Folks,
I've just now submitted grades. My thanks again to everyone for a truly terrific semester.
I've commented on each of the digital humanities assignments below. I'll also be sending email to each of you with your grades for the digital humanities assignment and the final paper, along with a few final words on the paper and your work this semester.
Best, Matt
SCHOLARSHIP SPOTS IN THE
2004 Digital Humanities / Humanities Computing Summer Institute
University of Victoria
June 25-30, 2004
http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/institute/
Dear Members of the Humanities Computing Community,
With good news of sponsorship for this year's summer institute, those
involved in the institute are very pleased to announce that we are able to
offer several scholarships for 2004. The scholarships reduce greatly the
cost of registration, to $225 (CDN) for faculty and staff and $150 for
graduate students for the six days of the institute and the banquet.
If you would like to be considered for one of these spots, please visit the
institute's website (http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/institute/) and, after perusing
the offerings, contact Ray Siemens (siemens@uvic.ca) by **May 14** with [1]
a very brief bio-statement (which could include a link to a website), [2]
an indication of which offering would be your first choice and (if that is
unavailable) an alternate preference, and [3] a short paragraph outlining
your current work, and how attending the institute would benefit that work.
About the Institute
The Digital Humanities / Humanities Computing Summer Institute provides an
environment ideal to discuss, to learn about, and to advance skills in the
new computing technologies, over a week of intensive coursework, seminar
participation, and lectures. The institute is hosted by the University of
Victoria's Faculty of Humanities and its Humanities Computing and Media
Centre, and is co-sponsored by the University of Victoria, Acadia
University, and Malaspina University-College. It is supported also by the
Consortium for Computing in the Humanities / Consortium pour ordinateurs en
sciences humaines, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the
Canadian Initiative on Digital Libraries, the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Image, Text, Sound and
Technology Strategic Research Grant program, and others.
For details, see the institute's website, at this URL:
http://web.uvic.ca/hrd/institute/ .
On behalf of all those involved in the institute, I encourage you to
consider joining us, and I look forward to welcoming you this summer.
With all best wishes,
Ray Siemens
Director
____________
R.G. Siemens
English, Malaspina University-College, Nanaimo, BC, Canada. V9R 5S5.
Office: 335/120. Phone: (250)753-3245, x2046. Fax: (250) 740-6459.
siemensr@mala.bc.ca http://purl.oclc.org/NET/R_G_Siemens.htm
I said I'd blog 'em! (If you hate one, I'll take it down. But it has to be of you. :>) I kept them reasonably small so the load time should be tenable.
Posthuman bar adventures:
Ed interfaces with the jukebox
Beth interfaces with the pool table
Joseph interfaces with the pool table
Kelly interfaces with Playboy Pinball
Matt interfaces with the pool table
I am beginning to realize that "interface" is no kind of verb, so here are people dealing with things other than technology (disregarding my camera, of course).
Ed, Ed's sister Alenda, and Alenda's boyfriend Brian are color-coordinated (and goofy)
Marc is about to ask for more gruel
Everybody looking like salty old pool professionals (yes, pool professionals are always blurry)
Last semester at this time, I was positively obsessed by two things: William Blake and paratext. I spent quite a few hours creating two separate projects dealing with these two subjects, hoping, in doing so, to purge myself of my twin obsessions. But now I find that not only have they not been purged, they have become intertwined. That is my excuse, anyway, for what follows: a discussion of Blake and paratext.
First let me define paratext, according to Gerard Genette. In his masterful work, Paratext: Thresholds of interpretion, Genette writes, “More than a boundary or a sealed border, the paratext is, rather, a threshold.” It is “a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that . . . is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it.” Then quoting Philipe Lejeune, Genette further describes paratext as “a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text” (2).
There are some loaded words in that definition, of course, words like “privileged”, “transaction” (I’m thinking in market terms) and “controls.” This brings us into the territory of “representational politics,” in terms of who controls access to and frames the meaning of texts. It also brings into us the arena of “sociologics of text” and “bibliographical codes” championed by Jerome McGann, refracted through the prism of electronic technology in the online environment. I hope all this will come clear in the discussion below.
More specifically, paratext includes “front matter” (such as title page, prefaces, and epigraphs), “end matter” (notes, postfaces, even reviews), and what we might call “between-matter” (chapter titles, intertitles, illustrations). Needless to say, there are plenty of such examples in the digitized works of William Blake. I would also argue (did argue, in my paratext project from last semester) that paratext also includes critical apparati and other interpretive tools, and, in the online environment, multimedia and interfaces. It is on these elements that I would like to focus.
