For the second group project we chose as a group via consensus Bram Stoker’s Dracula due to Halloween and because vampires a great subject to explore. I was pleased with the choice of Dracula and it was Teddy that pushed for it, and in the hindsight I am glad that he did. The novel fits the annotation style for me and probably for the group as a whole as it offers rich tapestry, victorian language, historical settings, mythical creatures, memes, etc. for the exploration. No wonder the novel is classic and staple especially during this time of the year right around Halloween.

Everyone had their niche in this project, and mine was history. My passion has always been history even though I am trained mostly in IT. I do tend to listen to historical podcasts such as Dan Carlin, and watch youtube channels that deal mostly in history such as Invicta, Kings and Generals, Simple History, etc. I am proponent and follower of system building historicity and my peers may have noticed it during my discussions in the class. The one historian that has influenced me the most is Fernand Braudel of influential Annales school of social history. Systems prevail against the agents of so called great men theory of history as they are themselves beholden to those systems be they nature, society or environment, and in that sense for example Japan was destined to modernize during Meiji Era because it was predisposed to so because of its unique geography and rise of intercity commerce that chipped away at the power of landed samurai creating a new class of merchants that demanded new powers.

So, back to Vampires again. There are chain of events to need to happen in order for a novel that deals with vampires to appear in the world stage. You need certainly printing press, electricity, a rising middle class, and I would even argue the weakness Ottoman Empire for this type of novel to appear; cue the Maslow’s pyramid (One of the settings of the novel is Transylvania which was the periphery of Europe, a mysterious and semi closed space that is stuck in time and which was part of Ottoman Empire) All of the above points come naturally if you dissect the novel using Annales historicity and place contexts that may be overlooked or under looked onto choices that Bram Stoker may have made when writing the novel and why he chose certain settings, and certain terms and certain style, and even the choice of names of characters that reflect the pressures and the environment of that time and place. Annales is the river that carries you, and people being constrained by biology or history individually can not go against the grain. Of course there are criticisms of the Annales school as it does not deal with individuals but rather looks surgically towards things like river formations, temperature, cities, biology, etc. It is a system building theory (Karl Marx was was also system builder as was Hegel and even the ancient Aristotle).

I come from the world, and place where Vampires do not exist, why? Some things are almost universal in the world like the undead but not vampires as they mostly appear in Indo-European cultures. We have sorcerers but not witches, we have undead but not vampires. Those types of questions that need to be asked for me to satisfy my curiosity because I do come Euro-Asian continental perspective and not necessarily pure Western perspective. Maybe, just maybe our systems, our structuralism, and our total history did not allow for the vampires to emerge from their graves and evolve from the “simple” undead to blood sucking “undead”. There was no need for the vampires akin to the society of Nomads who have no need of cities. I do also believe without H.P. Lovecraft we would not have shows like Stranger Things but H.P. Lovecraft could not have created the novels in the first place if he had no idea of what ocean is like and by actually living near them. (You could say he could have read and learned about cosmos and ocean in school and yet again all of this is total structuralism). A nomad does not understand why you would walk as your horse is your extension. East German can not produce a Mecedes that sells but can only produce shitty Trabant, North Korean move studio will never make a Squid Game, or K-Pop group like the South Koreans. The are all same people speaking same language but yet the live different lives and produce different things under the weight of their superstructures, and only Bram Stoker in Victorian age during the collapse and retreat of Ottoman Empire could have produced a vampire novel to be read by emergent middle class who are curious about mysterious and still exotic Eastern Europe.

End of rant.

Scene from Anna Readman’s Illustrations of McCarthy’s Suttree

At this stage in the conceptual development of my final project, I can, at best, provide a provisional outline detailing the framework of my approach and what I hope to accomplish. Elements of this are still a bit abstract and it will take a bit more time to narrow my scope of inquiry and hone in on that which I intend on arguing. So, with that out of the way:

