Our group, assigned to create an audio book, chose to weave three related stories into one. We used The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1892) as the master recording, into which we spliced recordings of The Box Social (James Reaney, 1996) and The Story of an Hour (Kate Chopin; 1894). The heroine of The Yellow Wallpaper is a writer who, we imagined, could be the author of the other to stories. Her experiences and observations wove easily into the other two stories which deal with a similar theme: women whose lives are stifled and negatively impacted by men in their lives. Taken together, the three stories give a rich impression of how this oppression takes shape, and the different ways its impact is processed by and emerges through the women it affects. To emphasize this variation and layer we chose to have three different readers, one for each story.

I was assigned the reading of The Yellow Wallpaper. I knew, from my previous experience listening to Publivox works, that creating an audio recording of a text would bring about unexpected sensations and realizations. I had experienced in my comparative listening of the Sherlock Holmes tale A Scandal in Bohemia the impact a reader has on the interpretation, enjoyment, and understanding of the listener. If unmoored in the story—presenting it simply as words translated from written to aural, the story could feel stilted with the emotional stripped away. Too professional and polished and it could dehumanize the characters and center the reader. Read with empathy, enhanced by macro and micro understanding of the tale paired with an ability to read between the lines, and the story can really spark to life.

I got set up and ready to go, with a goal in mind—bring the story to life! Feel our characters experience and immerse yourself! All of this creative direction buzzing in my head left me unprepared for the physical challenge of performing the text! The constant need to clear the throat, swallow, or quench a sudden urgent need for water. The mind jumping and distracted by anachronistic and unrelated sounds—sirens, honking, dogs barking and neighbors stomping. More than once I found my mouth simply would not form the words distinctly—bumbling together and rounding out the sharp edges of that needed precise articulation. A woman of some standing in 1892 slurring her words? It can’t be. Despite reading ahead to anticipate the flow of a passage, I’d still find myself in funny little corners where the tone of a previous sentence simply did not neatly connect to the next. I became a bit obsessed with pausing and rerecording — my liberal use of “pause” leaving little blips all through the recording.

Even more surprising than the physical realties of audio book narration, however, was hearing what I had actually captured. When I recorded, I did what I could to immerse myself in the characters voice. She was writing in her diary, a setting where she would presumably be most expressive and safely house her true emotions. As I spoke into the microphone, I would lean into certain words with an image of our heroine writing and reliving what she described. Given that the story portrays her being isolated, with activities limited and monitored, she would need to have a bit of desperation. In the opening, that might take shape as her trying to make peace with the situation up, looking at it through the lens of her oppressor husband/doctor, until that façade begins to crack revealing an frantic delusion centered on restoring her own freedom and sense of agency. My idea was that I would set out almost too chipper and light at the beginning, as she tries to convince herself that all is fine—maybe with a few cracks of awareness that she chases away. As the story progressed I would become more frantic—speaking faster and louder with more emphasis on certain words. Our heroine ironically becomes more hysterical as she, in her own mind, becomes more in control. The issue is when I listened back is that what I had thought were emotional readings were actually mild mannered and distant. The distance between the voice in my head and the one in the recording was immense and surprising. Either my natural or conditioned tendency to softening my expressions interfered with what I had been trying to do artistically. But I’m not an actress—so how to render her story in “full color” without going off the rails into campy emoting? I muddled through—admitted to myself that some of it would likely be absurd, but noted this new realization of myself. Thanks to this experience I now wonder what people are hearing whenever I speak, because it clearly is not what I hear in my mind.

That distance between my internal and external expression of the story puts in relief the conscious structuring and perimeter of a story. Any hesitation or discrepancy in flow and emotion, and immersion is lost for the reader and the listener. I believe that there’s an authenticity that naturally occurs when we hear any story in our minds—as we absorb and activate it, weaving in our own voice and experiences. That is ours alone. Once we turn to share it out it necessarily cannot be the same, unless you are specifically skilled at the translation of the internal to the external. Overall, this experience has given me a greater appreciation for the artistic process behind acting. The ability to take someone else’s story, enhance it with your own internal understanding and reflect that back into the world is extraordinary. For me it is much more difficult than storytelling alone—which necessarily includes personal tailoring and adjustments for mood and audience—leeway in its telling. But to take the boundaries of a written piece and still pump it full of life and meaning, never changing a word, is a different talent all together.

