Kai and I are happy to share a link to our final project, which we are calling Uncertain Curves and Outrageous Angles: An Admirable Exercise in Deformance.
We’ve included on our site information about the project, as well as our own individual reflections on it (see Kai’s reflections; see Bri’s reflections).
It’s been an amazing semester! Hope to see you all around the GC again next semester.
Inspired by an audiobook project created earlier this semester, we want to build a web-based tool that generates multiple assemblages of the three texts used in “The Yellow-Wallpapered Box Social Story of an Hour” (“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin, and “The Box Social” by James Reaney). Through a series of programmatic text manipulation experiments, both more and less aleatoric, we hope to address the following question: are arbitrary, systematic text manipulations, both intratext and intertext, meaningful for interpretation and/or scholarly research methods, and at what levels of automation might the usefulness break down? The scholarly inspiration for this endeavor lies strongly with “Deformance and Interpretation.” Beyond the support from Samuels and McGann, we can also take practical reinforcements from visual media scholars that run with theoretical implications of deformance. CUNY’s own Kevin L. Ferguson has demonstrated the usefulness of creating image composites from movie stills in the aid of film studies with digital technologies. Similarly, Jason Mittel’s “Deformin’ in the Rain” collection provides fertile ground for how a curated set of deformances can be in delivering a fresh perspective on a text. As Mittel summarizes elsewhere “[deformance] strives to make the original work strange in some unexpected way, deforming it unconventionally to reveal aspects that are conventionally obscured in its normal version and discovering something new from it.”
We aim to explore a few different experimental methods. We may also create an interactive experience where a visitor could refresh the page or an element and remix the interwoven stories into a new text paragraph by paragraph. Another might operate as a sort of literary Mad Libs, taking parts of speech from one text and applying them to another. Inspired by erasure poetry, we may also explore removing portions of text from the stories (see also this ErasureMaker project). Through our experimentation we hope to explore such questions as: Is the whole of a story, or the layering of multiple stories, more or less than the sum of its parts? Is it possible (especially as someone other than the author) to distill a story down to its essence? Can you tell a coherent story without all the parts of speech? How much of a story can you change or take away before it becomes unrecognizable? How much fidelity, if any, do we owe the original texts and their authors?
To the extent possible, we hope that all work can be done in a web browser without pre-processed work offline or a server side component. We have experimented with a natural language processing (NLP) library written in Nodejs called compromise. This library has much to recommend it for our purposes. The text parsing, filtering, and tagging methods are varied, but kept relatively simple and performant. The library doesn’t focus on the statistical methods and models common in NLP packages. Nor is it the most accurate tool for NLP. Rather, it tries its best to treat text as data. This emphasis sometimes results in less than accurate outputs, which helps the process unfold systematically, but somewhat arbitrarily. Other benefits include the ability to use the library locally via content delivery network (CDN), letting us perform our text mangling in the browser, avoiding server side development, and granting us free hosting of the website via Github Pages. A rough and ready exercise to determine compromise’s appropriateness for our experiments is available here. In this web page, we’ve ingested the text as a string literal, tokenized it, then broke the text into some typical parts of speech kept in sequential order. Of particular interest are perfectly imperfect “nouns” and “verbs,” which are really phrases or groups of the parts of speech that are ripe for remixing. Some examples include the following:
Nouns
Verbs
In this proof of concept iteration of the project, we are limiting ourselves to the three stories we worked with on the audiobook project as we are already very familiar with these texts and know that intentionally layering them together yields exciting results. As such we feel confident in our ability to judge how much the use of these digital tools in remixing these texts has the potential to add or distract from the discourse, whether the new texts our experiments yield create a dialogue or conflict with the originals, and what we can learn from each.
Working Bibliography
Ferguson, Kevin L. “Digital Surrealism: Visualizing Walt Disney Animation Studios.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly: Digital Surrealism: Visualizing Walt Disney Animation Studios, 2017, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/11/1/000276/000276.html.
Mittel, Jason. “Deformin’ in the Rain.” Deformin’ in the Rain on Vimeo, 2017, https://vimeo.com/showcase/6603776.