My tripartite aim for this project begins with the development of an analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s 1979 novel Suttree that focuses on its themes of spatial politics and municipal power in Knoxville, Tennessee in contrast to the ways in which those municipal powers have since sought to “monumentalize” Suttree via the production of “annotated space” throughout the city via plaques, retconned statues, and the naming of parks in Cornelius Suttree’s honor.
In McCarthy’s post-war Knoxville, the period’s accretion of municipal power and the resulting spatial codes physically inscribed into the landscape are evident as dominating forces on the story’s cast of characters, resulting in the incarceration, state-sanctioned violence, and murder of fringe figures violating the designated social parameters assigned to them by the city. Interestingly, with McCarthy’s increased fame following his release of The Road and the award-winning film adaptation of his No Country for Old Men, the novel has grown increasingly spatialized in and detached from the city that was the focal point of its criticism. By establishing this example of an inapposite annotation of space (such as in the case of the once-dilapidated Market Square that now hosts a seemingly-out-of-place quote elucidating Suttree’s alienation) as the central throughline of this piece, I intend on arguing on behalf of the Lefebvrian notion that all space is inherently political and through the municipal subsumption of literary works critiquing such municipality’s very dominance, the production of space annotated with such criticism in the creation of a civic identity acts as a neutralizing assault, whether intentional or not, against the power of the critique.

From here, I’d like to expand this analysis to further include Henri Lefebvre’s social theory of the production of space, specifically that of monumental space as to address and analyze the aforementioned monuments to McCarthy’s work that bizarrely operate to enshrine an exposition of alienation, poverty, and death amidst the modern city into the very architecture of such a city’s landscape. Lefebvre suggests in The Production of Space that, “Monumentality… always embodies and imposes a clearly intelligible message. It says what it wishes to say – yet it hides a good deal more… monumental buildings mask the will to power and the arbitrariness of power beneath signs and surfaces which claim to express collective will and collective thought” (143). Using Lefebvre’s work, primarily the aforementioned text along with his 1968 work Everyday Life in the Modern World, bolstered by Stuart Elden’s Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible, I hope to apply a theoretical framework previously unexplored in relation to McCarthy’s Suttree and the criticisms of spatial politics therein. As I conclude my application of Lefebvre by discussing his right to the city* to explicate Suttree’s notion of civil disobedience, labeled “the wrath of the path” by Ab Jones (208), my aim for the closing portion of this section into the next is to highlight the ways in which municipal power exploits the achievements of its artists and intellectuals via Lefebvre’s production of space and through the creation of local identity in pursuit of “urban authenticity” but rarely works to restructure social conditions in such a way that upsets entrenched class relations and delivers potential artists and intellectuals from precarity to opportunity.

My final section will aim to provide additional examples of this annotated space across the landscape of the southern United States. My intention here is to examine the ways in which space might be further annotated in reference to southern literary and intellectual figures as a means to decipher the spatial context of such monuments and understand the range of political motivations behind their production. For example, the Toni Morrison Society’s Bench by the Road Project uses the author’s legacy to install benches to commemorate the absence of slavery in the historic production of monumental space – benches that are notably without the anti-social architecture of those in modern cities meant to engineer appropriate social behavior. Certainly, this doesn’t align with Lefebvre’s suggestion that “Such frontal expressions… do not completely crowd out their more clandestine or underground aspects; all power must have its accomplices” (33). What’s to say of New Orleans’ Ignatius Reilly statue? Of James Agee Park, also in Knoxville? Is there anything to be said at all? Are these simply markers of celebration for a community’s artists and the occasional misuse of such art in the renaming of a park that hosts $60 million condo developments is nothing more than a naive misapplication?

In conclusion (or what acts as a conclusion at this point in my project’s development), I suppose my final point is the re-advancement of Lefebvre’s right to the city to encompass a right to the production of social space within the city in such a way that counters the dominant productive forces (as in the case of Knoxville’s appropriation of Suttree) and recaptures art in order to do so (such as in the case of the Toni Morrison Project). This capacity to shape the city is noted by Lefebvre in Everyday Life in the Modern World in reference to Ulysses, “This narrative has a referential or ‘place’, a complex that is topical, toponymical and topographical: Dublin, the city with its river and its bay – not merely a distinctive setting, the scene of action, but a mystical presence, material city and image of the City, Heaven, Hell, Ithaca, Atlantic, dream and reality ceaselessly merging but with reality giving the tone: a city cut to the size of the citizens: the people of Dublin have moulded their surroundings which mould them in turn. Drifting through the streets of Dublin the wanderer gathers together the scattered fragments of this reciprocal assimilation” (4).