What first got me going on Blake and paratext was looking at the images of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience owned by the Rosenwald Collection at the Library of Congress. My goodness, I asked myself—immediately enamored—is that really what the cover of the 1826 edition looks like? Is that green marble in the inside cover paper original (it certainly resembles much of Blake’s stone-strewn landscape)? And when did that little portrait of Blake appear in the front matter (was he such a hot commodity in 1826 that his portrait was called for?)? And then comparing the 1826 and 1794 editions, more rich questions arose, such as: why are the 1794 images printed verso and recto, but only verso in the 1826 edition? Does this reflect changes in technology between 1794 and 1826 (deeper, more precise imprint in 1826, but increased danger of ink leaking through the page) and a more savvy sense of Blake’s audience/market (1826 edition being more “deluxe” than the 1794 edition, signifying that Blake has given up on reaching anyone but collectors). The questions are fairly endless; the answers, however, are not as forthcoming, since this is not a scholarly site—it seems more for public consumption, to show off the collection. This is acceptable, I think, as long as there are other multimedia sites online featuring Blake’s work (and as long as they allow scholars access to the materials on fairly easy terms). Which brings us to discussion of The Blake Archive.
How can we do anything but genuflect to the wonderful editors and managers of The Blake Archive for the wonderful service they provide to scholars of William Blake? Speaking personally, I can say that the Archive has revolutionized my thinking about online scholarship, the relations between image and text, even, heaven help me, turned me into a budding Romanticist. Allowing me to toggle between text and image, between image and image, and providing scholarly context—all this and more is on hand (literally) at The Blake Archive. And yet, fabulous as it is, I find much of the technology clunky, and at certain times unwelcome. A good case in point would be my efforts to search for appearances of the tiger in Blake’s works. Having a check box specifically for “tiger” certainly helps, but what would help even more would be being able to type in the word “tiger” in a box at the top of the page, avoiding scrolling and scanning a long page, and be brought to relevant pages/images. Currently, when I finally come to a relevant image (after six clicks, which seems too many), it comes up in inote applet (that takes too long to load) that I have to jiggle with a mouse to make an image appear, and even then it is not centered (and no way to center it that I can tell), and it’s accompanied by an annotation I did not ask for which, frankly, distracts me.
I mentioned above that any discussion of paratext in a scholarly environment should include critical apparatus, and any discussion of paratext in a online environment should include interface. The Blake Archive, of course, offers both. The technology mediates everything one accesses at the Archive; using Genette’s terms, it controls ones reading of the text, and provides—even forces—transaction. But what if the interface is clunky and unwelcome, too controlling and transacting (exacting, anyway)? What does this do to the text and its reception? At the very least it suggests that you must in some sense be a techie, and very patient. In the same way, the critical apparatus—in this case, annotations—feels too controlling, popping up where it is not summoned. In all this I am not saying these elements should be removed or necessarily even changed; I am saying that other choices, other interfaces, might be helpful. What are the possibilities of offering one interface for scholars, who can take the time to master the technology of inotes and appreciate the critical apparatus, and another interface for the more casual, less scholarly, user? I hope it is at least something that has been considered by the editors of The Blake Archive.
A resource that might seem to be in competition with The Blake Archive would be the Blake Digital Text Project (BDTP). If it were a true competition, the BDTP would seem to be unequal to it, in that it has very simple (non-color) images and limited critical apparatus. But then going deeper into the site, one finds elements that positively distinguish it from its titanic adversary: I am referring here to the audio recordings of Blake’s Songs. These were a revelation to me, though, of course, the music itself was hardly up to the most exacting standards. I enjoyed Greg Brown’s bluesy-jazzy version of “The Tyger”, for example, as well as Finn Coren’s acid rock version, though find them slightly incongruous for a scholarly site, to say nothing of Gregory Forbes’s amateur folk effort. Benjamin Britten’s avant-garde art song would seem a better fit, though it was arguably the furthest from Blake’s sensibility. As to Allen Ginsberg’s recordings, I think the most generous thing one could say is that they reflect Ginsberg much more than Blake, and might have value at a Ginsberg site, but not here. But my intention is not to act as music critic but to muse on the function of such multimedia as a portal upon, and paratext to, the work of William Blake. I think such audio recordings frame Blake’s work in important ways, and offer the reader insights not otherwise available. In general, I’d like to see more such multimedia, particularly audio, added to scholarly websites, though I think the offerings here might be better situated in a section clearly devoted to Blake and popular culture, and annotated as such. Imagine a site that does for the aural what The Blake Archive does for the visual; and imagine the two in cahoots, in an interface that would allow them to play together. It's the type of thing I like to imagine anyway. No more inconceivable than what has already been accomplished online, things that, in Blake's words, were "once, only imagined."
