If you prefer (or if you are experiencing technical difficulties), you may post your response to Part II of the Digital Humanities assignment as a comment to this entry.
Posted by mgk at May 3, 2004 12:05 PMLiterary Research as Play
The two sites I’d like to consider are a Textarc version of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience and the one from The Blake Digital Text Project. In some ways the comparison is unfair since the former is a mechanism for viewing any text, not Blake in particular, while the latter is designed with this particular text in mind. In addition, Textarc has no means of including visual images besides words in its view of the work. Nevertheless, each site emphasizes a visual, patterned representation of Blake’s series of poems.
The fact that Blake was so interested in the arrangement of the poems and the images (evidenced by the numerous shuffling and rearranging over the years) underscores the importance of unity within this text. Songs was not intended to be merely an anthology. The works within it are interconnected and juxtaposed. Hence, it would seem to be ripe for a hypertext environment, which can imitate and enhance this sense of unity.
Though it is not exactly mean to be “read” in a traditional manner, Textarc visually captures the unity of Songs nicely. The text of the poems arranges itself clockwise in a single, wide ellipse. Like a mini Milky Way, all the words used in the poem are contained in the figure. Any word chosen with the cursor generates rays to their various locations throughout the poems. Thus, every word search using the Textarc emphasizes the interrelation of the Songs. Similarly, the manner in which the Textarc “reads” itself (with a looping, comet-like orange line, interrupted by fireworks bursts of purple association lines) continually reminds the observer of its coherence. The term story line takes on new meaning.
The Blake Digital Text Project, on the other hand, presents the poem series first as a list. Oddly, this static list undercuts one of the main features of the site, which is to demonstrate the variety of the editions. Each song is on its own page, but the image is uncolored (but this is a material constraint, as explained by the introduction) and disembodied, floating in a black background. It is a page, and yet it’s not a page. Options for jumping to other poems gives a sense of the continuity of the work. However, in no case is there an option to view both pages, verso and recto, together. Knowing the order of images is certainly important, but comparing and contrasting them simultaneously (as the Library of Congress site allows) seems to be an important intention in Songs. The sense of the work as a book while preserved with the image of the page is lost with this limitation.
This view of the songs does, however, allow one the possibility of seeing the development of Songs over time. Though another important option for scholarship surely, this view further renders the songs unconnected and isolated from each other. Rather than maintaining them as part of a scheme or even of several schemes, DBTP begins to feel a little like a Romantic’s version of Afternoon, A Story. The number of possible paths for reading through the poems is enormous.
The interactivity of these sites varies greatly and says something about their view of literary analysis. The BDTP offers a wide range of choices with each Song page: songs versions of the poems, close views of drawings, typographical versions of the poems, annotations, and bibliographical information. One can explore these embedded pieces of information, but not interact with them. There is, however, a significant possibility for interaction in the site’s opportunity to email annotations to the site’s web editor. I would call this an interactivity that is so delayed as to render in non-interactive. It does, of course, insure the value of the content in what is meant to be a public experience or, I should say, a collective experience. In this, it imitates the wider scholarly enterprise of building on the work of others, and slowly, carefully, laboriously (if this sounds critical, it should) compiling new understanding of Blake’s work.
Textarc’s interactivity is less prescribed, and it is a private one. My viewing of the text applet is a fresh viewing. My search for patterns does not build on the scholarship of others, for Textarc basically offers an algorithmic frame for Blake rather than a repository for Blake and things Blake. The word count, brightness, placement, and associations are determined by the text not by editorial choice. Though interaction is limited in options, it is real, in that something really changes in a unique way. As a research tool, it is the more poetical of the two. In describing the value of viewing screens, the editor points out that they give, ”a chance to live with the ideas buried in fine literature on a day-to-day basis. The ideas, vocabulary and associations in the texts enter your mind at a pre-attentive level every time you glance at one; and focused study is repaid with even more depth of understanding.” Ultimately, Textarc perhaps brings into the study of humanities a necessary element missing from the more traditional analytical tool like the BDTP: a dynamic sense of play.
Digital, Funny… and Truly Useful
I would like to discuss a little bit about three of the five sites we used for the digital humanities assignment: The William Blake Archive, The Blake Digital Text Project and Digital Materials from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection (Library of Congress). The first two sources share the characteristic of being focused in Blake (1757-1827), whereas the third one gives special attention (two works from Blake on the “front page”) to that same author. In the other two sources, Blake’s works represent just one possible subject among others.