Mittel, Jason. “Videographic Criticism as a Digital Humanities Method.” Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2019, https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/4805e692-0823-4073-b431-5a684250a82d/section/b6dea70a-9940-497e-b7c5-930126fbd180/resource/ec709ed8-8ce2-4383-969b-2a8ad1887823.
Samuels, Lisa and Jerome J McGann. “Deformance and Interpretation.” New Literary History, vol. 30 no. 1, 1999, p. 25-56. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/nlh.1999.0010.
Along with Natalie Kretschmer, Theodore Manning, Faihaa Khan, and Nuraly Soltonbekov, I worked on Annotating Dracula. Teddy suggested Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897), and being spooky season, it was futile to resist the book’s thrall. From our first meeting as a group, it was clear we are all interested in different aspects of Dracula and annotating, so we agreed to take differing yet complementary approaches to the project. Natalie was most interested in exploring the vibrant meme history of the text on Tumblr, especially surrounding the novel’s resurgence in popularity with the Dracula Daily substack. Teddy started with providing historical context and the evolution of tropes within the text. Nuraly wanted to dispel some of the myth and exoticization that is rampant in much of the story. Faihaa was a first-time reader and created annotations that included her reactions to the story, definitions of words or concepts that aren’t clear, and also gif reactions. I chose to think about the text as an object and was focused on using digital tools for text analysis. We all agreed from the beginning that our annotations would be a mix of so-called high-brow and low-brow, and that we wanted to make our annotations fun!
For platforms, we chose between Manifold and the CUNY Commons. The main advantage to Manifold would have been that we could ingest the story directly from Project Gutenberg and immediately get to annotating. However, we knew our annotations would include a mix of text and images, videos, and gifs. Manifold’s annotation tool only allows text annotations, so our other annotations would have to be added separately as digital objects, creating a disjointed user experience, and perhaps a hierarchy within our annotations, which we ultimately decided was a deal breaker. Furthermore, the diary/journal entry format that predominates the text felt very well suited to the blog-default format of the Commons (which uses WordPress). I also was very intrigued by the idea of annotating as layering, and thinking about how Dracula is a story of layers–layers of diary and journal entries, letters, telegrams, newspaper clippings, etc. As such, I convinced my group I could come up with a tagging schema to tease out these layers, and thus our project lives on the Commons.
From Project Gutenberg, I copied each segment of text into a blog post, which I numbered sequentially. Each post corresponds to one diary/journal entry, letter, telegram, newspaper clipping, etc. I respected all breaks in the story as published, with the exception of journal entries that included “later” posts within the same date–these appear grouped together in one post. However, when a journal entry of the same date was separated by a chapter break, this break was maintained and I created two posts. Every post is categorized according to the chapter it appears in. Furthermore, almost every segment in Dracula has a date, so I created both month and date tags, such that readers could see all of the content that happens within a certain month, or even on a certain date (there is a lot of time jumping back and forth in the text). I also created tags for journal and diary entries as a whole, as well as subtags for whom the diary or journal belongs to (Jonathan, Mina, Dr. Seward, and Lucy). Similarly, I created a tag for each letters, telegrams, and memoranda and notes, as well as correspondence tags for the senders and recipients; there are also tags for newspaper clippings and ship’s logs. There were also several segments of text that were correspondence that Stoker notes were not delivered to or received by the intended recipients, which I thought was fascinating and so created a tag for them. If I had more time, I would have loved to come up with more thematic tags like this.
Our annotations were created with Hypothes.is, and we decided we wanted them all to live together, so I ensured that every entry appears all on the same page. I also had to do some trouble-shooting to get all of the posts to appear in the correct order (I copied them in the order of the story, which put them in reverse chronological order as WordPress defaults to the newest post first). This was actually a real pain as every time I made an edit to a post, it took them out of order again, and I had to manually reorder the posts (and there are 188 of them!).