I have done. Have I finally purged my obsession with Blake and with paratext? I’m guessing no, certainly not as long as such fascinating sites as those surveyed in the course of this assignment continue to crop up online. I see no reason why they shouldn’t. If this is what we have now, when web media is still taking its baby steps, imagine what might be when it can run a 4 minute mile?
Works Cited
Genette, Gerard. Paratexts: Thresholds of interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Related Links
Utopia: A User’s Manual. My site dealing with the paratext of Thomas More’s Utopia.
<http://www.wam.umd.edu/~byrnejo/utopia/>
Games of Innocence and of Experience. My site considering Blake’s Songs as a game.
<http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/designsonblake.ns/byrne/contraries.html>
I thought I'd offer up my online version of my close reading paper since we've been talking about e-publishing the class's work. First, I'd like to share the work. Second, it can offer this semester's editors one possible format. Third, I'd like to invite others to blog their ideas and the texts they worked on.
Words Matter: Nick Montfort's Ad Verbum
ED
P.S. Plus I had to post on the blog on my birthday!
Examining the multiple digital presentations of William Blake’s work, it became apparent that scholars had to decide whether or not, in archiving his work, they would present it as text with accompanying images or each plate as its own work with artistic elements of words interwoven with images (and words as works of art unto themselves). This affected not only the choice of presentation, or interface that presented Blake’s work, but also whether it would be searchable, indexed, and historically situated.
Most of the archives chose to privilege Blake’s text over the images not only because they desired to construct a searchable database of these words for scholars, but for epistemological reasons as well. Both Textarc and The Blake Digital Text Project emphasize his poetic skills, and the William Blake archive separates the text from the image and uses a representational matrix that continually asks, “what thought/idea is Blake attempting to signify with this image?” Blake’s work is acknowledged and held in acclaim for its representational logic and for the signifying power of his poetry, or use of language, instead of the additional play on representational forms that the plates make. As the assignment sheet attests, “Tyger, tyger burning bright” is the opening line of the most anthologized poem in the world, but what about the accompanying images and manipulation of lettering? There are material constraints interwoven in this distinction that I am pointing out, namely that one cannot search for an image but can search through metatext that attempts to indicate what an image is signifying, but I think that other archives thought about this representational logic as well. For instance, the Library of Congress Blake archive chose to present the Songs of Innocence and Experience in an “original” codex form that has been scanned. The plates function as images and text that are inseparable (and therefore not searchable) as one work that speaks to the function of images and words as well the poetic use of language to create a “written text.”
I am not attempting to make value distinctions between the two models, but instead want to focus on the representational and epistemological consequences of such a distinction. The move to emphasize Blake’s representational logic (or the elusive thing that is being signified) attempts to examine how and why Blake set about crafting his work from a very humanist perspective; implicit in this is a necessary familiarity with his work when encountering the archive. For instance, when navigating through the William Blake Archive, the user can search through text or choose types of images to view from categories, or can view specific plates. Developing such an interface separates plates from other plates and attempts to individualize them in some way as works unto themselves—it is analogous to examining a single track on a music album without focusing on the context that is developed through the other tracks (and yet one must wonder if such a context is always present, and if the desire for that context from the author of the text matters if it exists—a question we have looked at in depth this semester). The Library of Congress Blake archive retains this context through the presentation of the codex, and attempts to introduce Blake’s work through an “authentic” original (which contains its own problems-See Walter Benjamin’s “Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and other Critical Theorists who work on the concept of “origin”). I think it is important to note that one of these archives is a project developed by university sponsored academics, while the other is an outgrowth of the Library of Congress; both have overlapping audiences, but have different institutional objectives and prerogatives.
This question of audience affects the development of an interface for the reading/viewing of Blake’s works for the archives as well. The Library of Congress Blake archive is not only designed to stand in for the codex (by presenting the work as a digital codex that is to be read chronologically), but also introduces audiences to Blake in a way that other archives like Textarc do not. Clicking through the pages of the codex emphasizes an interaction with the text that was unavailable to many before and stands in for how the text was supposedly “intended” to be read by the author; the site is positing its archive as providing the “real thing.” Other sites emphasize scholarly investigations of the original work, and do not attempt to stand in for the work (or introduce it for that matter), but instead present it in a new fashion and allow for accessibility to aspects of the work that were previously unavailable. But Textarc and The Library of Congress Blake archive employ formalist notions of reading and do not consider the historical context or construction of the plates and text the way the William Blake Archive does. While Textarc and the William Blake Archive emphasize non-linear reading patterns of users (Textarc more explicitly), the question of audience in relation to these works determines in many ways how the archive is constructed. The William Blake Archive emphasizes scholarly articles that are available on Blake and point out different historical and cultural aspects of the work, focusing on its construction and the cultural impact Blake had; in comparison, the other archives are focused more on facilitating accessibility to Blake’s texts and representing these texts in novel ways.