As I’ve said, this still needs a bit of development. There are other directions I’d like to explore, such as Suttree existing as a work composed of those on the periphery and Lefebvre’s philosophy speaking to this fringe through notions of centrality. However, much of this will require further research and consideration. As far as what I have put together here, I hope I was clear in communicating my intentions.

* David Harvey provides a concise and applicable definition of the right to the city: The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city.

Working Bibliography:

Bone, M. (2000). The Postsouthern “Sense of Place” in Walker Percy’s ‘The Moviegoer’ and Richard Ford’s ‘The Sportswriter.’ Critical Survey, 12(1), 64–81. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41557021

Canfield, J. D. (2003). The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius: Abjection, Identity, and the Carnivalesque in Cormac McCarthy’s “Suttree.” Contemporary Literature, 44(4), 664–696. https://doi.org/10.2307/3250590

Elden, S. (2004). Understanding Henri Lefebvre: Theory and the Possible. Continuum Books.

Furey, R. (2011). Sentence Fragments, Sound, and Setting in “Suttree” and “The Road.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 9(1), 51–65. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42909425

Gay, M.-A. (2017). Cormac McCarthy’s Aesthet(h)ics of the “Canal-Rhizome” in Suttree. European Journal of American Studies, 12(3). https://doi.org/10.4000/ejas.12372

Guerra, E. (2019). “Nothingness is not a curse”: Suttree’s Absurd Revolt. The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 17(2), 148–170. https://doi.org/10.5325/cormmccaj.17.2.0148

Lefebvre, H. (1968). Everyday LIfe In the Modern World. (S. Rabinovitch, Trans.). Harper & Row.

Lefebvre, H. (1974). The Production of Space. Blackwell.

McCarthy, C. (1979). Suttree. Picador.

Morgan, W. G., & Morgan, W. (2003). “A season of death and epidemic violence”: Knoxville Rogues in “Suttree.” The Cormac McCarthy Journal, 4(1), 226–243. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42909736

Wallach, R. (2013). You would not believe what watches: Suttree and Cormac McCarthy’s Knoxville. Louisiana State University Press.

Though I had not read Virginia Woolf prior to this assignment, when the opportunity to do so presented itself in class, I leaped at the chance to finally dive into the work of an author whose name I had long seen showered with praise and aptly compared to the likes of Proust and Joyce. Though Mrs. Dalloway has certainly not been patiently waiting around a century for my recognition, Woolf’s prose, despite my taking a half-dozen or so pages to find its rhythm, is as brilliant and impactful as its reputation suggests and I regret the fast pace with which I had to breeze through it in order to proceed with the remainder of this assignment. Between Woolf’s existential meanderings (“She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day…” p. 6) and the lyrical way in which she highlights the mundane (“…how fresh like frilled linen clean from a laundry laid in wicker trays the roses looking” p. 10), I was quickly enamored with Mrs. Dalloway and, though my expeditious reading of the text was focused largely on the development of annotations rather than a savoring of Woolf’s voice, I look forward to a closer reading of this modernist masterwork in the future.

So, with all my belated applause for Woolf out of the way, onwards to the project. Comprised of Kai Prenger, Majel Peters, and Sean Patrick Palmer, my group sought to employ a collaborative digital workspace offered by Miro to visually annotate chapters 2 and 7 of Mrs. Dalloway and produce a prototype demonstrating the potentialities of utilizing such software in the development of a vast, scrollable, creatively expounded text. So, that’s exactly what we did. With Majel spearheading our approach to Miro, establishing the project’s groundwork by partitioning the text across the board and systematizing the color-coded delineation of character-specific annotation, Sean began providing notes highlighting the historical context of the piece and illuminating outmoded terms and phrases. My contributions were primarily focused on providing resources that expand on elements of the text that deserve further analysis, such as Woolf’s (and many modernist authors along with her) use of time as a theme and literary device, the reasoning behind Darwin’s name being mentioned throughout the work, and a historical account of Britain’s exploitation of India during the years of Peter’s deployment in India (1918 – 1925). This style of annotation is likely a bit self-serving, as I tend to gravitate towards reading things about the thing that I’m reading as I’m reading the thing, but I find that augmenting the scope of a text via the addition of critical commentaries brings a sense of an ongoing conversation to the work that enriches both it and the experience of reading it. Thankfully, Miro offers an innovative platform in order to do just that.