Building our site, tinkering with the CSS, and creating the categories and tags took a lot longer than I had anticipated, so I didn’t end up doing as much text analysis as I originally thought. I started with Google’s Ngram viewer and I wanted to see the usage of “vampire” in their corpus between 1887 and 1907 (10 years before and after publication) to see if this might show us the impact of his novel in literature. There was no discernible trend for these years, and when you look at all of the dates available for their corpus (1800-2019), the use of vampire doesn’t really take off until the late 90s and into the 00s. I then turned to Voyant to create a word cloud of the 75 most used words, excluding stop words. By far the most used word is “said”, and if you removed the character names, I honestly wouldn’t know this word cloud was from Dracula. It’s a bit generic, and I think I would need to spend a bit more time filtering to create something more meaningful or telling. Lastly I played around with the text using Python and the Natural Language Toolkit, namely using the .similar() function on various words that our group thought would be most interesting, e.g., vampire, blood, red, lips. See the About the Project page for more details.
Being an avid pinballer and having watched a lot of Dracula-related movies and TV shows over the Halloween season, I couldn’t resist including mentions related to these in my annotations. Also: Lots. Of. Gifs. I couldn’t help myself.
Overall I think our project has been a resounding success, and I think we’ve explored what is possible through annotation and how annotation can add to rather than distract from a text. Reading everyone else’s annotations got me really excited and helped me see different things I had overlooked in previous readings. The main drawback I see is that the Hypothes.is annotations are tied to the URL, and if you click on a category or a tag, it takes you to a page with a different URL, so you can’t simultaneously explore the layers and the annotations. However, even before our project was finished, a user cited us a source, which was incredibly exciting (see post 55). Hopefully we can be a source for other people just getting into or rereading Dracula.
There are two ideas that I found particularly striking in this week’s readings, both of which got me thinking a bit differently about Dracula (which my group is annotating for this section of class).
The first is from Ann Blair’s “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission” in which they are talking about the changes in the purpose and content of note taking changing over time, and moving “toward the diary based on personal experience and away from notes primarily based on the reading of authoritative sources” (page 102). A diary as notes on experiences? This kind of blew my mind. Especially given the strong association (at least in my mind) between note taking and academic pursuits. I was mostly taught how to take notes in relation to reading sources and writing a paper in school, and I assume many people are taught to think about notes in this narrow way. But why not think of diaries as a means to take notes on experiences, and why can’t those notes be just as useful/important as those of the academic variety. The majority of Dracula is told through the diary and journal entries of three characters, so–perhaps with some extrapolating on my part–Dracula is a story of note taking. And even within some of those entries the characters leave memos and notes to themselves. For example, in Jonathan’s first entry (and the second paragraph of the whole story) he’s left a note to himself to get a recipe for a dish he’s eating: “I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get recipe for Mina.)” Notes within notes!
The other idea is from Seth Lerer’s “Devotion and Defacement: Reading Children’s Marginalia.” In the opening they provide examples of children’s note taking in the margins of books and discuss the frequently negative reception adults give those. “How the adult reads the child is thus the centerpiece of my analysis, and I am interested in those marginalia that provoke scholarly inquiry into an understanding of the annotator as an imaginative subject” (page 128). This is definitely more of a tangent, but it got me wondering, if Dracula is a story of note taking, what is Bram Stoker telling us with the notes. More interestingly, what is he telling us in who he even allows to take notes on their experiences? Dr. Seward has the most diary entries, followed closely by Mina and Jonathan Harker. Lucy Westerna’s storyline is pivotal to the overall plot, and yet she is only allowed 5 diary entries (there are more than 140 in the novel). So her story is almost entirely shared from the perspective of others. Her character has real “too beautiful to survive” vibes, and thinking about note taking in this way seems to support this reading of her.
Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” was an interesting little read, but right from the get-go I was nervous about the transition from wartime to peacetime technologic advancement. When tech is built to support the war machine, and then built upon for other applications, what is that inheritance? What kind of biases are are we baking into that tech? Indeed even one of their most prominent examples of the application of their imagined tech is to be better able to study historical weaponry: “The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades” (section 7). Certainly technology can make many things easier, but this article was a good reminder to me that we must retain a critical eye when we use and adapt propriety tools for use in our digital humanities endeavors.
For our audiobook project, I was in a group with Majel Peters, JP Essey, Raquel Neris, Natalie Kretschmer, Kai Prenger, and Patricia Belen. I’ve been so struck with the note in Price’s piece about people cutting poems out of anthologies to create their own anthologies, that I knew I wanted to suggest something inspired by it to our group: a collection of short stories instead of one text. I figured this was also a very practical approach to a group project as selecting multiple short stories meant that more than one person could pick a text.