What is most important in evaluating these works is acknowledging that none of them stand-alone. Many work off one another and may be used in tandem; in all likelihood the developers of the various archives may have been (or are still) in conversation with one another and recognize the strengths and weaknesses of their various archives, allowing for others to develop digital works that are not intended to shadow other archives, but instead work alongside them. Researching the historical context, specific images or text in Blake’s plates, or the intertextual information provided to the reader between the prints in a book requires multiple resources that these archives provide.
Walter Ong’s discussion of aural versus visual learning has lingered in the forefront of my mind throughout the span of this class. While browsing the Romantic Circles MOO and The Blake Digital Text Project I found myself considering his notion of sound as a “unifying sense” within the context of these two sites. While it may be somewhat of an overstatement to say that the sites’ use of sound “unifies” the experience of the texts, it is certainly worth noting the element of harmony that sound brought to both the MOO and The Blake Digital Text Project.
Blake’s “Milton a Poem,” a.k.a. the Bard’s tale, which is presented both textually and orally in the Romantic Circles MOO, tells the tale of the beginning of time. Appearing in a popup window with a background resembling aged parchment or papyrus, the text’s appearance is reminiscent of a centuries-old handwritten transcription. As the lines of text scroll vertically up the window, a man’s voice accompanies the words, reading them with a dramatic intonation and sounding not unlike James Earl Jones. Blake’s color images periodically fade in and out as the lines progress up the page, illuminating specific passages or phrases. With so many visual stimuli occurring within a small (no more than 8 in. by 3 in.) window, a simultaneous oral interpretation of the text has the potential to overwhelm and/or to become a distraction from the text. Yet it does just the opposite. The speaker’s voice serves to bridge the vast chronological, technological, and ideological distance between a story about the world as it came into being and its arrangement in a popup window frame on a computer monitor. The words themselves allude to a time before the existence of man, yet upon hearing them we are reminded that without the most modern of man’s innovations, we would be unable to make them come alive in such a dynamic environment. As Ong claims, spoken words are “magic” because they are power driven, whereas the words or “things” on the page are, in a sense, dead. The events within the MOO support the notion of this “magic,” seen in the effects of the Bard’s song on Milton. After he “hears” the poem in the MOO, Milton is “inspired to go down to the mortal grounds of Albion to find his fairer half before the great harvest of mankind.” Had he simply read the text, would he have been so inspired? The series of actions in the MOO that are required to inspire him suggest not; there is no denying the force of the words on Milton, and the reader, as they are spoken, or as Ong says, “envelop the listener” and “place him in the center of an auditory world.” The key phrase here is “envelop the listener,” which the oral accompaniment undoubtedly achieves in a manner impossible by simply reading static words on a screen.
The effect of Blake’s ephemeral images in the popup window effect is less successful. The images appear only fleetingly, and as the text scrolls over them, pieces of one or the other are temporarily indiscernible. The emergence of the images reflects the rightful assumption that they are inherent to the text, yet they fade too quickly, and are clearly presented as the least significant element of the content. The issue could be resolved if the entire text with accompanying images appeared at once in a larger window, yet if this were the case the reader would naturally read ahead of the voice, arrive at the conclusion of the poem before the speaker, and ultimately miss out on the rich, “enveloping sensation” of hearing and reading the text simultaneously. And so the images of the text are somewhat sacrificed to its oral rendition. In other words, the technological innovation that allows for an alternative, enriching textual experience of “Milton a Poem” detracts from what may be construed as the author’s original intent.
The same could be said for the four song versions of “The Tyger” in the Blake Digital Text Project. Surprisingly, the songs appear to be the chief attraction of the page on which the image of the original text is posted. While the black and white image of the illuminated poem is low resolution, the page with the images of the song album covers is busy and colorful. The song versions themselves span musical genres: Britten’s has an operatic feel and is accompanied by dramatic piano crescendos; Brown’s country style is reminiscent of Johnny Cash, including a twanging fiddle; Coren’s throbs with the rhythms of rock and roll; and Forbes’s acoustic rendition has a “folksy” tone. The song list appears to the left of the poem, adjacent to an illegible clickable graphic that allows the user to show or hide the list. After clicking on the singer’s name, the audio file automatically launches if the user already has a media player installed. If not, I saw no instructions on that page or the home page as to where to find and download a media player. The quality of the sound files is adequate—I could understand the words and, as in the MOO, follow along as I was listening. The singers’ dramatically different styles enhanced my experience of the poem, causing me to consider which words or phrases they emphasized and why. In the end, listening to four musical versions impelled me to read the text four times, gaining a fresh insight with each song. The aural versions of the poem produced a harmony in my readings that was not simply musical; listening to the text through four different sound filters allowed me a deeper and more holistic sense of the piece.
