in the basement of a museum. Collecting dust in an archive, the radio offers little insight into the culturally and politically significant role that this cheap, widely available technology played in disseminating Hitler's voice to the German people. Switching the radio on, though – listening to contemporary broadcasts of Lady Gaga or Justin Bieber pumped through this aging system – brings the relationship between cultural and technological functionality into focus, showing that, as Ernst puts it,

there is no ‘historical' difference in the functioning of the apparatus now and then (and there will not be, until analogue radio is, finally, completely replaced by the digitized transmission of signals); rather, there is a media-archeological short circuit between otherwise historically clearly separated times.

Although Ernst did not physically re-wire this radio, the result was similar to the circuit-bending art described by Hertz and Parikka: namely, through the creative reactivation of a device, our sense of history, as delineated by the physical archive, changed. The radical and intellectually jarring juxtapositions that occur in such acts of "t(h)inkering" spark a deeper appreciation of the presence, the material weight, of history, as well as its significance to our own moment.

A focus on late nineteenth and twentieth century consumer technologies, like radios, has occluded media archaeology's connection to trends in digital humanities. Yet I would argue that an inverted form of Ernst's radio experiment occurs every time, for instance, a medieval manuscript is digitized and posted online in the framework of web-based software.

For (to state an obvious but still under-appreciated fact) an online e-book platform is, like a radio, an operational apparatus, such that certain aspects of it cannot be understood unless it is switched on; and though Ernst may not agree, so, too, is a medieval manuscript: it must be opened, used, for it to "disclos[e] its essence." When the former mediates the latter, it alters the operations, the "codes" of the medieval codex, physically and temporally rewiring it according to the software's designed logic. What represents the "past" and the "present" in this modified, mashed-up digital artifact? Scholarship abounds on the social transformations engendered by such tools; much remains to be said on the material transformations they enact, and even more on how their tactical deployment might spark new historical devices.

The ability to transform not only how we study but what we see in the past is perhaps the digital humanities' greatest potential. Whether or not practitioners in the field can mobilize this strength, though, hinges upon their insistent awareness of mediation, its effects and affects. As Johanna Drucker has forcefully argued, too many projects employ digital mapping tools and information visualizations as if their interfaces were transparent, self-evident reifications of data, rather than contemporary graphical conventions. This blind adoption of "tools" ends up taring history against our own media ecology, such that the present becomes the inevitable outcome of a past in which Western culture has always/already traversed the routes constructed by Google maps, or Western thinkers like Newton always/already "intended" their writing to be read through highly mediated digital transcriptions.

Rather than projecting the past onto the present, a "circuit-bending" approach to the digital humanities uses our present media ecology as a map for discovering the neglected corners of history, then plugs them into our own moment. It is powered by a recognition of "the made-ness and constructedness that inhere in any representation of knowledge" (as Drucker puts it) and, as such, exploits the rich potentials of electronic media without compromising the transformative power of the humanities to think and perform new ways of perceiving, experiencing and being in the world. Pursuing this approach also helps bridge the perceived divide between building and thinking, making and theorizing; for here, a material engagement with objects enacts a theoretical relationship between past and present, reconfiguring our historical coordinates in the process. It is critical and creative, interpretive and interventional. Its potential is fully realized not as a method for producing narrative histories so much as a kind of electronic schematic that diagrams the historical junctions where our sense of what is "old" both meets and diverges from our perception of the "new."

The Communications Building at the 1939 World's Fair featured Symbolizing Man, a twenty-foot plastic head, linked by a gleaming light to a thirty-foot globe. Between them, a multi-paneled mural showed (according to the Guidebook) "the acceleration of inventions in communications from primitive beginnings to the ‘World of Tomorrow'," including "postal service, printed word, telegraph, telephone, motion picture, radio and television." Of course, an object like the Houghton's Little Gidding Harmony fills no gaps in this list, forms no missing links in the evolutionary process connecting plastic sphere to Symbolizing Man. Its inability to fit into this technological history speaks volumes on the ideologies that shaped the exhibit, and which still shape how we conceptualize newer technologies in relation to older ones. The current hinging of "digital" and "humanities" has the power to short-circuit this narrative, if we deploy the former as a tactical re-wiring within the strategic devices of the latter.

