Hi all! I’m happy to share my final project, called Contos Maravilhosos (Wonderful Tales).
Link to project: https://contosdatereza.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
Final project rationale:
Contos Maravilhosos (Wonderful Tales) – Final Project
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Category Archives: Assignments
Uncertain Curves and Outrageous Angles: An Admirable Exercise in Deformance
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.
Final Project Link: A Sample Archive of Children’s Audiobooks Found in the Wild
https://childrensaudiobookarchive.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
This is the link to my digital archive of children’s audiobooks.Some embedded links in my posts don’t work. If you run into an issue please click the link provided below the audio bar, this should take you to the direct website where the audiobook is posted.
Have fun listening reading!
Final project updates
I’ve been working on my final project, called Contos Maravilhosos. I’m following the project plan I defined in my proposal with a few changes which I will explain here.
For now, I already have the website with all of the tales and instructions on how to collaborate. The stories are in Portuguese, but I’ve activated a plugin to translate them into English, Spanish, and German.
Instead of uploading only a few stories, I uploaded all of them so that users could choose which ones they wanted to illustrate.
These are the stories that received contributions until now:
The following steps for my project are:
1 – Populating the website with more contributions, which can be in the form of text, illustrations, or audio;
2 – Create at least one audio version of one of the stories, exploring different audio effects. I should also create an audiogram and post it on Youtube;
3 – Create an interactive map using Kumu to present differences and similarities between the tales, similarly to what I’ve created to the Manhattan Transfer project.
I should also write a rationale about the project, analyzing the contributions, the audio versions of the stories, and the interactive map.
Group Project #3: Playing Novels
As discussed, our third and final group project involves “playing” a novel in ways that draw widely from several different scholarly modes and cultural forms, from the creative writing workshop to the dramatic improv troupe to the textual scholar to the Dungeons and Dragons enthusiast.
To get organized, please sign up on this simple spreadsheet. After our discussion at the end of last week’s class, most of you know that we’re dividing into two groups that will play one of two texts: Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), and Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters (1970).
I’ve roughed in sites for both games. Refer to them to get a quick sense of some options for roles to play. You’ll start to build your role Monday, but it will help to a) read the text you want to play and b) think a bit about what roles would be most fun in advance.
And here are Zotero groups we’ll use to gather and share materials and notes for both games:
- Desperadoes (Fox group)
- Grotesques (Anderson group)
Final Project Proposal: Creating a Digital Archive on Children’s Audiobooks
For my final project I wish to expand on an idea I formulated through a previous assignment. In our earlier search of finding examples of audiobooks I decided to narrow in on the children’s book genre and found a number of YouTube channels showcasing audio retellings of popular children’s tales. I was impressed with the technical value and production of these videos. The storytelling aspect had been elevated with use of sound effects and voice modulations and the overall ambiance of the audio harkened me back to a simpler time in my life where books were often read to me. In my blog post I mentioned that these audiobooks may act as a favorable method for parents and or teachers who are inclined to introduce their children/students to reading methods without their direct assistance. This idea of having an almost virtual babysitter intrigued me to learn more.
Upon doing research on the added benefits of children centered audiobooks I found a bevy of articles on parenting/book sites that list the values of integrating such media into young readers minds. For the most part the benefits seem to line up with the belief that the audiobooks help children gain comprehension, vocabulary and pronunciation skills whilst also exposing them to literature above their grade level. This is especially pertinent to those who are diagnosed with ADHD or dyslexia as the visual to audio format allows for less distraction. Furthermore expanding on my initial point of audiobooks acting as a babysitter, the sites also add that the medium acts as a method to keep kids entertained and focused while the parent is busy or in need of a break.