Although their shared focus in Blake´s production, the three sites that I just mentioned develop quite diverse approaches to the subject. First of all, they react in different ways to the fact that a vast part of William Blake’s work is “illuminated books,” which means that we cannot approach these works without taking into account their hybrid nature of written texts and miniature paintings.
On one hand we find the The Blake Digital Text Project which, as its name announces, opts for focusing in the text. This source does not give up completely the graphic side of Blake’s work, but instead of investing energy in colorful reproductions of Blake’s plates, the site provides black and white images and focuses in the text (lets say “The Tyger”) stanza by stanza, and even word by word, with numerous notes and references that let the reader have a deeper understanding of the text he/she is confronted with.
On the other hand –and probably at the other extreme of this minimum range of digital humanities projects that I have gotten to know- there are the Digital Materials from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection (Library of Congress). In this case, the text is just one of the elements (and not necessarily the most important one) included in the rare books that this site tries to “put in the hands” of its visitors. This project assumes that its mission is to put precious and unique objects (books) within the reach of researchers that might not be as interested in the hidden meaning of words and stanzas, as in the history and current state of a particular book. This is why this archive not only includes photos of the pages of two different editions of Blake´s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience,” but also images of the covers and the blank pages that precede the illuminated poems.
Finally, I would describe The William Blake Archive as a project located in the middle of the two other initiatives, because it conceives Blake’s illuminated poems as a form of art where words cannot be disassociated from images. From my point of view, this archive tries to provide its readers with a critical edition of Blake’s production that gives equal importance to the written words (multiple versions, notes, comments) and the paintings (reproduced in full color and high quality in each of the available versions of the illuminated poems).
Some concrete examples taken from the way that these three sites work may help me illustrate this classification. In the case of The Blake Digital Text Project, if you go to the index and look for “The Tyger,” you will not be especially amazed for the B/W image of the plate, but you will not be less than excited when, using the interface to navigate stanza by stanza (in the plate), you discover that some words are linked to interesting critical comments. Besides, a menu located on the left side of the screen gives you access to press articles, statistics, comics and even songs related to the text but located outside the Academia production on the subject.
In the case of The William Blake Archive, the fun comes from the way that text and images collaborate with each other in the interface and the search mechanisms. Thus, in this environment the word “tyger” can lead me to the multiple occasions that Blake used it in its works, but also to the numerous times that the author drew tigers or similar cats in the works included in this archive. This is possible because almost every corner of Blake’s illuminated poems are described with words; it is through words that one gets to the images, and once confronted with the images, one can zoom in and out getting into details that could be compared within different editions in the same way that it is possible to compare different versions of a stanza in a particular poem.
The site of Digital Materials from the Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, on the other hand, does not give you lots of possibilities to play. The designers of the site seem to rely on the uniqueness of the objects they are dealing with. The interface lets you go through the pages of the book the same way you would do if you would have it in your hands, with one important advantage: you can dramatically enlarge the pages without loosing quality in the images. On the contrary, the enlarged pictures are so sharp that one probably can detect details that would not have seen when confronted with the original.
Homer: “There’s three ways to do things: the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way!”
Bart: “Isn’t that the wrong way?”
Homer: “Yes, but faster.” (The Simpsons)
In studying digital media’s treatment of William Blake’s writing, the differing styles of collection reveal the importance of searchable presentations over basic collections. We have continually discussed where digital studies will take us, both as readers and as scholars, during the past semester. The Internet certainly makes research faster, more efficient and more useful and this Blake project has shown that digitization allows a myriad of presentation options for those that wish to work with a given text. It also seems that innovation for the Internet is now an attempt to split available information into categories, useful and not useful (search engines perform that task, allowing us to see the gold in the “crap” -- as it has been repeatedly described). Is that what these projects have done? In working with the search engine in The Blake Archive and the presentation of Textarc, it seems that the reader becomes a literary Google-er, one who puts in a few words and the mystery machine on the desk spits out useful chunks of information. Has digitization simply sped up what we could have done before, however painstakingly? I fear I am being overly cynical about these Internet sites. I truly appreciate what help they are and (at least nominally) how much work went into them. In working on a comparison of them, I can’t seem to escape the nagging question of “why?” What effects will these sites have on scholarship? To make sense of these sites, I try to examine them in regards to the specific abilities they perform in relation to what has or could have been done without digital means. After all, is not the study of digital media the study of what makes digital media different from the non-digital variety?