Yet, the aesthetics of this version of “The Tyger” did little to engage me. In addition to the low quality image of the poem itself and the aforementioned peculiar show/hide button, the dark purple links contrast poorly with the black background and the overall use of page space is visually ineffective.
Considering the decades he spent studying art and engraving, I surmise that had Blake witnessed these digital renditions of his poems, he may not have been pleased with the sites’ treatment of his illuminations. But does it matter if Blake’s illuminations have been subjugated and overshadowed by the spoken version of the digital text? Is it the job of digital humanists to preserve author’s original intent? Or is to present a text that will “envelop the listener,” allowing him an encounter with the text that is more dynamic and potentially enriching than that of the “dead words” in the codex? The answer to each question is yes. I envision a time when we will have it all: a digital version of a codex-based text that will not only preserve the original in its entirety, but will launch the reader into a sensory encounter with the text that will transcend the flat page from which it was born. Until then, readers must cobble together varying digital and print versions of a text, creating their own “unifying sense” of a piece and ever mindful of what has been added or sacrificed in the digitization process.
Noting the two entries that have been posted so far (Jess and Jenny), it’s rather interesting that at this point in this discussion of Blake, little has been mentioned about the content of his work, the ways in which Blake creates virtual spaces through the juxtaposition of blended imagery and text within his plates. This is quite appropriate in the context of this assignment—to search and discuss variant Blake resources in a critical manner is to search and discuss the mediation of Blake, not the work in itself. In fact, within new media (a purposefully broad term) there is a current that dictates that any close reading of a (new) mediated text is really a close reading of the media itself. We read Blake and cognitively blend the content of each plate but we do so based on prior decisions made with the text and, more importantly, prior incisions that digitization has made on us. Put differently, we possess an (often unconscious) awareness of the digital that precedes our interaction with these texts, an unspoken mandate that the text exist as a manipulable, user-controlled entity.
And, indeed, manipulation is what we get when we encounter these various Blake sites. As Jenny notes, this manipulation is quite obviously pre-configured towards the aims of the specific sites. But to what degree can we say that this manipulation actually reflects the content of Blake’s artistry? Do the structure/ interface/ presentation in these sites in allow us to reflect upon the nature of the plates themselves? In other words, do these sites in any way extend in the conceits put forth by Blake’s composition? The answer, of course, varies from site to site but each can be seen as an expositor of sorts of the aims of Blake himself, namely the desire to expunge “the notion that man has a body distinct from his Soul…by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives… and displaying the infinite which was hid” (Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 14).
When working with Blake’s plates, one quickly develops an awareness of the degrees to which the “text” of the poetry itself becomes as inherently visual as the “imagery” of the work. In fact, it’s quite obvious that text in Blake is imagery to a large degree, completing the sweep of the entangled vines, arching tree branches, creeping fauna and advancing wildlife. By removing this division between sign (letters, words) and signified (images), Blake seeks to unify the rational and individual minds, creating a space where the human reaches its truest potential in its own conceptions. Combined with the inherent self-reflexivity of new media, this desire becomes manifest in the presentations of Blake found on the web.
Take, for instance, The Blake Digital Text Project, specifically the Songs of Innocence and Experience Graphical Hypertext, which aims to present the movement from “pre-verbal, pure sound inspiration to sung words to written text” (Hilton 1998) that is evident from the opening of the cycle. Indeed, it is this in this reading that our navigation of this cycle becomes bound. Blake worked in multi-dimensional multi-media, and it is here that we extend our readings past the simple black and white digitization of the plates themselves. Note that the point of not using color images is to increase navigational speed, as if progression through these texts is the focus, not the close reading of the plate itself. Knowing this, one must realize that the text itself is not necessarily inconsequential but, rather, only a portal to other mediations of it. We do not browse The Blake Digital Text Project in order to read the text (even if this was the only online version at the time, codex facsimiles have existed for years). Instead, we navigate in order to become part of a larger multimedia experience (sound and image). Just as Blake’s plates allow us to view the multidimensionality of the visual-textual form, so does this site allow us to interact with the extensions of this form into aural media. It becomes, then, a site that, although antiquated to our techno-myopic eyes, recognizes Blake’s own use of multimedia extensions and fulfills at least partially the promise the of McGannian archive.
The Romantic Circles MOO, however, presents a differently oriented yet equally visual-textual aware mediation of Blake. In it, the text itself becomes the means through which the user not only navigates the site (and Blake’s work), but also the means through which its imagery is constructed. Granted, all text in one way or another corresponds to determinants of visual cognition yet in a first-person forum like a MOO, this text constitutes spatial orientations as well. We change form, float to the heavens and traverse estates much in the same way that the text of Blake’s works snakes its way from plate to plate, the visual line extending far beyond the “page” that pretends to contain it. To put this differently, although it is certainly possible to use image concordance to traverse almost hypertextually between plate spaces, it is ultimately the text that drives us on towards the completion of the Blakean cycle. Similarly, it is text in the MOO (typed or clicked) that allows for interaction and completion.