Base research alone has convinced me to look at children’s audio recordings as a formidable learning tool in the modern age. However as stated by Prof. Jeff on my blog post; children’s audiobooks have been a tool that have dated back as early as the 1920’s and 30s. For my project I would like to dive more into the world of children’s books converted to audio format. My goal for this project is to create a digital archive to showcase the evolution of production concerning the audiobooks. By breaking down the books found by decade I will observe the advancement of technical attributes applied to the recordings through the lens of what is to be expected through modern day standards. Through this process of finding and listening to these recordings I will discern if the quality of the audiobook has improved and/or altered itself to meet the needs of today’s children. Perhaps earlier recordings of children’s books exhibit qualities of storytelling that are not utilized today. I am hoping for this project to not only answer these questions but also act as a reputable source for those who are searching for children’s audiobooks themselves, whether that be for research or personal reasons.
This project will require me to do an immense amount of research on children’s book recordings. Some of which may not even be available online. I am not too completely certain as to how I am going to compile all these recordings but my initial plans lie in doing at least 10 for each decade I can find. These recordings will have to be downloaded as an audio file and then linked to a CUNY WordPress site I will set up. The recordings will be filtered by date and genre and have a short descriptor on the story itself. This will involve author, date published and synopsis of the plot. I also wish to provide images of the book being represented to add an extra layer of organization and clarity.
My main inspiration for the aesthetics of this project is derived from https://archive.org/. This was the only reputable archival website I had found when searching for digital audiobook archives. The website is described as a non-profit digital library where users from around the world can upload media. This is not specifically delegated to just audiobooks but the site does feature a section dedicated to it. The layout of that particular page is similar to what I am trying to achieve as far as organization is concerned. I will attempt to follow this as a template to showcase the work I have compiled by the end of this project.
Kai and Bri’s Final Project Proposal
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
- the open country
- that beautiful door
- john dear
- that long smooch
- my wellhidden ropeyou
- separate little houses
- coheirs anyhow
Verbs
- will proudly declare
- never saw such ravages
- outlines run off
- suddenly commit
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.
Reflections on Annotating Dracula (or: I Reflect, Therefore I Am Not a Vampire)
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.
Annotating Dracula: Thoughts, Critiques and Memes
INTRO 
Building on the literature based theories of writers such as Barthes, Iser and Drucker we have learned to see text as an object that may be manipulated and expanded upon by way of the reader. “The Reader” in all three theorists’ eyes is pronounced as an integral part of the formation of the narrative. Although the author is the one that creates the story, the reader is the one to transcend the text to new grounds. Of course there are a number of ways where the text can be handled but this project in particular has utilized the art of annotation.
PROCESS
Our process began by first coming to an agreement on the type of text we wished to commentate on. Team member Teddy suggested the Victorian novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. The suggestion fit in well with our team’s all encompassing love for the macabre and vampire lore. We were all immensely intrigued by the prospects of the project and discussion on how we wished to approach the task commenced as soon as we formed our group. Our preliminary discussion revolved around the text itself. Some of the members had previously read the novel while others were pursuing it for the first time, I personally fell into the latter category. We agreed that we would all read the novel on our own terms and speed and start annotating when we felt prepared enough to do so. Our annotations are arranged on a free e-book edition of Dracula team member Brianna found on the website ProjectGutenberg. Those that didn’t have a physical copy of the book were able to use the e-version. Once we settled matters on the text we had back and forth discussions via whatsapp on where our text and annotations would be displayed. Manifold and Hypothes.is were our top two contenders. Although there were a wide range of benefits to both, we decided it would be best to keep things simple and easy to use to avoid any confusion. Hypothes.is was a platform everyone on the team was already familiar with so we managed to save time by skipping over any tutorials we would have needed if we had gone with Manifold. This proved to be a big advantage to us as we were allowed more time to focus on reading the text.
Once the annotation tool was set it was formatted into a Cuny WordPress blog where we were all administered as members. Work from here on out was largely independent. We kept in touch through text messages but we decided early on that our annotations will reflect on how each of us personally wanted to view the text. Some members had a specific critical lens they wanted to focus their analysis on while others followed an almost stream of consciousness while reading. We did not want to infringe on anyone’s creative process so each member was given free reign on their contributions, the only overarching theme we wanted to abide by was the objective of incorporating humor into our work. Highbrow vs Lowbrow was a theme that constitutes our team the best so we definitely wanted it represented in our project. The modern day use of the internet has provided readers with the opportunity of utilizing comedy when discussing literature. I think this is a perfect representation of the evolution of text that has permeated our readings the past several weeks. The shift they seem to have disregarded is meme culture and its effects on how literature is viewed today. Our modern take on Dracula by use of internet humor invites conversation we hope to see on our site.