While useful in their own right, basic collections such as the Rosenwald site simply lack the ability to offer a new dimension to a study of William Blake that modern scholars require to distinguish themselves from the generations of brilliant people that have devoted their lives to this work in the past. The Rosenwald collection allows everyone a fast trip to the Library of Congress rather than allowing a new manner of study. What then of Textarc and the Blake Archive? Are they merely fast research tools that save us gas and time?
It would be possible to reproduce Textarc’s image without the computer. Similarly, it would be possible to make enough copies of Blake’s images and words on paper to file them by each word and by each searchable aspect of an image and file it all in a massive collection of paper. What then, is the value of speed? It must be the ideas that are now able to be both visualized and dispersed at a rate previously impossible. The speed that has been added to literature study (a humanity never particularly associated with rapid and violent change) is now forcing scholars to respond to these specific ideas faster.
To avoid coming across as a reactionary missive, I wish to clarify that I don’t reject what value these sites have. It is easy to forget in this inundation of digital helpers, that the only innovations in literature study are the result of human interpretation and thought devoted to the work in question. It is for precisely this reason that Textarc and The Blake Archive are so important. They open study that had previously been reserved for more advanced scholars is now available to inexperienced students, hopefully speeding up the evolution of scholarly thought. For example, to have a specific understanding of the repetition of words and where these repetitions occur in Songs of Innocence and of Experience that Textarc provides in minutes, a scholar would have previously needed to spend untold hours poring over the work. Reading and re-reading, poring over critical analyses, discussing the poems in classrooms, these would all be standard practice to master a concept such as how many times Blake uses the word “green” and the importance of where he uses it.
Therein lies the limitation of what these sites are capable of, the exclusive use of digital thinking. MOO’s vision is to allow a way to study the works outside their digital fractals is the step that MOO’s envision, a sensational (in both senses of the word) immersion in the literature world. This step is extremely difficult to quantify in a scholarly manner at this point, but it will be interesting to see what avenues teachers make use of the creation of a literary world in which the student may be dropped into, and left to feel what the literature is, rather than break up the work to look at it in a different manner.
To compare the types of sites we utilized is indescribably difficult outside of the concrete technical aspects each offer. Sure, Textarc and The Blake Archive offer new search methods that allow an in-depth study of a work at remarkable speed. These features will surely facilitate a scholastic pondering of the work. The Rosenwald collection allows readers from the entire world to see documents that they may never have the opportunity to see so closely. The Blake Digital Text Project provides a setting in which secondary material can be hyperlinked to the poem in a fairly standard way. The MOO, again, is a new setting in which players can experience William Blake’s material in new ways at the hands of whoever created and maintains the program. These technical aspects are certainly intriguing in their own right, but what effect do they have on us now? I keep cycling back to this question of the value of speed. Do they simply allow more people a chance to think about or to experience Blake? Without question. What are the effects of these faster manifestations of Blake study? Perhaps the reason why approaching these questions of digital effects is so difficult is the fact that they force a questioning of literature study itself. Why do scholars study works in the ways that they do? Given that at least some of the web sites we worked with were created in the academic world, it is worthwhile to consider why Textarc was constructed in the way that it was. It certainly seems built to facilitate close readings of works while condemning the computer with the drudgery.
Digital Humanities Assignment
1. The Blake archive contains a most useful search engine in which a reader may search for images in the works in addition to text. The selection of search elements is not unlimited, but there are many useful categories (such as animals, people, positions, etc.). In searching for “tigers,” I thought it would be useful to include similar animals such as lions and cats. The engine is constructed, however, with multiple labels for each image, meaning that “tigers” are also registered in searches for “cats” and “lions.” All told, there are two other plates depicting large cats in the Songs of Innocence and Experience other than the aforementioned plate 50 in “The Tyger.” They both occur in “The Little Girl Found” in plate 35 and plate 36, although the latter is probably a lioness. A tiger also appears in plate 9, Copy E of “Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Great Albion,” another of Blake’s ‘illuminated books.’
The various editions of the poems presented on the archive allow a comparison of the different colorations between editions. While each print appears identical, many color variations exist. One such example in plate 50, Copy C features a tiger with a menacing red eye, while many others a simply two-toned.
2. Textarc provides a graphic representation of the text, allowing a close reading rather quickly. Some of the most frequent terms in the songs are “little,” “mother,” “father,” “happy,” “sun,” “delight,” “birds,” and “happy.” The most popular word seems to be “love,” and it is liberally spread between the two halves of the work. Textarc shows that the words “Night,” “sleep,” “weep,” “Holy,” and “Bright” are most popular in Songs of Experience while Songs of Innocence tends to repeat the terms “joy,” “sweet,” “green,” and “white.”