So what, then, do we make of TextArc, where imagery is absent and the Blake’s work becomes nothing more than discrete units to be distributed through the algorithm of a verbal centrifuge? Can we say that this, too, contains an awareness of Blake’s intentions? Although Jess was certainly correct in asserting that both textual and image distribution could make this a far more encompassing site (imagine that for a second—images broken down into lines and forms to be constructed, deconstructed and followed through the length of the plate[s]), TextArc does, in many ways, come closest to approximating the visual-textual dynamics of Blake’s work as a whole. Poems are broken down into swirling, cascading vortexes of meaning with whole lines struggling to maintain the delicate balance between the chaos of scattered words and their simultaneous unity. We use this maelstrom as an interface; our actions within this space are an attempt to make sense of this verbal ataxia, to find patterns in the seeming randomness. Yet again, one cannot help but be struck by how innately visual this whole enterprise is. In the case of Blake (perhaps not so for Alice in Wonderland et. al), TextArc is successful not because it breaks text into its base patterning (there is still some work to be done here) but, rather, because it alludes to the erasure of the division between text and image. Johanna Drucker maintains that all text is inherently visual, especially so on the screen. Blake reminds us that this division is an inordinately human one to make, but also an inordinately limiting distinction as well. TextArc provides us with a tool to dissolve these barriers, rendering text and “texted” image one in the same.
And so it is, having looked at these sites, one cannot help but be underwhelmed by the scans of the texts provided by The Library of Congress. Quality here is quite clearly not the issue. The scans are brilliantly rendered and extraordinarily intimate. It seems clear, though, that the use of digital media has and always should entail an awareness of the media itself, a self-reflexivity that attempts to accommodate digital nature with textual nature. The Library of Congress scans, though, are only copies. They do not contain the awareness necessarily to truly translate an analog object into digital form. Each site discussed here shows us that not only cannot Blake be separated from the concept of multimedia(tions), but also that, online, his text cannot be separated from its carrier either.
Nelson Hilton --"William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience"
in The Blackwell Companion to Romanticism, ed. Duncan Wu (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998).
In class last week we discussed the digital archive in the context of such an archive’s usefulness or even advantage over the traditional library archive. "The William Blake Archive" is an excellent example of the kind of site we were discussing, both in its scope and its vulnerable points. On the surface one would view the Blake Archive as an enhanced version of what we find at the Library of Congress site. Quite the contrary, the Blake archive site contains a serious degree of interpolative play, in the ways that the text can be sorted and searched. The word search is one we are familiar with. We are looking for the word “Tiger” and we find every occurrence in all of his work. The image search however is more difficult. An image of a tiger takes many forms. The assumption is that the viewer is able to objectively search for a tiger image and will find every distinct tiger depicted by Blake. Perhaps with some images this is true, but with many of Blake’s images, there is no clear descriptor. For instance if one searches for “snake”, 231 matches are found. Some of these images are more snake-like than actually clearly snake. In suggesting this link, a possible interpretation is made. In essence, any time a search mechanism is created, the link between the thing searched for and the image found informs the reader in a way that is suggested by the archivist. In this way the researcher looking to the site for a search interface is in a way collaborating with the archivist more than performing a generic search. It is as if the researcher is asking “do you think this is a snake?” and the archivist is responding “yes, I do”.
Of course that is not to say that the archive is in some way lessened by this association. Having the various copies of Blake’s work available in one place, even in facsimile, will allow ways of studying Blake that were never attainable before the archive was created. To compare similar images from different works side by side, to have the ability to zoom in on certain sections with a high level of accuracy, to search the images (even if biased), to view the text and image together as they were depicted on the page, are all monumental leaps in the research of Blake.
This kind of searchable archive has all of the advantages listed in the paragraph above over the kind of collection found on the Library of Congress site. At the Library of Congress site we see just the book, as one would leaf through it, page by page. There is no searching, and no attached commentary or critical work. The functions are limited. However, one can zoom in to see the detail of a page, attaining a sense of dimension that is unavailable on the Blake Archive site. We can see the detail of the binding and in some cases see who owned and printed the books. The interface treats the books more like artifacts than literature. The interface reminds the user that the book is a book, whereas the Blake Archive separates the book into plates, then words, then images. There is no attempt to separate the poem from the codex in the Library for Congress site.
