ENGL 668k: Digital Studies (Spring 2004)

Invisible Technologies

The Blake Digital Text Project offers a number of useful scholarly devices: a concordance to the Blake canon, links to the full text of each of the poems, and, most notably, a graphical hypertext version of the Songs of Innocence and Experience. As the editors state in their introduction, the goal of this last project is to offer a variety of approaches to interpretation by presenting the user with a repository that includes “contextual material, existing interpretations, annotated bibliographies, sound files, and anything else likely to be of interest.” This last bit, “anything else likely to be of interest,” really characterizes the project, as the editors seem to want to err on the side of inclusion rather than exclusion—online readers can even contribute their own annotations and musical interpretations to the ever-growing heap.

On the bright side, the BDTP is like a critical edition on steroids. Unfettered by page limits, book bindings, and other constraints associated with traditional codex publishing, this edition can take you from “Infant Joy” to weather satellite photos of the Oregon coast in less than the time it takes you to sing “The Tyger.” Without leaving your desk, you have enough materials in front of you to produce, for example, thoughtful comparisons between a variety of 19th century views on education and child rearing. On the down side, though the linking structure gives the user the illusion of critical control, it is actually, I would argue, very rigid in the sense that the user is always bound by what McGann would call the various “grammatical” decisions the programmers made in constructing the hypertext from within. In other words, though the “rhetorical” interface suggests that the user is making the connections, those connections have, in a sense, already been pre-determined by the editors (McGann “Textonics”).

There are other problems with this version of the Songs. There are no color reproductions (the files are just too large) and the black and white scans, even though they have been edited “one pixel at a time,” are often difficult to read, particularly on a small screen. Color and resolution have been sacrificed in the service of hypertextuality—no small sacrifice considering Blake’s work is so overwhelmingly visual. In addition, rapid looping from one poem to another, from poem to commentary, from picture to bibliography, from word to audio rendition, often results in a lack of continuity that is likely to bewilder a reader unfamiliar with the Songs. All this said, I probably wouldn’t send a student to the BDTP version of Blake before he or she had actually seen a copy of the work either in the original or in some kind of facsimile edition.

For this purpose, I think that the digital versions of the Songs available at the Library of Congress website do a wonderful job of suggesting/ reproducing the “aura” of the originals. (I know this is a loaded term, via John Berger and others, but for now I am using “aura” to suggest something of the fragile bookishness of Blake’s originals as well as the intensity of the colored images.) The editors of this site clearly wanted to approximate for the viewer some sense of what it feels like to be in the special collections room—the access page for the collection is in fact titled “Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room”—with a copy of the Songs on the table in front of you. Every effort is made to foreground the “object-ness” of the work, a concern that the BDTP obviously does not share. For each edition, the editors have included high resolution scans of each part of the book—the cover, the end papers, the blank pages—that capture the gradations in color and show the pages in the slow process of decay.

There are no quick search by word or image options—to view the text you have to use the notably titled “page turning mode” that allows you to flip through the pages as though you were holding the codex in your hands. The book is displayed as an open face with both the recto and the verso showing up on the screen at once and around the pages you can see the outline of the cover as well as the crease in the spine. Unlike the BDTP, this site does not offer much in the way of ancillary interpretive materials and this makes sense considering the goal here is to display and preserve. You wouldn’t come to this site to read the Songs, just as you wouldn’t travel to the Folger Library to read Hamlet. You come to this site to look and examine the books as art objects. While projects like TextArc offer exciting ways to think about how digital technology allows us to see/use texts in ways that were not possible before the advent of the personal computer, I think it is important to remember that the ability to preserve perishable objects and to offer the user virtual access to these objects is perhaps one of the most monumental developments in digital humanities thus far. At the same time, I think this is a technological advance we sometimes take for granted.

I recently read an article by Eric Roston in Time magazine entitled “Tangled Wires” that talks about what happens when technology becomes invisible. He writes, “What is technology? A handy definition goes like this: if something breaks or crashes, it’s technology; if you don’t notice it, it’s no longer technology. Consider the car. Cars were probably a new technology until the 1950s, when they became reliable enough not to fall apart at high speeds. Microsoft Windows is clearly technology because it crashes all the time. Cell phones are technology because you can’t hear the person you’re talking to and also because we, as a society, haven’t settled on etiquette for using them in public” (Roston). I was originally going to post this as a separate blog entry and comment that I wish I had included this essay as part of my pedagogy assignment—I think it would be a great exercise to make a list of visible versus invisible technologies—but I think the issues that Roston raises have relevance to our discussion of Blake on-line.

Once we no longer obliged to talk about images files that are too large, screens that are too small, internet connections that won’t cooperate and once we have developed intuitive interfaces that are not just naturalized, but nearly impossible to detect, I wonder to what extent “reading/looking at Blake on-line” will simply become “reading/looking at Blake.” And I wonder if ultimately we won’t see that there is any important or relevant distinction to be made? The interface of the BDTP is clumsy enough that the “digital” in “digital text project” foregrounds itself pretty readily, but the simplicity of the Rosenwald interface eerily approaches invisibility—at least for me. As Jess rightly notes in her blog posting, the fact that many digital editions of Blake insist that readers confront textual variations disrupts our traditional understanding of what constitutes a literary text. I wonder when and to what extent this new understanding of what it means to be a text will become naturalized, something we no longer question or keep in mind? Yet another argument for capturing these things in the process of becoming.

Roston, Eric. “Tangled Wires.” Time 9 Feb. 2004. (No page numbers, sorry. This article was included in the “Time Bonus Section: Inside Business.”)

Posted by Jenny at May 4, 2004 02:14 PM