3. In the 1794 edition (the earlier one), “The Tyger” is printed on the verso side of a page facing the poems “My Pretty Rose Tree,” “Ah! Sun and Flowers,” and “The Lily.” In the 1826 version, the poem is printed on the recto side of the page, along with the rest of the book. For some reason, nothing is printed on any verso sides in the 1826 edition. The Rosenwald site allows the perusal of photographs of the books rather than digital images of the pages. I particularly enjoyed the ability to view the cover of the books.
4. The following is a list of the musical versions of “The Tyger” listed on The Blake Digital Text Project. Each sample contains both the musical clip and the citation and an easy manner to purchase the recording.
a. Benjamin Britten
Songs & Proverbs of William Blake, Op. 74 (1965)
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, baritone; Benjamin Britten, piano
London Records OS 26099 (Decca Record Co., Ltd., 1969) [with The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, Op. 35]
b. Greg Brown, Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Angus Foster: Bass
Michael Doucet: Violin
Peter Ostroushko: Violin, Mandolin
Dave Moore: Button Accordion, Harmonica, Pan Pipes
Greg Brown: Guitar, Vocals
Produced By: Bob Feldman & Greg Brown
Engineered & Mixed By: Scott Rivard
Recorded At: 74th Street Studio, Minneapolis, Minnesota
c. Finn Coran, The Blake Project. Recorded at Park Studio, Waterfall Studio, Lydlab Studio, Rainbow Studio and Bard Studio, Oslo, Norway between 1993-96.
d. Gregory Forbes, Selections from William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Gregory Forbes: vocals, guitars, & flageolets
Deborah Twiddy: concert & alto flutes
Geoffrey Sommers: violin & snare drum
Grant Albert Heckman: bass electric (Songs of Experience)
David Schleich: tomtoms ("The Tyger") hand drums ("Ah! Sun-flower")
Marie Borowec: vocal ("A Little Girl Lost")
Thomas Handy: guitar ("Ah! Sun-flower)
The music was recorded by Douglas McClement at Comfort Sound, Toronto, Canada.
5. Milton receives his inspiration from hearing the Bard’s representation of Satan’s tale. To Hell, to gain the company of lost lady fair!
Posted by: Brad at May 6, 2004 12:26 AMGood thoughts, Walter, and I agree with you about Textarc; in fact I wonder whether the "freshness" of the experience, the fact that each new user opens up new fields of play (literally) might serve as a kind of index of that much over-used word, interactivity.
With regard to the "unity" of the Songs, there are some interesting dynamics that emerge if one further distinguishes between the unity of the text and the unity of the codex artifact--in fact, you do this implictly in your own comparison of Textarc to the LoC images. Blake was very self-aware of both textual and artifactual unity, and worked to complicate them; with regard to the former, he re-arranged the order of various poems in his different printings of the Songs, and indeed, a couple migrate back and forth between Innocence and Experience; with regard to the latter, Blake's work became more "painterly" and less-oriented toward the codex form as time went on--you can see this if you Compare images from the Blake Archive, and it also manifests itself in the lack of facing page verso images in the later books.
Posted by: Matt at May 9, 2004 05:56 PMSilvia, a good overview of the strengths and weaknesses of some of the different sites; what's interesting I think is that they all succeed in provoking some form of aesthetic response, whether it's the awe/aura of the LoC reproductions or the playfullness of Textarc. Interesting too that despite its new-fangled ludic nature, in many ways Textarc is that most traditional of tools: the concordance. Which raises the question of whether these older scholarly tools can also be playful, and whether one finds opportunities to play where one least expects them--in the dryasdust corners of bibliography and textual criticism.
Posted by: Matt at May 9, 2004 05:59 PMBrad, good thoughts from you too, particularly your evocation of the culture of speed which--you're absolutely correct--has been central to the culture of computing from the outset (read Virilio, or James Gleick on the subject of speed in modern technology). One question: when does mere acceleration undergo a kind of phase change and become something qualitatively different? Google is the perfect example: note the way it flaunts the (miniscule) time required to perform the search at the top of your list of results. The rhetorical message would seem to be this isn't just faster, it's also something new, different . . . something more.
Posted by: Matt at May 9, 2004 06:03 PM