Upon reflection, I think that our approach to annotating Mrs. Dalloway and the tools used to accomplish it both bear a great deal of potential and offer a fun, refreshing method of moving (literally) through a text. However, I do think that viewing an entire book on Miro similarly populated with annotations as that of our prototype might work to overstimulate the reader and cause confusion, especially if the “strategies of reading” advanced by the project aren’t clearly communicated to the reader prior to their diving in. While sure, this instinct might be due to my inexperience with reading a large text in such a way, I do think that, given the time and carefully calculated methodology, one could produce a fluid experience that allows users to easily progress through the pageless-pages of a book on Miro. More than anything, I think Majel’s work creating connections throughout the book with flowing lines, maps, and color keys certainly offers an effective model of what this might look like in the future. However, similar to what Kai has asked, I do wonder if the varied approaches to annotation on the board might have swamped portions of the text with unnecessary augmentation. What is the likelihood that readers will follow hyperlinks and read secondary texts? Is an image of a Skye terrier really helping anyone? Many such things to consider. Should this prototype be developed further in the future, perhaps a more clearly defined “goal of analysis” would be beneficial in driving annotations toward the development of a singular argument, thesis, investigation, etc.

Like the experimental qualities of John Dos Passos’ prose, our Manhattan Transfer project is an experiment in the digital possibilities of annotation and interpretation. The novel is a portrait of urban life in Manhattan featuring characters whose stories sometimes collide. The text is fragmented, jumping from one character’s journey to the next and then returning at any point. First published in 1925, the writing shares aspects with other forms of modern art such as cinematic techniques, narrative collage, and a fascination with urbanization and technology.

My team (Raquel, JP, Miaoling) and I have created a website devoted to the novel where we have provided the entire text (available through the public domain), historical background information and multiple layers of interpretation strategies. The digital format and use of technologies can provide new historical contexts for understanding the time period of the 1920s and Dos Passos himself and can also yield fresh interpretations of the text. The collaborative nature of this project allowed us to focus on different aspects which suited our interests.

John Dos Passos, Book cover design for Manhattan Transfer, Harper & Brothers, 1925

For my part, I chose to focus on avant-garde and modern art. Although connections can be made with many works of Cubism, Futurism, and Expressionism happening in the same time period as Manhattan Transfer, after learning that Dos Passos was also an artist, I thought it would be interesting to concentrate  on his own paintings and use them as the source of hypothes.is annotations for Chapter 1: Ferry Slip. Dos Passos never achieved major success as an artist but there are many parallels between his art and literary works. The first edition book cover uses a Dos Passos work to convey the complexity and dynamism of the city with its jagged forms. In other paintings, Dos Passos uses multiple perspectives and planes like a Cubist, similar to the multiple narratives and characters found in the novel. In the text, Dos Passos even writes like a painter at times: “skyblue and smokedsalmon and mustardyellow quilts, littered with second hand gingerbread-colored furniture”. So, although Dos Passos’ innovative writing can be traced back to other modernists like Joyce, Stein and Cendrars, we can also see influences of artists such as George Grosz, Lyonel Feininger, Fernand Léger, and F.T. Marinetti. Hypothe.is, while somewhat limited in terms of functionality, was an appropriate choice to do these annotations because the hypothes.is panel can be hidden for those not interested in art. This is something I struggle with looking at the website now – how much our interventions may be distracting and actually influence the reading vs. allowing one to read the text first and foremost and then choose to interact with our interventions.

AI-generated image of character Tony Hunter.

In contrast with the historical paintings, we also used AI technology to generate ‘new’ images based on the text. I used Midjourney to generate the character faces. Despite the novel being cinematic in nature, it was never made into a film. Therefore, we felt this was a way to help envision the characters. It was an interesting process to type in keywords and see what the AI bot came up with. For example for the character of Tony Hunter, I typed in “1920s gay man mental breakdown actor nervous photorealistic new york city”. I was surprised by the assumptions and stereotypes made by the AI bot -for all characters, I was given images of white people. It seems that is the default unless you indicate a specific race. I suppose, given the fact that the tool was created by humans, perhaps this should not be surprising.