As it’s getting close to Halloween, I wanted something a bit spooky, so I started with the suggestion of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892), in which a new mother dealing with mental health issues is driven mad by the rest cure prescribed by her doctor husband. Everyone was on board pretty quickly, and in a short span of time we had agreed to also include “The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin (1894), as suggested by JP, and “The Box Social” by James Reaney (likely written in the late 40s or early 50s, but not published until 1996), as suggested by Natalie. No one in our group had read all three of the stories, but we all had a sense they were told from the perspective of women, at least two of them somewhat unreliable narrators, who were unhappy and confronting feminist issues (inadequate mental health resources, confining and unfulfilling marriages and domestic spheres, and date rape).
Originally, I thought we would record each story and then decide which order to have the audience listen to them, or perhaps we’d let the audience decide which order they wanted to listen to them in, which would let us think about how the stories speak to each other differently depending on the order in which they’re heard. But the assignment rubric literally asked us to be adventurous and take risks, so I said what if we challenge ourselves and create a new text by splicing all three of the stories together. Reading aloud is itself an interpretation of the text, so why not embrace that and start by reinterpreting the text on the page first.
Everyone was on board, and JP recalled that the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is a writer, so perhaps these other stories are the ones trapped in her head as her husband refuses to let her write during her rest cure. I’m an editor by day, so I took on the challenge of creating our spliced script. After reading and rereading each story, I was struck by how much similarity there was between them, in theme, but also even in the descriptions of certain objects (e.g., wallpaper, chairs, views from windows). “The Yellow Wallpaper” is by far the longest of the texts, so I began with that as the foundation, and when she speaks of wanting to write but being unable to, I took those moments to introduce each of the other two stories. Then I inserted snippets from each of the other two stories when the themes and descriptions overlapped, until they all reach their dramatic conclusions together, the stories’ climaxes all building off of one another. The resulting text is both new but also entirely faithful to the originals. Every word of every story is presented in its entirety and in the order in which it was written, which I think speaks to and embraces the inherent tension in the relationship of audiobooks to their source text.
I shared the new text in our group Google doc so we could tweak and agree on the final script together. We had a rough idea of individual tasks from the first class in which our group was made, especially given that we had two people with audio editing experience: Natalie and Kai. With our final script, we agreed that it was important to have each of the stories read by women, and thankfully we had enough women in our group to do this. We also thought that as we have three stories, we want three readers, hoping that the different voices would be sufficient to demarcate the different story lines without extra audio flourishes. Raquel was worried about how her accent may affect her reading (none of us thought it did), so she took on the shortest of the stories, “The Box Social”. Then Majel and Patricia flipped a coin to see who would read the other two, with Majel getting “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Patricia “The Story of an Hour.” I created individual scripts for each of the readers so they could have only their story in front of them, and I indicated where the text was being spliced so they knew where they could take longer pauses and/or breaks in recording as needed.
Each reader turned their recording around very quickly, and the raw audio was great. Kai did the initial audio edit to put everything into its correct place within the full script, and Natalie did the final edit. We didn’t want to undermine any of these women’s stories, so we agreed on a more subtle audio-editing approach. However, there is a moment in “The Story of an Hour” where there’s a piercing scream, and we really wanted to include this one sound effect. An audiobook offers affordances you can’t get in text, so we wanted to acknowledge and embrace this aspect of the medium. This left JP in charge of successfully presenting our audiobook in class, which we shared notes on via email beforehand.
Overall I’m so happy with how our audiobook turned out, and I very much enjoyed working with this group. We used email and Google drive for our communications, which was sufficient, but perhaps we should have used some other way to communicate with one another or stay organized. I also wonder if we should have better defined deadlines and deliverables for each of our roles. It would have been nice if we could have played around with the audio file a bit more (would other sound effects have added or detracted from the final product?). I think we could have benefited from someone being a project manager. If we had more time, I would have also loved to be able to learn more about audio editing, as it’s something I know very little about. But these are small issues and something to think about for future group projects. I certainly have a much greater appreciation for the skills of my classmates and the audiobook format having completed this project.