Rocks, rocks and more rocks; on a curious book with flap boulders

2012-12-18T17:35:00.000-05:00

I was at the Wellcome Library in London this afternoon, spending time with Descrizione del Sacro Monte della Verna (catalogue entry here), a very large book of etchings related to Monte Penna, most famous as the place where St. Francis of Assisi received stigmata. Printed early in the seventeenth century in Florence, the book is a bit unlike any other sets of etchings I've seen before -- first, because several of the images have flaps, and second, because those flaps are rocks, and tend to be inexplicably placed. Like this large rock in the middle of a scene of other rocks, which lifts to reveal...

...more rocks!

Or this other oblong rock, floating over other rocks...

...rock, paper.......

I know St. Francis worked water from rocks; but what is a big boulder -- wider than both the page and the room it occupies -- doing inside?

I'm pretty sure these flaps were misplaced, either when they were originally tacked in or by some well-meaning later owner. The long strips of paper that hold them, wedged between the leaves, are hand-drawn to look like the portion of the illustration they cover, and are so carefully done as to appear printed at first. The ink is also very black, which may indicate the strips are a later addition, used after the flaps fell off their original location. If anyone knows more about this book, or related sets of prints, please do share, as it remains a bit of a mystery to me.

Some related images can be found here.

"Thus are all things confused among the Poets"

2012-11-11T20:54:00.000-05:00

From the Folger Shakespeare Library.

[H]e took out a Box out of his pocket, wherein was that picture enclosed, which he ever carried about him, though it were of a pretty bigness. ... Methinks, saies he to Lysis, that where before the breast was represented by two balls of snow, there are now two Globes, where may be seen the Aequator, with the Tropicks, and other circles. You are in the right, replyes Lysis, Anselme hath reform'd it since you saw it, having sent for colours to Colommiers; but this last thing is of my own invention, and as time makes us wiser: I have left the snow for Charite's neck, and some places adjacent; and as for her breasts, I thought fit they should be represented as two worlds, for to render the picture more delightful by the variety. It is certain your Masters the Poets do ordinarily compare the breasts of their Mistresses to worlds, saies Clarimond, but very impertinently. You are mistaken, replies Lysis; and I assure you, that if I possess'd Charite's breast, I should think my self happier then any Emperor; for I should be master of two worlds, whereas the greatest Emperor that ever was, could never enjoy one. An excellent fancy indeed! says Clarimond; because the breasts are round, therefore they are worlds, Apples and plums, and all things that are round are worlds too. 'Tis a very slender resemblance of a thing, to have nothing of it but the simple figure; but yet in this case you cannot make good all you say, The breast of a woman hath but two half bowls, they must be put together to make one whole one; so that you are still short of your reckning; for you can finde but one world, which is divided into two, as the Cosmographers represent it in their universal Maps: And I must tell you, that it was a far neater invention of those who say, That Venus having obtained of Paris the Apple, which was to be given the fairest of the Goddesses, she was so taken with it, that having cut it in two, she plac'd it on her breast, and wore it for an eternal sign of her victory, and will'd all those of her sex should do the like. However, if you desire that Charite's breast have two Globes, I grant it you; and I will in that sense too teach you an imagination which you never knew; and that is to say, that half of each Globe is sunk into the body, and that there is only what remains apparent; and as for the nibbles, it must be believ'd they are the Poles. Moreover, to render the picture more judicious and rational, it should be my advice to feign that one is a Terrestrial Globe, and the other the Celestial; but though we should grant all that, yet will there be still somewhat to be reprehended; for if they be worlds, they must necessarily have Suns to enlighten them, and it cannot be perceiv'd they have any, if we do not suppose the eyes; but they are at too great a distance: But if you would take them for two Suns, how can you imagine it, since you call Charite a Sun, that carries them about? One great star therefore carries two little ones, and that also contains two worlds. Thus are all things confused among the Poets; and to hope any satisfaction from their impertinent imaginations were the vainest thing in the world.

// Charles Sorel, The extravagant shepherd, or, The history of the shepherd Lysis translated out of the French (1653)

Visualizing Travel on Maps, Early Modern Style

2012-11-10T17:43:00.001-05:00

The key is straightening the route into a big line, flipping it on its side and drawing it like a scroll.

John Ogilby, Britannia (vol. 1) (London, 1675). From the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Voila. You've fit it in a single book opening.