Overall, I think the project was a great way to try out digital tools to re-invent this novel. However, I sometimes question whether our additions add to the text or if they are extraneous bits added on top to distract. Would a reader prefer our website, Project Gutenberg, or a physical copy of the book?

Thanks to Raquel for developing the WordPress site, AI images and Kumo map; Miaoling for suggesting AI and creating the character map; and JP for contributing audio and historical images.

For the purpose of this project, our group selected the second and seventh chapters of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway for annotation. Our group is made up of Hampton Dodd, Majel Peters, Sean Patrick Palmer, and Kai Prenger. At the onset, we loaded the publicly available version of the novel from Project Gutenberg into Manifold. However, Majel spearheaded a fairly advanced prototype of Miro board with one chapter, demonstrating the varied annotative approaches we could use on this platform, and we adopted it as our tool of choice, While some of our annotation followed a more orthodox pattern (highlighting text and commenting on the highlighted text with digital sticky notes providing annotation), Miro gave us flexibility to pursue other styles to gloss the text. To track events external through each character’s point of view, such as the backfiring car or mysterious skywriting in chapter 2, we used flowlines connecting disparate references to these events across pages and perspectives. In another form of marginalia, we created a color-coded legend for each character’s stream of consciousness which could be appended to a page/paragraph when the stream begins, helping the reader understand how this common Modern literary technique is applied in Mrs. Dalloway. One main difference (and indeed trade offs) between using Miro as an annotation platform in comparison to hypothes.is or Manifold is that most annotation is visible without clicking or drilling down into each individual annotation. Maps, images and the annotations themselves live on the surface of the document. The unnested nature of the marginal notes closely mimics notes on a physical page. Beyond that, this digital tool also allowed us to include instructional notes on how to use Miro, and potentially could give new annotators details on the meaning behind color choices and structure of previous annotations like flowlines used for events interleaved throughout a chapter.

Initially, our division of labor rested on having each team member specialize in the type of annotation provided. For instance, Sean Patrick Palmer highlighted philological shifts by identifying words which exist today in English, but had a different meaning or valence in the Britain of Woolf’s time. Some teammates chose to focus on intratextual and intertextual commentary, while others wanted to provide historical context. Outward bound links varied from publicly consulted sources like Wikipedia to scholarly articles found in academic journals. We created maps and appended photos of locations extensively referenced in chapter 2. Portraits of royalty and dogs were included.

Reflecting what next steps would be interesting for a project like this:

1. Allow for filtering based on the annotation styles (historical, intratextual, cultural/theoretical, etc)
2. Creating more interactivity to reveal the relationships between narrators, or narrative through lines like the car backfiring

On a personal level, I found the additive nature of annotation, particularly sped up with digital tools, slightly overwhelming. I often asked myself “how much annotation is too much?” Perhaps I prefer subtractive creative work (photography, work through editing, even interpretive essay writing) versus additive work (painting, sculpting, annotation?).

Barthes tells us that, “confronting the work–a traditional notion, long since, and still today, conceived in what we might call a Newtonian fashion–there now occurs the demand for a new object, obtained by a shift or a reversal of previous categories.” His description of the text starts to resemble that of Dark Matter—not able to be directly or immediately perceived, but is rather, evidenced by its impact. I took this to mean there are certain persuasive and influential realities that govern our human perception, experience and behavior—though we are not always aware of their impact. In art, we attempt to give shape to some these forces acting on us—charting or claiming understanding of what we feel but don’t necessarily clearly see. 

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf drills down into very specific examples of these forces—spotlighting the causes and reactions tied to universally human themes of aging, spontaneity (freedom) versus security, conformity versus individualism—and sets them, seemingly, adrift in the minds of her characters. For all the precious behaviors of 1920s London she describes, Woolf makes her text felt through the undulating undercurrent of her key themes. Despite Woolf’s claim that there was no grand scheme in the writing of the book, an armature of precise timing, balance of character focus, and prism-like refractions of her key themes emerges. In the end, the novel itself feels quite tidy, even if her characters’ internal dialogues reveal them to be anything but.  