The interface in every case lays over the underlying, real text a bias or interpretation. In the Blake Archive, the subjective labeling of the images is one example. In the Library of Congress, the treatment of the Blake book as an artifact is another. In every site we examined this week we can uncover the site creators hand in the presentation and interface. If we look deeper, in many cases this authorial overlay is discovered in other areas of the site. Consider how many links and resources are included in the Blake Archive site. What does that say about what was exclude or about the intended use of the site? In the Library of Congress site, all we find is the catalog data, again referencing the intention of the collection editor to have this site perform a specific function.
After examining bits of game theory and working with Jason Nelson’s “Injury”, I’m really getting fascinated by notions of “playing” a text to promote different forms of access and interpretation with a work. While I am still working with what it is to “play” a text, exactly, I am drawn to a lot of musical metaphors that these digital media open up to the reader, whether the textual resources we look at involve sound or not, or are designed with the notion of a game in the classic sense, of something involving a specific player return. In some way, all of the things we’ve looked at involve a breaking down of the text, if only by virtue of the fact that they are now in digital format. Some of best ones, however, through varying means of deforming and drawing out of the elements of the text, much like sampling, give the reader/user different tools for their own remixing of the text. How “playable” a text can be depends on both the samples it gives you to work with and the interface on which you can pull out a new composition.
I am particularly fond of Textarc and MUDs as two different tools for their potential to sample, remix, and play a given text. Both programs lend a level of instrumentality to text that provides new access into the traditional (analog?) codex. With Textarc, detailed breaking down of the text into the concordance lays the text out in one neat track, ready for the user to set the needle anywhere and grab line, a word, or check out the beats/frequency of the words in a work and it has a particularly seamless interface, like a well laid out soundboard. It’s playability likes in the user/reader’s ability to break down and sample a text. When it comes to the sampling of a text, searchability is key, and Textarc is particularly smooth and helpful with its library in Project Gutenberg, and the visual window that calls up possible hits as one changes the parameters of the search. Textarc is foremost a textual medium, and I think it’s purpose is not so much a medium of composition as a medium of exploration, a researcher’s tool to dissect and examine the medium for later interpretations. Which is not to say that this exempts the nonresearcher/author reader, but perhaps that’s just a matter of the knowledge of the technology being first available amongst scholars and those in the university settings. Even the audio and color visuals still draw attention to the breakdown of the text, rather than any form of recomposition. For that, I’d head to the MUD.
The MUD at Romantic Circles has a number of advantages for sampling and remixing texts. For one thing, it is not limited to the literal texts. Works the authors come up with are open to thematic interpretation and remixing as well as offering the ability to play with the original text of a work. In addition, if a GUI interface is available, the MUD need not be a textual tool alone, but allow a user to interplay between the images and text of a work, showcasing one or the other, or letting both speak to a user simultaneously. A MUD has its playability located in both it’s interpretive power (the ability to mix elements of a given text), and in a more classical game theory mode, centered on the reader/player.
In fact, there are a number of games going on in a MUD, so to speak, as the author first plays the text itself, crafting rooms and narrative as he or she sees fit with playing the reader in mind, sometimes guiding them to make certain choices in the game, just as the reader will come to the MUD with the purpose of learning how to play the text/game itself. The player must figure out what the text and the author have contrived to derive success at the game and move forward through the given narrative by breaking down the narrative into parts accessible by certain commands. For instance, it is given in a hint in the Beulah section of the Romantic Circles MUD that the command needed to start the action is
The key elements to really make a GUI MUD work lie in the interface and the integration of the textual elements of the traditional MUD and graphical layout/components for the textual aspect of the game. In this, I think the Romantic Circles MUD needs work—there is a severe breakdown in the seamlessness of the user interface for the MUD. While the graphical interface often worked very well, little attention seems to be paid in the translation of those elements to the textual aspect of the game. There were instances where the keyed terms were sticky, highly object specific without the use of aliases to better allot for player interpretation. The command to access the Help desk, for instance, must be typed with ASCII spaces and proper capitalization in only one certain way, instead of making a few alternatives for user ease. In addition, a number of traceback and player_msg errors were occurring that broke the narrative up with bug code and interfered with both the ease of playability and readability of the text. To make a long story short, this area in the MUD felt very much like the author’s own interpretation of the work, with little consideration for the ease of player accessibility and reception. Which is fine, if that’s the artist’s goal, for his or herself, but at its heart, I think the MUD is best utilized as a more mixed medium where the variables involved in player/reader interpretations are considered. What really makes the MUD work is the playability for the reader/player in conjunction with the author’s intent of designing the game.
So, to draw back and simplify, while Textarc and the MUD at Romantic Circles may not be designed as tools for mixing texts or game play in the traditional sense, the qualities of playability that these two programs give us to take to texts, I think, are worth further delving into and using for different projects, specifically because they go beyond the normal database or text archive and take textual scholarship one step further, into the realm of playing the text.