Text/ile Technologies, Part 1

2012-11-08T13:04:00.001-05:00

As I've mentioned on Twitter, I've started using Pinterest to collect images that relate to current or future research on early modern material culture. One of my favorite boards to pin has become Text/ile Technology. It began as a way of gathering images of machines for making both texts and textiles -- the hand press, rolling presses, Jacquard looms, stocking frames -- feeding my fascination for the strange relationships between them, and between presses, looms and computers. It's quickly morphed into a collection of images of people working around these machines, which is even more fascinating. When you cut across history horizontally, examining depictions of a few objects across a large swath of time, shifts in (for instance) the gendering of these machines and the various configurations of labor they enable become particularly evident.

Below, I've curated a few of my favorites so far. Each source is linked below the image. Enjoy.

* * *

In this engraving after Joos van Winghe, circa 1600, St. Paul sits at a table writing while Aquila, a tentmaker, weaves in background. Aquila's wife Priscilla sits in the foreground spinning, her young boys helping her wind the thread. I love the juxtaposition of Paul's and Priscilla's various tasks -- his hand holding a quill, posed between thumb and forefinger, her fingers delicately pulling thread. I also love that Aquila at his loom looks a little like a pressman at his press (check out that hat!). His open-handed gesture is more closely aligned with that of the playful boys than with the focused "handiworks" of Paul and Priscilla.

Print made by Jan Sadeler, after Joos Van Winghe. Flemish, ca 1600. From the British Museum.

After these things Paul departed from Athens, and came to Corinth; And found a certain Jew named Aquila, born in Pontus, lately come from Italy, with his wife Priscilla; (because that Claudius had commanded all Jews to depart from Rome:) and came unto them. And because he was of the same craft, he abode with them, and wrought: for by their occupation they were tentmakers. // Acts 18

Almost exactly contemporary with the engraving above is this print from the Netherlands:

Print by Crispijn de Passe the Elder, after Maerten de Vos. Netherlands; published in Cologne, ca 1600. From the British Museum.

It shows the five wise virgins (from Jesus' Parable of the Ten Virgins); they weave, write, spin, weave and embroider, working both texts and textiles. Compare this seventeenth-century depiction of women's work with this late eighteenth-century advertisement for Moore & Co., a carpet and upholstery manufacturer (1797-8):

Print made by William Blake. London, 1797-8. From the British Museum.

At the bottom of the ad, women factory workers are seen weaving a carpet while a man knits stockings using a stocking frame. Another man shows a woman around the factory. It's a relatively early depiction of women working in a textile factory. Interestingly enough, this print was also made by William Blake.

Of course, I've yet to show you an actual image of a printing press; so here, have one in an eyeball:

Print made by Isaac Robert Cruikshank, published by George Humphrey. London, 1821. From the British Museum.

In this political print by Isaac Robert Cruikshank (1821), a portrait of Queen Caroline rests on a printing press, which is itself reflected in the iris of an eye. It's a kind of rebus for the radical press's support of Caroline during King George's efforts to divorce her. Note the reference to Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew.

Pair that image with this 1928 etching by John Sloan, in which a nude woman reads a book in front of a rolling press, her clothes draped over one of the handles.

Print made by John Sloane. 1928. From the British Museum.

I'm reminded of Wendy Wall's and Margreta de Grazia's work on the masculine (and sexualized) metaphors of printing: hard type presses and imprints blank paper, inscribing feminized materials with masculine words. Although this etching is much later than the Renaissance examples Wall and de Grazia examine, it plays on the same contrast between a soft, open female body and a hard machine that "presses" its subject.

This seventeenth-century print study also sits a woman in front of a rolling press; however, instead of reading nude, she seems to be showing the man a copperplate she's engraved, perhaps with the image drawn on the paper at her feet. Did women work as engravers? She looks like a mythical figure -- who would be the goddess of engraving?

Print study, drawn by Vincent Laurensz van der Vinne I. Late 17th-century. From the British Museum.

If I have little context for van der Vinne's print study, I have no context for this:

Print made by Hermann Vogel. German, early 20th century. From the British Museum.

It seems to be some kind of mourning scene: friends feast below in memory of a deceased man who hovers above, with some other people in earlier dress (ancestors?) and a floating press. My best guess is this man was a printer of some sort, and this is a kind of mourning card for him. Maybe for a memorial service, or a post-memorial dinner. In any case, historical proximity does not always lead to deeper understanding.

These are not the most skilled prints and drawings I've found of various types of presses and looms; just ones that piqued my curiousity. Many more examples, including some Japanese, Vietnamese and Indian paintings of looms and presses, can be found on my board.