PERSONAL ROLE
My personal form of annotation did not begin with a defined approach, rather I wanted to go with qualities of annotations I prefer when reading a piece of commentated work. With that being said, if I were to attempt to dissect and organize my notes, I would say they fall into three categories; theories, definitions (I always find these helpful) and cheeky humor. Every now and then I did add an annotation on the obvious but that’s more or less me wanting to emphasize something I felt was exciting. Personally I did not want to conform to one specific mindset when reading the novel, I wanted to give myself the opportunity to say how I felt in the moment while also attempting to be analytical of moments in the story I felt were worth discussing further. I hope I conveyed that through my work and I invite anyone to chime in with their thoughts as well.
FINAL THOUGHTS
My experience in annotating the famed vampire novel was truly enlightening. Because I have not read the novel beforehand I was able to experience the story with fresh eyes. Although I already had my preconceived notions on how the text was going to play out, I was pleasantly surprised to uncover that this is not a mere piece of monster fiction. Stoker definitely has taken liberties in his work to express themes outside of horror and mystery. Themes of love, friendship, queer romance, domination and submissiveness pervade the novel. Annotating has given me the chance to remark on such themes. Given the opportunity to highlight and comment on the novel has provided me with the platform to open up further discussion on a 19th century book that has long been manipulated by the hands of Hollywood. My own personal work aside I also got the chance to see the thoughts of my fellow members as well. Annotating honestly feels like a virtual book club! One of the central benefits of an annotation program is the ability to foster an environment for conversation and introspection. There were a number of things that my members picked up on that I hadn’t thought of when reading the novel myself. In all, I think the benefits of annotation have made way for a renaissance of literature and reading as an activity. I look forward to seeing the evolution of lit based analysis in the years to come, perhaps even more use of memes!
Manhattan Transfer Project Reflections
In the last few weeks, I have been developing the Manhattan Transfer project, a WordPress website with a multimedia and collaborative annotated version of Manhattan Transfer (1925), a novel by John Dos Passos. My role in the team was more technical as I built the website structure.
Using an Academic Commons WordPress website as a tool was an excellent choice for two main reasons. First, it utilizes open-source technology that enables users with no coding skills to develop websites. Second, it provides a flexible environment to explore different interactions with the narrative. By installing the Hypothesis plugin on the website, we created a collaborative space for note-taking. We could also embed videos and images that transformed the reading experience into a more interactive and engaging experience.
Along with the website building, I also created some multimedia elements. For example, I used Kumu to develop an interactive map based on the character’s map created by Miaoling, as you can see here.
I also created audiograms for the project, which are graphical representations of sounds. I used Headliner to develop videos with sound waves based on free audio files I downloaded from Freesound, a collaborative database of audio files released under Creative Commons licenses that allow their reuse.
However, the most exciting experience was illustrating the reading with illustrations generated by artificial intelligence. Our team used different tools to create them, but I used Dreamstudio in most cases. It was fun to play with keywords and excerpts extracted from the reading and see what the AI would generate. I created an image for each chapter based on short descriptions created by Nadin. By doing that, I could see some AI biases, in which one single word would deviate from visually representing the excerpts. For example, every time that I used the word “Congo”, which is the name of one character, the tool would provide me with images black people:
However, in almost all other pictures, which by the way, did not have any keyword related to race, the AI would only generate white people:
Final thoughts
I would love to see this project’s final version, with all chapters enriched by multimedia elements and collaborative comments. It made me reimagine how a book can be transformed and reinterpreted, not only by people but also by Artificial Intelligence. It also made me think about how AI is biased and how it reflects social inequalities.