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.”)
The URL listed in the syllbaus is no longer valid; use this one instead:
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jjm2f/textonics.html
Ed’s post got me thinking of the valences that these various sites put on different elements of the text -- visuals, words, plot, and so forth. Because some of these sites leave out various elements, or at least abstract them from other elements, they make the user more aware of the multiplicity of the text.
With Blake, words and pictures are unusually inextricable in the original; with most illustrated works, even ones with canonical illustrations like Alice in Wonderland, I wouldn’t find myself wondering whether it was the same text without the pictures, but in Blake’s work of course the pictures and words are fundamentally intertwined. So the TextArc version, which eliminates the pictures, is even more interesting for Blake than it is for other works. Ed addressed this nicely in his post –- TextArc treats the text as simply a bunch of words, and this is more evident with an author like Blake for whom the most obvious non-texual elements of a book (pictures) are so prevalent. Comparing the word jumble of TextArc with the list of image search terms on the Blake Archive raises the question: Which is more indicative of Blake’s intentions for his work? Is it more significant that "love" is one of his most frequently-used words, or that "corpse-plant" and "self-flagellant" are possible image searches? Or, to fully appreciate and analyze the work, is it crucial that we have access to both? When we are shown textual elements and visual elements in these stark lists, abstracted from the sense of the work, it increases our awareness that words and pictures are only factors in the work, and that it is the alchemy among them that constitutes the work itself.
The MOO goes at least a step further, removing most of the words and almost all of the pictures from its version of Milton and offering only a stripped-down rendering of the plot. I would argue that this is in fact a step too far, distancing this version too much from the original work for it to offer any sort of illumination. Still, though it fails (in my estimation) to offer something with a working relationship to Blake, MiltonMOO does help us answer the question "how many elements can be changed or removed before a text’s identity is compromised?" Okay, so maybe it doesn’t help answer the question per se, but it does provide another data point, one that is beyond the boundary, wherever that is. With TextArc or the Blake Archive image search, we see representations of the discrete elements that make up the text, and in TextArc we see some of those elements (words) but ignore others (plot, pictures). MiltonMOO alters or removes even more of those elements, and concisely shows that there exists a critical level of alteration where the new version loses the sense of the original.
Even an extremely thorough and faithful portrayal of the work like the Blake Archive versions can raise questions about the myriad elements of a text and their differential importance. In the case of the Blake Archive, it is an issue not of restriction but of superabundance. Graced with the ability to compare multiple versions of each plate -– to access not only visual and verbal elements, but temporal variation -– the online reader can actually see a very different work than would the reader of any physical edition of Blake. This forces her to consider the possibility that the physical version, failing to incorporate the element of change-over-time, is itself not the "real" text -– or at least that the text is inherently multiple, containing multiple elements but also existing in multiple iterations. TextArc foregrounds the text’s multipartite nature by isolating certain elements, whereas the Blake Archive, in its super-completeness, does so by drawing the reader’s attention to an element that is often invisible to all but textual scholars.
The restrictions, expansions, and extractions of these digital representations of Blake’s work are significant in multiple ways. For one thing, they cause the reader to rethink her categories -– what is considered a text, part of a text, integral to a text. She must acknowledge that the works she knows are made up of multiple elements, and consider whether any different assortment or concentration of those elements constitutes the same work. Furthermore, though, I think that this dissection of the text can serve as a rubric for digital versions of texts. At this point, it is unclear that digital media are able to produce faithful versions of older works that are improvements over the codex version -– most people find the act of reading a codex to be more enjoyable and easier for studying, unless they have particular need of searchability, and for good reason (available hardware just doesn’t allow for a digital text that’s comfortable to read). However, sites like TextArc, which isolate a few elements and allow for manipulation of only those elements, represent a functionality of digital media that is completely unique. For Blake, editions of whose works are so unique that scholars cannot perform effective comparisons without online access, the archive function (intending to be as complete as possible) is particularly necessary, but many works will derive more benefit from being dismembered. The ability to break a text down to its component elements and analyze them individually should be one of the most interesting applications of digital technology.
I mentioned this in class on Wednesday. I think you should be able to listen to the report. It's interesting.
Beth
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.
Everyone should have now received comments (and a grade) on their paper. If you haven't, please mail me (or check an alternate account if you have one since that might be the address I have for you).
The papers were excellent overall, and I'm looking forward to seeing as many of them as possible published in the evolving WordCircuits archive as I think there are some real contributions that have been made. Marc and Jenny have both volunteered for editorial duties, and I think two's a good number; however if anyone else has an intense desire to work on this please do let me know and we'll see what we can arrange. More details in class on Wednesday.