Tristram Shandy & the art of black mourning pages

2012-09-17T15:17:00.000-04:00

Inventive visual design and typography have made Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy a canonical favorite among all sorts of "material book" types, with the black page after Yorick's death --

-- typically cited as one of the book's enduring innovations. In fact, the Laurence Sterne Trust hosted a quite lovely exhibit on the 250th anniversary of the black page, inviting 73 artists (note the page number) to reinterpret Sterne's "most famous experimental device."

The thing is, though: while Sterne's use of the black page in a literary story is innovative, the mourning page itself is not so much. In fact, Sterne is drawing on a (by then 150-year-old) tradition -- perhaps "seventeenth-century phenomenon" would be more accurate? -- of including mourning pages or all-black prints, sometimes with a coat of arms or other insignia etched out, in printed funeral sermons and memorial verse.

Anonymous, An elegy on the death of the Right Honourable Spencer, Earle of Northampton, who died a conquerour at the battaile of Hopton-heath (Oxford, 1643)

Abraham Darcie, A monumentall pyramide to all posterities erected to the euer-liuing memory, and perpetuall honour of the all-vertuous and euer-glorious prince, Lodovvick, late Duke of Richmond and Lenox... (London, 1624)

Some of the earliest examples I've found come from elegies upon the death of Prince Henry, King James I's son. Henry was well loved, and his death at age 18 of typhoid fever inspired a national outpouring of grief in print. Sylvester's elegy (below) includes not only a mourning page on every verso, facing the lines, but heavy mourning borders with skeleton woodcuts framing each recto.

Josuah Sylvester, Lachrimae lachrimarum. or The distillation of teares shede for the vntymely death of the incomparable prince Panaretus (London, 1612)

It's a bit hard to get the full impact of this printing style on the reader through grainy EEBO scans -- but I imagine the inky blackness getting on the reader's fingers, marring the margins. (Of course, ink didn't spread then like newspaper print does now; but that's what I imagine.) Because each page of text is backed by a mourning block, the verse would be dimmed; little light could filter through the page to bring the letters into relief. The entire effect is heavy with grief. Another elegy for Henry highlights the lachrymose intentions of the mourning page by including a pattern of tears:

Christopher Brooke, Tvvo elegies consecrated to the neuer-dying memorie of the most worthily admyred; most hartily loued; and generally bewayled prince; Henry Prince of Wales (London, 1613)

In his elegy for Prince Henry, aptly titled Great Britaine, all in black, John Taylor incorporated not only a full mourning page, opposite a much lighter woodcut of Henry, but a kind of mourning title-page recto, backed by a second mourning block verso. To get the idea, you have to imagine how the pages are printed on a sheet, and pay close attention to the juxtapositions created by the openings. For instance, the white space in the title page was backed by another mourning page, dimming the contrast between text and border.

John Taylor, Great Britaine, all in blacke For the incomparable losse of Henry, our late worthy prince (London, 1612)

Upon the death of King James, Taylor produced another elegy; and while this one doesn't have a full-page mourning block, its heavy, blackened title page is part of the same tradition --

John Taylor, A liuing sadnes, in duty consecrated to the immortal memory of our late deceased albe-loued soueraigne Lord, the peereles paragon of princes, Iames, king of great Brittaine, France and Ireland (London, 1625)

-- as is Robert Markham's elegy for Sir John Burgh, which ends with a small, heavily bordered epitaph, followed by a shortened mourning block:

Robert Markham, The description, of that euer to be famed knight, Sir Iohn Burgh... (London, 1628)

The tradition seems to get some new steam with the beheading of Charles I. In his elegy for the martyred king -- which went through several printings -- John Quarles, like Sylvester before him, turns every verso into a mourning page. The repetition results in a kind of doleful deadening of the entire book, as the reader confronts a page black with grief at every opening.

John Quarles, Regale lectum miseriae: or, A kingly bed of miserie In which is contained, a dreame: with an elegie upon the martyrdome of Charls, late King of England (London, 1649)

While not all printed elegies or funeral sermons included mourning pages, many did include mourning borders, a variant in which heavy black blocks are used to frame title pages.

In some cases, bones, skulls and other memento mori break the black monotony of the mourning border --

-- while in other cases, thick black borders on every page recall full-page mourning blocks:

While Sterne's famous black page upon Yorick's death creatively pulls the mourning block tradition into a work of fiction, it was hardly an innovation of print in the eighteenth century. In fact, Sterne is recalling a way of making meaning through the visual design of books that flourished over one hundred years before Tristam Shandy was published. Did eighteenth-century readers recognize this move as retro, harkening back to the rhetoric of an earlier age? Why pull the elegiac print tradition into the novel? Is there an intentional linkage here to the flurry of mourning pages produced in elegies on the death of Prince Henry, then King James I, then the martyred King Charles I?