(with apologies to the Supremes)

Hemingway notes

Process:

I pulled a copy of the book from Project Gutenberg. I read the first few chapters, and realized that they were at best, loosely connected vignettes, so I decided to treat each chapter as its own story.

Then, we discovered we were working from the wrong edition, so I’m adding some stories from the 1925 edition.

For the recordings, I would read the chapter out loud to myself, and then record it. If it went well, I’d listen to the recording when it was finished. Then, I decided whether to keep the recording or to delete it and try again.

I didn’t use the first recording of any of the chapters. I’ve been doing recordings like this and teaching students to do them, that I went in knowing that the first recording usually isn’t very good. Most of these took between three and five takes.

I didn’t do a lot of editing, but I did some. For instance, I would get stuck on a certain phrase, repeat it or launch into swear words. Those got deleted. I also sometimes take a very audible deep breath before starting, and I tried to edit all those out, though I’m sure I missed a few.

Chapter one: at the start I tried to highlight how drunk everyone (especially the lieutenant) was. In the encounter with the adjutant, I tried to make him sound anxious and a little scared, and after that, I wanted the narrator to sound annoyed since the narrator clearly thought the adjutant was being overly cautious or maybe even downright stupid.

Chapter two: For the first matador, I was very matter of fact because there’s not a lot of story to tell there. The second one had a longer story, so I Tried to add some excitement to it, especially with him getting up and staggering around. The third matador, I tried to show his exhaustion by the end of the whole thing.

Chapter three: I spoke slowly with lots of pauses to represent how slowly everything was going, to give the impression that we’re stuck in the mud with them.

Chapter four: I read it like the narrator was telling this story to friends at a bar or a party.

Chapter five: I felt like the narrator was proud of his work on this barricade, so I tried to do that, and the excitement that went with it.

Chapter six: I treated this like the narrator was a reporter on the scene. I didn’t see the narrator as particularly emotional about any of this. I didn’t even see the narrator have any sense of pity for the sick minister. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s just I kind of expected a “wow, look at that wretch” reaction or something. But there wasn’t. No pity. No disgust either.

Chapter seven: I started off speaking fast and maybe a little staccato because there was still a battle, but I slowed down as the description continued and the focus more shifted to the perspective of the wounded. They’re not in the battle (which was dying down anyway) anymore, so I felt I could go a little slower.

Chapter eight: I wanted to highlight the fear in the man trapped in the trench, so I spoke really fast, then I went for an ironic tone at the end.

Chapter nine: At first I focused on the voices of the cops. I tried to use a hybrid midwestern/Pittsburgh accent for them. And, man, it did not work. They both just sounded… off, and in a way where I felt like I could come as judgmental or condescending towards them. I redid. I tried doing this one with different accents (the version with southern accents was, to borrow from Law and Order: SVU, especially heinous), and it just didn’t work for me, so I redid it about six times.

Chapter ten: I broke this up into smaller chunks to work on it. Honestly, the last two paragraphs were extremely rough for some reason. I had to redo them several times. Finally, on the last take, when I stumbled over something, I just repeated it and edited out the not so good version.

Chapter eleven: It’s good that I know a lot about WWI and its immediate aftermath, because I would have been LOST here without knowing what was going on. That also helped in chapter three.

Chapter twelve: I emphasized the word “whack, ” trying to make the onomatopoeia more evident. Then I switched to a voice that was about struggling to get onto and control this badly injured horse. Finally, I ended with hesitation, because of the bull

Chapter thirteen: This was a surprisingly difficult chapter. I tried to capture the noise and chaos of the crowd at the beginning, then the exhaustion of the bull, then the speed of the assault. And finally, I slowed down for the encounter at the cafe. There is a lot going on in not very many words here.

Chapter fourteen: I tried to convey action, but tinged with anger and hate because that’s what I got out of the reading.