Hi all, I took some workshops in the past about Hypothesis and Manifold, and I wrote a blog post about them for a previous class. Thought it may be useful to share here as well as we get ready for our next unit. Robin and Wendy are great, so I highly recommend their workshops!
The Introduction to Hypothesis Web Annotation workshop was led by Alex Gil (@elotroalex), the digital scholarship librarian at Columbia University Libraries. Hypothesis is a tool that allows annotation of any webpage. You can annotate publicly (for anyone who has Hypothesis to view), or you can create private groups so only members of the group see the annotations. It is free to use and built with open-source technology. All of your annotations are saved to their cloud. There is a paid version where they will work with your institution so the information is saved to your own servers, but this workshop focused on the free version. As it is open-source, you could also build your own site and integrate the Hypothesis code directly into it.
Hypothesis adds a layer to the webpage you want to annotate; it does not alter the content on the webpages. You can access it via browser extension, or you can add “via.hypothes.is/” before the URL of the page you want to annotate. Their development team is working toward enabling annotation of images, but at the moment Hypothesis annotates text. They do have an Optical Character Recognition workflow so you can turn images of text (e.g., scanned PDFs) into readable/annotatable text.
The Hypothesis interface is relatively intuitive (see their tutorial on Annotation Basics), and it’s very fun to use. We’re using this tool for another one of my classes this semester, and I’ve found it to be a very useful way of having conversations about the readings outside of the dedicated class time (especially in this time of virtual learning). You can also add images, gifs, and videos in your annotations. And you can add tags to your annotations as a way to keep your notes organized. For instance if you were annotating with a class, you could agree to use “question” as tag to alert the professor you have a question to ask them. As you create an account with an email address, when someone responds directly to your annotation you get an email notification.
You can be in many groups, but it is very easy to accidentally post your annotations to the wrong group. Unfortunately there is no way to move your annotations from one group to another; the only fix is to redo it. The other caveat is that if the webpage you’re annotating is taken down, all of your annotations will be lost along with it. There is a way to download your citations if you want to back them up, but this will only represent your notes as they existed when you downloaded them. There is also the ability to share your annotations, or a specific annotation, directly to other sites (such as Twitter).
Alex suggested this tool could be used for web-based DH project development for the team to collectively comment on functionality and content, which I thought might be beneficial to some of our project-building this semester. Here is an example of a team who used Hypothesis in the creation of their DH project: The Caribbean Digital & Peer Review: A Musical Passage Hypothesis. Alex has also successfully used the tool in a virtual conference, as an alternative to synchronous video conferencing.
The Introduction to Manifold Scholarship was led by Robin Miller (@robin_r_miller), an open educational technologist and librarian at The CUNY Graduate Center (GC), and Wendy Barrales (@WendyBarrales), a Manifold graduate fellow at the GC. Manifold is a completely open-source publishing platform. The platform was created by the University of Minnesota Press and the GC. Anyone can download the code for free and create their own “instance” of Manifold. The CUNY instance of Manifold promotes open educational resources, with all texts being openly licensed or made available by the creators. It is free for anyone in the CUNY community to publish on Manifold, and the publication of student work is encouraged.
The platform allows for the publication of dynamic texts, with the ability to embed multimedia resources. It also has a built-in Hypothesis-like annotation tool which allows you to create public and private reading groups. When creating a new project, Manifold offers very customizable layouts. You can include resource pages and tools, as well as pull in social media feeds based on hashtags. The platform has dynamic screen sizing and is optimized for mobile use. The publication page you create is crawled by search engines, so you can optimize your content for this. You can enable epub options so that content is easily downloaded, improving access for people with limited internet connectivity.
Manifold is a publishing platform only, not an authoring one. You create your project by “ingesting” (uploading) the text such as an EPUB from Project Gutenberg, Google doc, Word docx, Markup, or HTML. Manifold speaks HTML, so you may have to tinker with non-HTML texts to preserve your desired formatting. If you have to make any changes to the text, you have to make them in your file and re-ingest. If you re-ingest the same file, Manifold will recognize the changes and implement them quickly. If you need to make changes after your text has been annotated by readers, any annotations associated with the previous version may be lost, depending on how extensive the changes are.