That last question is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but I'm just ignorant enough of eighteenth-century British novels to feel okay posing it. Regardless of Sterne's intentions, what seems innovative and experimental to us is less so within the context of early modern print culture, and in fact may have even seemed like a memorial to an earlier time -- as if a novelist today were to include a mezzotint engraved frontispiece covered with tissue paper.

As I was finishing up this post, I decided to check ECCO for any instances of mourning pages. The one hit for the term "mourning page" brought up this, from the second volume of William Coombe's The Philosopher in Bristol (1775) (pages 60-62):

I guess that about sums it up.

Scented Sketches, on Books & Smell

2012-08-27T19:39:00.002-04:00

In response to several recent comments on the SHARP listserv regarding book-scented perfumes , Ellen Garvey posted a link to Tan Lin's screening/discussion, "Powerpoint and the Perfume of Reading." The actually screening of Lin's piece -- which takes up the first twenty minutes or so of the video -- is hard to follow. Some of the text is illegible, since you're watching a film of a film happening in the room in which the screen is angled away from the camera and takes up less than half of the shot. More interestingly, the most innovative aspect of the piece, to me at least, is cut off from us Vimeo viewers: the perfume "soundtrack" pumped into the room to accompany the piece.

What does a Powerpoint-inspired bibliographic e-poem smell like?

The perfumes are not described during the discussion, so I'm left to imagine what they might be. I smell institutional libraries -- the off-gassing of industrial carpeting, and the humid metallic smells of concrete staircases locked behind fire doors.

Strangely, I don't smell any paper. Libraries don't smell much like paper to me. Books in libraries are closed, and the thing about books -- the thing that makes them so olfactorily intimate -- is that they don't disclose their scent until opened up and brought close to the face. You really have to bury your nose in a book to smell it.

* * *

(A few months ago, I bought a paperback copy of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets from Amazon. As soon as I opened the box, the smell of the book hit me, a mix of potpourri and old ladies' perfume. Over time, the scent has barely diminished. I brought the book to a talk I gave this summer, with a passage bookmarked for the audience to look over. The first woman who took it wrinkled her nose. "I know," I said. "Potpourri?" She pulled it up against her face, closed her eyes and took a deeper, less tentative whiff. "More like cinnamon," she responded. I've never been able to read from this copy; the smell is too distracting.)

* * *

But: "The Perfume of Reading." A "perfume soundtrack." In the discussion, Tan Lin talks about his interest in "expanding the frame of reading to an environmental space," a space "disaggregated by fragrance." What's interesting to me about this and other comments throughout the discussion is the desire to retain a certain "bookishness" in the piece. Film brings a cinematic experience to the book, perfumes extend the space of reading a book to the broader space of a scented room. Why tag any of this work as fundamentally bibliographic? Put another way, plenty of self-described digital poetry projects verse onto a wall alongside various other media forms (audio, images). What does relating this type of work to the codex form get us? Where does it get us?

Earlier this year, Counterpath Press kindly sent me a copy of Lin's Heath Course Pak, which, if I were asked to describe it in only a handful of words, I would call one person's afternoon of 'net surfing in book form. I state that admiringly. It meanders from text to scan to image to screenshot, strung together through loose, lyrical affiliations to Heath Ledger's death or Samuel Pepys's Diary. In fact, if Samuel Pepys had had the web, he might have produced his journal something like this (a fact of which Lin is no doubt aware).

Again, the question: why print and bind it as a book?

Culturally, we position e-books as the "next stage" in the history of the book; but (this thought is still difficult to articulate well) to describe e-books as 'books' is to privilege content over form in the word 'book', which is another way of saying: it is far from clear to me that the most ostensibly innovative digital 'books' are still books at all. If we define books through the codex form -- rather than through some vague sense of 'long-form text-y argument-ish thing one reads in particular situations, usually while waiting or traveling' -- then digital innovation in the book means bringing other media into contact with the form and seeing how they play together, how they mediate each other. Which is exactly what Heath Course Pak does. It's a kind of inverted, perverted e-book.

* * *

Wendy Fernstrum has produced Literary Essences, a book of vials of perfume.