Chapter fifteen: Again, I tried doing different voices here, just like in chapter nine. It didn’t really work here either, so I aimed for different tones of voice, which I think worked okay. A really small thing tripped me up on this chapter. In the phrase “he hunched down in the street with them all”, I stopped at “them” at least four times. But you shouldn’t put a pause between “them” and “all” because “them all” is acting like a single word here.

Chapter sixteen: I started off a little slowly here, because I wanted to give the idea that Maera was dazed. Then when they carried him out of the ring. I went faster to highlight the speed they were going. I made “larger” louder, and “smaller” quieter to try to give the impression of the change in perception. Finally, the word “cinematograph” was rough. I kept adding a “-y” on the end of it. Then I had to look up how it was pronounced, because I wasn’t sure. I turned out to be close. It’s strange because it’s not a word we use much.

Chapter seventeen: By and large, I read this like a reporter at the scene. The only time I changed that was the dialogue, especially the line the guard said after Cardinella lost control of his bowels.

Chapter eighteen: Again, knowledge of European history comes in handy. The king of Greece, Constantine was overthrown in 1917, but returned to the throne in 1920, and was toppled again in 1922. This story takes place after the second time he was overthrown in the aftermath of the execution of the ministers in chapter six, I think.

The Indian Village was a challenge because of the length. When I first saw how long it was, I read through it, looking for places to cut it into smaller files, but I didn’t see how I could do that and keep the flow of the story going, so I did as one long take. Also, as with the chapter with the Hungarians being shot, there is a slur in this chapter. I am not comfortable with using those words, but they were certainly in much more widespread usage when these books were written, so I did it.

Weirdly, it reminds of the Wild Cards book series from the 80’s and 90’s. They were an anthology series, several of the books were set in what was then contemporary times. I loved those books, so a few years back, I picked one up to reread it. The story still held up, but the dialogue – which hadn’t really bothered me when I read it 30+ years ago – disturbed me. I admit the slurs that were thrown around were used like that back then but it’s not a pleasant memory.

The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife. I probably should have tried to differentiate between the voices in the dialogue more, especially the doctor’s wife. Why was she in the darkened room? A migraine? Was she drunk or hungover? Those would affect her lines in this, but I really didn’t think about it until just now,

The Cat in the Rain. I read this as kind of a “day in the life” story. The wife is … if not completely unhappy, certainly disaffected here, and the husband is oblivious. The hotel manager is more responsive to the wife than the husband.

I actually sent the recordings to a friend for feedback before I sent them on to my teammates. This particular friend is a former student and now colleague, so he understands what I do.

Once I went over his notes – he suggested that I rerecord chapter nine, for example, I sent the files to my teammates who did the editing. At that point, I mostly checked out. I mean, I checked out things when the folks editing the piece put something up.

At one point, I decided to take the 1924 edition and put it on Manifold as a Do-It-Yourself sort of thing. I put the chapters up, added recordings, and annotated them, so the person reading it can try to make an audiobook themselves.

Hi folks – I recognize that this post might venture (perhaps too far) outside of the scope of our coursework so apologies in advance. Attempting to connect these thinkers might have been a stretch and my approach likely mirrors the discombobulation I feel when attempting to recreationally address such abstract and seemingly insurmountable issues. However, I hope some glimmer of what I was trying to convey can be gleaned from my diatribe. Looking forward to hearing any thoughts, criticisms, “what the hell are you talking about”s, etc.