In working on this annotation project, I thought it important to capture some aspect of both the tidiness and the mess of Woolf’s stream of conscious-driven meditation on social British social obligation and human mortality. I feared that using a tool like Manifold, despite its many merits, would give far too much ground to an academic tidiness. I felt Miro offered a few beneficial tools that would help bring out what I felt was embedded in the text. First, it allows the text to be viewed all at once—one could theoretically zoom out and sense the body of work and the overlapping occurrence of many of the books events, and have an immediate impression of character interactions with each other and external events. Second, I felt that externalizing the annotations—making them viewable at all times (there are ways to hide them, with a slightly different set up) helped reinforce the concept of stream of consciousness—immediately sussing out Woolf’s intricately woven references to history, society, psychology, and geography. Third, Miro allows for linking between text and objects on the board, with the screen traveling across the terrain of the text to land on the final destination. This physical experience, to me, suggests the various migrations of Woolf’s characters around London, and even hints at the passage of time, a key component of the novel, as you shift to a new space on the board. And Finally, placing external links directly on the board generates a preview of the link—imagery that potentially answers the immediate needs of the viewer, keeping them engaged and focused on the text at hand. Of course, readers can jump into the rabbit hole if the wish. In addition, using the search function,  certain patterns within the work emerge. Quick context and word frequencies can be found—speaking to the rhythms Woolf baked into the narrative.  

Overall, I feel that the resulting object functions on many levels. It starts to trace some of the “Dark Matter” of the text—revealing it to the naked eye, while also answering the immediate need of sharing relevant factual information related to references contained within the “work.” Although it is perhaps not considered best practice, as a deeper expression of the multilayered of Woolf’s novel, I could imagine a thicket of stickies, links, images, and videos crowding the margins of chapters, giving an immediate impression of the depth, interconnectivity, and overarching structure of the text to shake off purely practical annotation ini favor of becoming, in its new form, a new “work” in and of itself. 

I felt an affinity for the Graham piece “Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires”, because back in a dark era called the 90’s when I was in grad school in Illinois, one of my first jobs was working at The Kolb-Proust Archive for Research.

This project is still up, and I think it’s still being worked on.

So, here is my experience with this project.

Marcel Proust wrote several letters per day. He was a member of the upper class of Paris, so his letters give an excellent view of life in that society.

The downside to this is that Proust didn’t date his letters. Enter Prof. Philip Kolb. He was a Proust scholar who collected and annotated Proust’s letters, eventually publishing over 20 volumes of his work.

To do this, Kolb would look through newspapers and magazines at the time, to figure out when the letters were written. Many of the people Proust wrote to were celebrities in their day, so their lives are fairly well-documented. Because Proust would mention the weather in his letters, the chronology files contain lots of weather reports.

Kolb then took this information and put it on index cards. These cards make up the chronology files. Kolb had other files, another set is the biography files. This set was about the people Proust knew and their families.

After Kolb’s death. the library and the French department decided to put Kolb’s research online.

The work was slow for the first year or two because the project had limited institutional support, and the folks running the project had to set it up, including things like the html templates, language, and design concerns.

Then, the project was awarded a grant. The grant allowed them to hire research assistant, which is where I come in. I worked mostly on the chronology files and some on the biographical files.

My job was to enter the information into the templates, alter the template if I needed to (add or delete sections or another category, etc) and look things up if the writing wasn’t clear, or the citation wasn’t complete.

It was a fascinating project to be involved with. I’ve always been a history buff, so the close-up view of upper class Parisian society in the late 19th to early 20th century fascinated me. I learned quite a lot.

It also affected me in odd ways. Reading all these letters, or excerpts of letters from these people gave me a kind of emotional connection to them. This came into focus when I started encoding the files around the start of World War I in 1914 and several people who has been regular correspondents of Proust’s died. Even though I never met these people, I felt this odd feeling of loss.

And I know history well enough to know that this was coming.

Another highlight for me was the correspondence between Proust and his ex, Comte Robert de Montesquieu. One letter, written by Proust while they were fighting, was absolutely scathing. Montesquieu sent the letter back, having corrected all the grammar and spelling errors with the signature “from your professor”.