For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whose progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them.

// John Milton, Areopagitica

Milton's use of the word ‘violl’ is interesting, since, in the Greek, it usually meant a broad, flat vessel, like a saucer; and in the Authorized Version it is still translated as a ‘bowl’. The sense of its being a small glass bottle, containing an essence, seems to have developed in the seventeenth century. I have not pursued the inquiry further but I imagine that this meaning relates to the use of glass tubes and phials in scientific experiments. Their transparency would have been important for allowing one to read the level of a liquid, as we do in a thermometer or mercury-glass, or to see chemical reactions involving, for example, changes of colour.

In this rather new sense, then, as used by Milton and later by Robert Boyle, it heightens the idea of enclosure, of the text as contained, determined, stable, of the author within, both clearly visible and enduringly present.

// D. F. McKenzie, "The broken phial: non-book texts," in Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts

* * *

Smells, the smells of media objects, are often nostalgic, and sometimes disruptive, but rarely signal innovations. When digital technologies smell, something's wrong.

But Oh, too common ill, I brought with me
That, which betrayed me to my enemy:
A loud perfume ["perfume soundtrack"?], which at my entrance cried
Even at thy father's nose, so were we spied.

// John Donne, "The Perfume"

* * *

Then there's Smell of Books™, "a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer."

Before you get too worked up, it was a spoof. You can tell because the product is made by DuroSport Electronics, the same company who produced the Russian iPod knock-off that Roy gets Pam for Christmas one episode on the US version of The Office. Presumably, the writers of the show made the DuroSport website as a joke, with Smell of Books™ as a quirky follow-up.

Still, the fake "cease and desist" letter the company receives from the Authors Guild is amusing:

To whom it may concern:

The Authors Guild has recently been made aware of a new e-book related product called “Smell of Books”. This product has allegedly been designed to improve the e-book reading experience by simulating the smell of a real book.

While the Authors Guild supports efforts to improve the digital reading experience, we believe this product represents a significant threat to the development of aroma rights, and as such, will adversely impact the rights of our members.

It is important to note that in the digital era, books, and the smell of books, have been decoupled. In the future we expect authors to participate in the development of custom aromas for their books. These olfactory rights constitute a derivative right to be licensed separately. The preservation of these rights is essential as authors explore new markets and distribution channels.

Allowing unauthorized third parties to provide the “scent” for a book substantially changes the underlying work to a degree that infringes upon the author’s copyright, not to mention artistic vision.

Today the Authors Guild is calling on the DuroSport Corporation to remove the Smell of Books product line from the market. Furthermore, we are advising our members to refrain from licensing aroma rights until we have more clarity on this issue.

On the actual smell of books? Try this (somewhat strange) video from AbeBooks:

Building with Books II: "Bibliography"

2012-08-23T16:46:00.000-04:00

(This post and the one before it are companion pieces about two related projects I've finished. I've been sadly dilatory in writing about these projects but am happy to share, finally, a bit about my experiences with them.)

This past spring I collaborated with Elsewhere on "Bibliography," an installation in an empty storefront in the old Trust Building in downtown Durham. The work was part of the Durham Storefront Project, an exciting initiative that makes Durham's empty storefronts bloom each spring with local art.

Bibliography was an extension of Stump Speech, a book stump I assembled as part of my time at Elsewhere in July 2011. While the stump emerged from a research project on book structures as conceptual models for plant physiology, Bibliography emerged from an interest in the relationship between the structure of books -- big, brickish things -- and the structure of cities. City sidewalks as open books; city blocks as bookshelves storing buildings, spines out. Cities are living archives, and create spaces for conversation and exchange.

More than any city, though, we wanted to evoke an experience of Durham. The building we chose, 212 W. Main Street, was once a landmark in town, the tallest building in North Carolina at the time of its construction in 1905 and home to Durham's (and allegedly the entire South's) first elevator. It encapsulates the city's turn-of-the-century expansion, driven by the prosperity of the Bull Durham Tobacco company, in its uniquely-curved corner that once jutted out like the prow of a ship.

[From Open Durham]

The Trust Building’s curved corneris now sadly occluded at the street level, and its stature has long since been dwarfed by Durham’s handful of skyscrapers --

[From Open Durham]

-- but we knew we wanted to represent this jutting prow, somehow. Other than that, we had no plans, just six or so people, six or so hours, two sunny storefront windows and hundreds of books. This was an one-off, on-site collaboration.