Though it has likely been said ad nauseam regarding much of the work associated with thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Walter Benjamin’s somber dissection of the declension of storytelling, the resulting slow death of wisdom, and the falling value of experience is as relevant today as it was in 1936. Mirroring the loss of aura discussed in his famed The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction written a year prior, Benjamin’s critique of modernity and its associated experiences of disenchantment, fragmentation, and solitude have only become exacerbated as instances of rapid transition, such as that which fomented the modern individual’s inability to integrate themself into the disruptive early 20th-century, have increased unimpeded in the Digital Age, further distancing the masses from the possibility of true understanding of the world they exist within and producing the present sense of political impotency and detachment from any sense of historical continuity. Benjamin’s prescient vision of the supersession of knowledge by passively received information is undoubtedly noteworthy and merits its own analysis. However, for the sake of exercise, I’d like to evaluate Benjamin’s The Storyteller as a prognostic account of the cultural trajectory that in some way led to a work I recently mentioned reading in class, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations by social critic Christopher Lasch. Though Benjamin and Lasch are wildly different thinkers who approach their cultural critiques from dissimilar theoretical frameworks, I found myself unable to dissociate Benjamin’s survey of the lonely crowd’s “inability to communicate experience or apprehend wisdom” and Lasch’s commentary’s cogent continuation of this societal descent into a narcissistic rejection of the past (i.e., of wisdom) and the “transcendental self-attention” that consequentially surfaces in a dissonant society that believes it has no future, shared or otherwise (White, 2017, p. 10; Lasch, 1979, p. 14). Throughout what follows, I intend to briefly highlight the ways in which Benjamin’s lamented decline of oral traditions and the concurrent rise of information ultimately yielded the narcissistic trivialization of the past that Lasch’s criticism works to illuminate. In conclusion, I highlight the resurrection of communicable experience as an immaterial commodity in the Digital Age and the renewed relevance of Benjamin’s essay The Author as a Producer.

As noted by Richard White in his analysis “Walter Benjamin: “The Storyteller” and the Possibility of Wisdom,” the philosopher’s primary intention in this piece is to illuminate the way in which the devolution of storytelling’s role in society is a symptom of a wider phenomenon of modernity connected to the atomization of the individual and the crippled capacity to communicate or contextualized one’s experiences within a community (2017). Benjamin traces the root of this decline to the rise of the novel and its “birthplace in the solitary individual,” giving way to a societal condition devoid of experience that Benjamin termed Erfahrung, or the “deeper sense of participation in cultural forms” that transcends and shape the individual (White, 2017, p. 6-7). As time is increasingly flattened and experience is detached from context through ubiquitous connectivity, people are left in a state of distraction and disruption (or, in states of shock begetting systemic bêtise, if we want to be Stieglerian) dependent on disseminated information from above rather than inherited, intergenerational wisdom that modernity has dismissed and “co-signed to oblivion,” to further borrow the cynical poetics of Richard White, a process that the project of postmodernity has (rightfully or not) finalized in its leveling of all totalizing, grand-narratives (2017, p. 2).

While plenty of literature exists today detailing the current landing place of the cultural trajectory that Benjamin’s work sought to delineate, such as Byung-Chul Han’s work in The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present (I’ll touch on this shortly), Christopher Lasch’s 1979 work can be said to address the post-war evolution of this phenomenon and its manifestations in the culture and social movements of 1970s America, offering something of a bridge between Benjamin’s elegies to the aura in the 1930s and the crucial critiques censuring Big Data’s commodification of the self being published today. Produced amidst escalating global tensions following the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan, Lasch centers his work in a similar sense of loss and precarity that underlies much of Benjamin’s output as a Jewish German witnessing the early stages of Hitler’s consolidation of power, each echoing Frank Kermode’s notion that “…the sense of an ending… is endemic to what we call modernism” (Kermode, 1967). In the same vein as the cries of “No Future” being issued concurrently by circles of punks in the nascent age of neoliberalism, Lasch notes, “Now that tomorrow appears troubled and uncertain, the past appears ‘irrelevant…,” suggesting that a denial of the past, regardless of the progressive and optimistic package such a denial might be delivered in, ultimately embodies the despair of a society who can’t face their own sense of lost futurity (1979). Lasch theorizes that, within the current economic system, this produced a commodified, marketable nostalgia that “trivializes the past by [simply] equating it with outmoded styles of consumption, discarded fashions and attitude…” and that “…people today resent anyone who draws on the past in serious discussions of contemporary conditions or attempts to use the past as a standard by which to judge the present…” (Lasch, 1979, p. 5). Mirroring Benjamin’s criticisms of the modern individual’s inability to exchange experience, Lasch suggests that the disassembly of societal continuity and its resultant radicalized individualism begets “strategies of narcissistic survival” that ultimately reproduce the “features of a collapsing civilization it claims to criticize” (Lasch, 1979, p. 4). Lasch pinpoints these strategies in programs of self-improvement and fixations on our own “private performance” as “connoisseurs of our own decadence,” admitting that while such pursuits are harmless in themselves, when wrapped in the “rhetoric of authenticity and awareness,” they signify a retreat from politics and class consciousness (Lasch, 1979, p. 13). Returning to Benjamin’s notion that collective experience, initially passed on through storytelling and lost through the advent of the solitary novel form, has been devalued, giving rise to the masses as individuals subjected to an absence of collective counsel that renders them wholly dependent on information presumably produced beyond the reach of the layman, this can be said to have subsequently generated a process that Lasch terms the bureaucratization of the spirit. As such, the terminus, as it existed in 1979, of Benjamin’s loss of experience sees the initial stages of its resurrected commodified form through the narcissistic survival strategies of the individualized nascent-neoliberal subject approaching self-improvement and education as esoteric programs to be purchased rather than adopted through intergenerational wisdom.