Here are some additional links about Getting Started with Manifold and the CUNY Manifold Maker Guide.
(Originally posted here: https://dhpraxis21.commons.gc.cuny.edu/nycdh-week-intro-to-hypothesis-manifold-and-palladio/; Feb 13, 2021)
Originally I intended to listen to the first episode of The Sandman audiobook. I love the graphic novel series—have read it multiple times—and just finished watching the series on Netflix. I’m not much of an audiobook person, having only listened to books on tape during long road trips. So I was extra curious to see how they would/would not be able to translate the color and the aesthetic that is prominent in the art of this series. I am still very curious to listen to this fully, but for my review I went in another direction. The teaser sample of this audiobook series is of such high production value and has many famous actors voicing the characters—if you didn’t know it was only audio, you would think it was from a big-budget movie—so I decided I’d be better served listening to something else for inspiration for our own project.
As my group is going to be working with short stories, I turned to one of my favorite authors and perhaps her most famous short story: The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.
This was the first hit that came up when I searched for an audiobook, and I appreciated that this seems to be part of a ghost story audiobook/podcast series, so I gave it a listen. The intro (and outro) are very stylized, with creepy imagery and very eerie background music with voice clips from other horror stories. It’s a bit over the top, but mostly fun. In contrast, the reading of the text itself is very plain and even understated.
Tony Walker reads the story with an English accent. At first I thought, ugh, is this to make it sound more literary or more serious in some way? Jackson has said the setting is rural New England. However, after he completes his reading of the story, he spends some time talking about the story, wherein he says he felt he could read this story in his native Northern English accent expressly because it feels so much like a story that could be set in any rural, anglicized area. I’m inclined to agree with him. It also made me curious to listen to some of his other stories and see how he chooses accents for those, and how well they fit those stories. From his discussion, it seems Walker is a bit of a voice actor and seems able to make decisions on accents based on the stories he chooses to record.
I read along as Walker narrated, and I noticed a few alterations in some words between his version and mine. The changes were so slight I’m unsure if it was human error while he was reading, or if there are subtle differences in versions depending on the edition you have, or if indeed he deliberately chose to change some of the language. (I have Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories, published in 2010 by The Library of America, but here is a link to The New Yorker, where it was first published in 1948: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/06/26/the-lottery). When he discusses the story after reading it, he shows a lot of reverence for Jackson, so I’m inclined to think he accidentally changes a couple of words as he’s reading it, or else there exist slightly different versions of this story. [Example: In the opening paragraph in my version of the story, it reads, “…but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours….”; the version he gives, and which I also see in The New Yorker, reads, “but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took only about two hours…”.]
Walker reads slower than I would if I was reading on my own, but not so slowly as to draw the story out unnecessarily. His pacing is very methodical and even throughout, though he does slow down as we get to the climax and realize that something is very much amiss in the town ceremony. Indeed, he adds more repetition and emphasis on “the black dot” when we realize it’s Tessie Hutchinson who’s been selected for the lottery. Jackson wrote: “It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal-company office.” But Walker adds in an extra “The Black Spot” so the spot is mentioned three times instead of two. I believe this change from the original text was an intentional editorial choice on Walker’s part, and that it enhances the audio experience.
Walker does slightly alter his voice for different characters’ dialogue, just enough to help a listener who isn’t also reading along, but not so much that he sounds cartoonish or mocking of any of the characters. And he slightly alters the level of his voice when people are talking versus whispering or speaking in hushed tones. Again, I think his choices enhances the text, rather than detracting from it. He does not use any background noise or add music or sound effects, which we know was a deliberate choice for him based on the way he’s chosen to style his intro and outro for his series. From his discussion after the story, I learned that he has specialty audio recording equipment, and you can tell the sound quality is very high, and his diction is crisp. He has a podcast, and he’s clearly very comfortable in front of a mic. I also learned that he started doing live readings, which included video of him, which his viewers gave mixed responses to. As such, he seems to be making two versions of each of his stories: one live with video of him reading; and another with some sound-editing that is just his voice. It seems like a lot of work, but I appreciate that he’s open feedback and understands there are pros and cons to each type of audio experience for his audience.
Overall I think his reading of The Lottery was very good. I felt very much like he could have been sitting in my living room and reading directly to me.