We started by sorting. Funny how, when faced with a pile of books, so many of us instinctively start sorting -- by author, by title, by topic, by color. We sorted by size. It took us hours. (One quickly learns the subtle width differences between cookbooks, computer manuals and fitness hot-tos!)

Once the books were sorted by size, we laid out an arc between the two corner windows with boxes. Some of us began laying the books like masonry in the front, while others began stacking paperbacks, folded back and taped so they flipped open into a curved fan of pages. Unfortunately, I don't seem to have any images of this; but, this became the Trust Building's prow.

I had drawn and cut out some silhouettes of people walking from old encyclopedias, which we laid in front of the buildings. From there, we built out according to our whims, adding pop-ups from found images in old books to create gardens and joggers and even an oncoming train, rushing toward a giant dancer in '80s-era fitness gear.

Open encyclopedias paved the streets, while pop-ups cut from the books enlivened the street corners.

The resulting structure was neither library nor city, but a kind of biblio-geography that captured, in its own ramshackle way, the spirit of Durham's rambling, low-rise cityscape. Although I couldn't snap any decent photos from the outside, where visitors could peer into the city, it was fun to watch the bookstacks cast long shadows across the empty floor of the building, as the sun moved from one of the storefront windows to the next.

As a finishing touch, I set up a simple SMS system, like that used in Stump Speech, whereby any passerby could text the city, and receive back a transmission of biblio-chatter from inside its bookish buildings.

Those with smartphones could visit a website to observe how Durhamites had been interacting with their shadow book city. A few choice examples:

QUESTION: what do people do for fun in the book city?
BOOK CITY: gods which his chosen chariots, and stand before

QUESTION: What is the best life?
BOOK CITY: foreigners? for their faces were backward, and to

QUESTION: what is your favorite book about science?
BOOK CITY: These may include feedback squeals during sound checks

QUESTION: (Who do you love?)
BOOK CITY: Moses: and Shimron. And there for he would

All the books were received as donations, and went back into the community as donations, most of them to an afterschool program for children, some to a prison desperately in need of reading materials. I don't imagine some of the older, odder books -- like a how-to on molding gelatinized foodstuffs into various shapes -- will help either children or prisoners much; but I do hope a stray pop-up here and there may make the reading experience a little more magical.

Building with Books I: "Stump Speech"

2012-08-22T16:58:00.000-04:00

(This post and the next are companion pieces about two related projects I've finished. I've been sadly dilatory in writing about these projects but am happy to share, finally, a bit about my experiences with them.)

In July 2011, I was a scholar-in-residence at Elsewhere, a thrift-store-turned-"living museum" and all-around wonderfully creative, collective space in Greensboro. While there I completed Stump Speech, a big, chatty hunk-o'-stump made from books. Text it a question, and it responds with a random phrase pulled from one of books in the stump.

Some recent questions put to the Stump by museum-goers:

QUESTION: did you steal the poem?
STUMP: By the efforts of a persistent crew.

QUESTION: why is yo mama so fat?
STUMP: Souriez-moi de cette bouche charmante!

QUESTION: why did you allow such blatant corporate branding?
STUMP: Maybe it was because it was so like that first disastrous time I had called for Helen.

QUESTION: what is the color of rain?
STUMP: It was a silent battle and he became aware of that silence and wondered at it.

QUESTION: what is the best way to woo a woman?
STUMP: His countenance, in this repose, was mild and kindly.

QUESTION: where do you find magic?
STUMP: To the west, America, he said, full of greedy fools fouling up their inheritance.

QUESTION: when does recombination first exist?
STUMP: With an effort I put away from me a mental picture of two porkers facing each other over a green baize table.

QUESTION: what type of tree were you?
STUMP: It is the first topic of conversation I heard at the coffeehouse, the Gold Doubloon.

I love the idea of a device -- your phone -- mediating your experience, your "conversation," with an object immediately in front of you. It reminds me of the Victorian era's obsession with media as mediums, mechanisms for communicating with the dead/undead. "i think the stump is haunted," someone once texted me late at night. Like an actual tree stump, Stump Speech is an archive of once-active forms of life; technology reanimates it.*

When I came to Elsewhere, I didn't plan on making a talkative hunk-o'-stump. At the time, I was doing research for my "Plant → Animal → Book" essay, and was thinking a lot about medieval zoophytes like the barnacle goose tree, as well as bibliographic metaphors in botany -- that is, how the form and functionality of books gave shape to our earliest scientific (in the modern sense) conceptions of plant anatomy and physiology. I was loving how material the book was for seventeenth-century botanists like Nehemiah Grew. Far more than a mere platform for conveying information, the book was a physical thing to them, with a hefty weight and sophisticated structure; it folds in on itself like a seed and opens out like a flower as its "leaves" curl back. Although I had lived with books (and plants) my whole life, they had never had for me the kind of structural resonances that they had for Nehemiah Grew. I wanted to get deeper into the secret life of the book.