After two years, the funding for the project ran out and they couldn’t find alternate funding, so while work on the project continued, it was scaled back, and I ended up getting a new RA position, in the Language Learning Lab.

The article as we may think has this peculiar and interesting aura around akin the advancement of the atomic age and idea of unlimited energy which it promised to provide the average joe, atomic cars hell yea. But there was Fukushima and Chernobyl which have dashed the hopes of unlimited energy of nuclear technology and the pushback that we see in many societies against the technology is something deeper that Dr. Bush may have missed when he wrote the article in 1945, and foretelling the advancement of technology in betterment for humanity he may have missed the mark somewhat.

There this missing aspect in the subjective reality that is hard to quantify in a scientific manner and that aspect is also important in my opinion – happiness. There is not mention of happiness in the article which should serve as a basis of society and not GDP or how many nobel prize winners your country might have. Of course these measurements are good and they do tend to increase happiness but technology is a double edged sword. Dr. Bush states as such but does not delve into that more in depth for more nuanced article.  Internet made us more connected but at the same time increased Big Brother aspect of it, and Data is gathered without our input. We are bombarded with Ads and constant news, and I doubt our brain is designed for it. We may live longer lives but our bodies are maintained by copious amount of drugs and doctor visits have become a new national pastime in America. But are we happy? School shootings are rampant and lies are new norm, and every expert that your mom loves to quote from Facebook during an argument with you about everything from fluoride in water and that everything has chemicals in it (Lady everything in this world is chemistry). Happiness is the one thing that is slipping in our quest for technological progress and prowess. Technology and the mastery of it increases our GDP but makes us look at the phone each time when we wake up. I think people notice the first they do is check their phone when they wake, and at times doom scroll throughout the night about all news of the world that is fed in real time. Are we still happy? Backlash against the onslaught of technology is inevitable and we as digital humanists must balance the good and the bad that technological advances offers us and policies and ethics that we might champion in the future which may sound radical now may be needed for more equitable society.

Graham uses the example of Joyce’s Ulysses to present an early example of hypertext that serves as “a graveyard for early work in the digital humanities.” (Graham) I appreciate her analysis of the intertextuality and the potential of cyberspace in creating infinite hypertext and variants. But after reading her introduction on diverse Ulysses DH projects, I started to consider the question of bridging intertextuality and intermediality through the digital transformation of literature. By referring to Marshall McLuhan’s theories, especially his discussion on media as extensions of man, I am wondering how to explain the mechanisms between textuality and materiality in our reading/writing experiences, particularly during the current media convergence. I have questions: can we say that a hypertext work remediated via digitalization transforms the implicity of intertextuality? If we are now in a meta-medium world, is it possible that we are overly immersed in nodes in intermedial practices and lose our connections with a work, a text, or an object? How should we deal with fragmented reading/writing/playing experiences enhanced by media convergence?

Drucker’s “The Virtual Codex” argues for an architectural approach to thinking about E-book designs. What elements make a book? What features constitute a book? She lists overlapping features in traditional book and e-book designs, like the table of contents, index, bookmarks, etc. My question, again, goes with the materiality mentioned in this approach: in terms of material culture, if we talk about things that talk via books/reading, how shall we analyze books that are not read (but to be collected, to be shown, to be exhibited, etc.)? What kinds of E-book designs satisfy this aim? Or, do we need to pay attention to nonreaders associated with books and E-books collections?

In this week’s reading, Blair touches on my above questions in “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission.” I learned about the broader applicability of note-taking in our engagements with books and also in our daily interactions. The notes could also be subversive or even totally irrelevant, as examples introduced in Lerer’s article “Devotion and Defacement: Reading Children’s Marginalia.” We see images of children’s playing, education, and domestic relationships in notes and the feminization in note-taking among young women. Note-taking is serving as the lens of human activities, including but not limited to reading. I am especially interested in how scholars talk about a person’s life experiences by reading their notes and comparing them with other historical resources. Is there a fictionality in note-taking?

The two weeks’ readings encourage me to reconsider the textuality and materiality of books, archival resources, notes, and general reading/writing experiences. Is there a space between texts and textiles? Do digital tools fragment these spaces?

McLuhan Marshall and W. Terrence Gordon. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: Gingko Press, 2013.