The quote that has struck me most from this week’s readings is from Lynn Coady’s Who Reads Books?: Reading in the Digital Age: “The problem with this conversation we’ve been having over the past couple of decades is that it perpetually confuses capitalism with technology and technology with culture itself. Technology exists apart from, but is profoundly influenced by capitalism, and the same can be said of culture” (p. 35).
I’m not sure she goes far enough in her arguments about this distinction, but I’m at least glad to know she’s aware of them. For example, Jessica Pressman uses Mark Z. Danielewski’s series The Familiar, which was meant to be 27 volumes, as an example of the future of the novel in the digital age. But would publishing companies have gone along with this if someone less famous had pitched the original idea? Even with his fame, the series was ended after only 5 volumes were published because of low readership (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Z._Danielewski#The_Familiar).
How many great books have been written and we’ll never get to read them because they never make it off the slush pile based on the preferences of a small group of people and/or marketing concerns over what sells? The publishing industry as we know it is built on the exploitation of rank and file workers who want to work in publishing because they love books so much (see Coady, pp. 36-37; and, e.g., https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/29/the-book-industry-isnt-dead-thats-just-an-excuse-to-keep-salaries-low), so it probably needs to go or massively change how it operates.
Will Self’s arguments about the loss of the “serious[ness]” and “cultural primacy” of novels (Coady, pp. 13, 17) reminded me of multimillionaire James Patterson complaining about how hard it is for older white men to get published (see: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/books/james-patterson-discrimination-white-men.amp.html; I find myself wondering whether Self would agree with Patterson or disassociate himself because Patterson’s writing isn’t “serious” enough). Similarly, Jonathan Franzen’s argument about modernity ruining books (Coady, pp. 32-33) is also annoying. Neither Franzen nor Self seem to question who gets to define so-called serious literature and who gets to enjoy it, as if the literary cannon hasn’t been carefully curated by and for a very small number of privileged people over the years. And by harkening back to it, it feels like they’re actually limiting what the future of the novel can be.
I very much admire Coady’s and Pressman’s optimism about the future of the novel. Technology has its limitations, and when we borrow technological tools built by private industry for expressly capitalist purposes—which isn’t uncommon in DH—we have to be careful about how we use them and acknowledge any shortcomings therein. I’m very curious to check out the digital game/novel hybrid experience Pry that Pressman discusses in their article. I love how each of their examples speak to different aspects of what people love about books: getting absorbed/lost in words (The Familiar), the physicality of books (The House of Paper), and the experience of being part of/creating a story (Pry). Pressman’s examples certainly speak to Coady’s Twitter poll participants sharing what aspects of books they love (p. 40).
And this cautious optimism has me thinking about what’s possible for our projects in this class. How can we contribute and save the novel (if it indeed even needs saving) and/or challenge what a novel can be?
Though I had a hard time overall digesting Alan Liu’s “From Reading to Social Computing” article, I did find parts of it inspirational. For instance, in paragraph 18, where he quotes D. F. McKenzie: “…each reading is peculiar to its occasion…”. I think it speaks to people rereading books and rewatching shows and movies, and it also reminded me of Choose Your Own Adventure books where this is even more literal. Could we capture this experience somehow in a tool or platform? Maybe if you have a story you love to reread regularly and annotate your experience of it each time, and you have a history of yourself reading the book. Maybe this could be achieved with Hypothesis if the copy exists digitally, though I’m not aware of a way to filter annotations with this tool, and it would be interesting to see your annotations together and also separately based on date or some other organizing feature.
I was also intrigued by Liu’s example of sailors having their own presses on long voyages (paragraph 21)—I had no idea this was a thing. Could we use an existing digital database of text and somehow recreate this experience? Or let people import their own text—a la the desert island question game where you decide what things are most important to you.
Similarly, I was struck by this note from Leah Price about historical reading practices: “Instead of respecting the anthology’s boundaries, poetry lovers scissored pages apart to past scraps of one collection into the margins of another.” Could we recreate this experience digitally? Perhaps using an existing text archive like the English Broadside Ballad Archive, Poetry Foundation, or Academy of American Poets as the base from which people can choose text to curate for themselves.