What better way than to spend many hours a day, delicately weaving together crumbling paperbacks?

In all the thousands of hours I've spent reading, I've never felt like I knew books better than I did during those three weeks of not reading them. I got to know how much force a spine could take before cracking; which kinds of binding glues still stretches after three decades in storage, and which dries out; the angles at which pages fanned, relative to a book's width; how the structure of a book's spine (glued or bound) affects the "chunking" that occurs when it's laid flat and open; how the weight of the paper determines the curve of a page as it turns; and so on, and so on. Though such lessons seem insignificant, they absolutely are not to a book historian: in fact, they signal entire cultures and histories in the social life of print. These material differences have framed and altered how people across time have moved through texts.

A second motivation for the stump: my desire to showcase one of the book's most artistically underutilized facets, its fore-edge. Some extant early modern books bear titles or markings along the fore-edge, indicating their owners stored their books edge out. In the nineteenth-century, fore-edge paintings became something of a fad, as evident in this online exhibit from the Boston Public Library. Yet today, the fore-edge is conceptually blank zone on the book, barely noticed. With the stump, I wanted to showcase this versatile part of the book's structure -- the soft crumplings where readers thumbed their pages; the mottled marbling of molds and water damage; the beautiful variety of colors that tip the page of vintage paperbacks, from highlighter yellows to dried-blood browns.

An intended consequence is that the stump acts as a kind of alternative Ramellian book wheel, facilitating random reading across different texts. I've watched people approach it cautiously, then peek into its bark, read a bit, pull apart another book, then read a little more. The stump has an unexpected depth and fluidity, like some rustling sea of paper you can dip in and out of. Someone once told me a circle of people had been reading across it collaboratively, each person picking a bit and sharing it as they gathered around the stump's base. An alternative arrangement of books generates new ways of experiencing them, of interacting with them.

[Part of Elsewhere's mission is to preserve its "collection," a mass of stuff that gets assembled, sorted, mixed together mashed up and moved about as artists and interns cycle through the museum each month. Most of the art there can be disassembled and in fact many of my favorite pieces are repurposed from earlier works. Because most of the books I used were part of Elsewhere's permanent collection, I couldn't harm them in making the stump; so I wove the books, fore-edge out, to a structure devised of hardware fabric.]

Ultimately, then, the project was more about my own learning process than it was about creating an object. I was brought to Elsewhere as a scholar-in-residence, and while some of the artist residents seemed a little stumped (har har) as to why a PhD student was creating what looked (kind of?) like art, the experience was, for me, a scholarly one, since it was borne of research I was doing, and was done to help answer historical questions I was pursuing. I make this point not to draw arbitrary distinctions between scholarly and artistic processes but because, right now, it seems more urgent that we invite creative "t(h)nkering" into scholarship rather than vice versa. In fact, it doesn't surprise me that the three scholars-in-residence at Elsewhere last summer ended up making things: we were starved for opportunities to engage with the fruits of our research in ways other than writing, in modes other than argumentative, and in media other than text.

We need spaces like that fostered at Elsewhere right now. They are models of what humanities labs could be, if these labs 1) were politically engaged, 2) were embedded in the communities they seek to serve and 3) following that, were constituted outside the institutional power structures that most only mildly critique at best.

*My friend and collaborator Nick Bruns is largely responsible for getting the stump to chat. Nick was helping me with the project as a way of getting his feet wet with some programming skills. He had no PHP or SQL skills going into the project, and while I had a little bit of knowledge, I was too busy with the stump to give him much help. So instead of a leisurely wade, Nick got tossed into the deep end of the pool (sorry, Nick) and within three weeks, had taught himself enough not only to get the SMS call-and-response working, but to set up a decision tree such that certain types of questions ("why," "what," "how," etc.) resulted in different kinds of answers from the stump. Nick has long since buzzed past me in terms of coder knowledge and is now completing a master's in computer science at Cornell. So if you ever need a creative, quick-learning programmer...

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.