With this turn, consumption as a cure becomes the “wisdom” of the time, addressing alienation and modernity’s malaise with prescribed therapeutics of purchasable personal salvation that allow for the momentary sedative illusion of personal well-being and psychic security, degenerating class-conscious politics into “a struggle not for social change but for self-realization” (Lasch, 1979, p. 39). Or, so Lasch suggests. The importance, accuracy, and relevance of this work are obviously up for debate, as Lasch’s output is in many ways problematically dated and has since been adopted to justify the unsavory politics of unscrupulous slimeballs. However, I found the connective throughline of modernity’s fragmentation of experience and reduction of community in both works to be noteworthy and functional as theoretical rest stops on the highway to understanding our present moment. As previously noted, the work of Byung-Chul Han provides some insight into where the course of culture once critiqued by Benjamin and Lasch currently stands. In Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power, Han follows Lasch’s critique of the individualized, narcissistic neoliberal-subject in his discussions of their novel role as auto-exploiting laborers, in which class struggle has transformed into an inner struggle against oneself due to the immateriality of production and the ubiquitous ownership of the means of unlimited production through their capacity to contribute to the constantly flowing circuit of digital capital via personal data, content creation, etc. while being sedated by the addictive, dopamine-tickling validation attainable through social media, subordinating the social to systems of auto-exploitative self-production under the banner of self-realization and experiential expression (Han, 2017). However, Benjamin’s work remains salient even amidst a milieu of contemporary writers such as Han addressing the terminal processes that Benjamin’s cautionary writing presciently intended to address. In his 1934 essay, The Author as Producer, Benjamin reminds the individualized producer, be it the author of modernity or the content-creator of the Digital Age, of one’s duty in addressing the class struggle, despite one’s inescapable position in the production process. Praising Bertolt Brecht’s ability to distract an already distracted audience only to shock them with the typically ignored shortcomings of modernity, Benjamin employs the playwright as an example of the producer exhibiting clear reflection regarding his position in the process of production and the subsequent changes consciously made to his technique, the infrastructure of the piece that he deems inseparable from its message, in order to maintain a dissenting, transgressive artistic approach countering the dominant economic logic of the time (Hess). Benjamin notes in the concluding portion of the work in reference to the intellectual iconoclasm of the author, “This betrayal [of class] consists, in the case of the writer, in behavior which changes him from a reproducer of the apparatus of production into an engineer who sees his task as the effort of adapting that apparatus to the aims of the proletarian revolution” (1934). Under today’s immaterial mode of production in which the narcissistic neoliberal-subject auto-exploits themself in the circuit of commodification consuming their permanently updating digital autobiography shared in pseudo-social spheres, perhaps Benjamin’s call for mediated solidarity finds new potentialities in the hyper-mediated state of our society should the author, the solitary individual, the content-creator adapt the inescapable apparatuses of neoliberal digital capitalism as mediums of transgression, community, and collective programs that might “blast open the continuum of history,” to borrow Benjamin’s phrasing in On The Concept of History (1968).

This vague optimism is not to distract from the complexity of such a naive “call to action” and the reality of what it would take to accomplish mobilizing content-creators to follow Brecht and creatively act on their revolutionary potential as producers, despite operating within mediums designed solely for the purpose of capitalist extraction and exploitation, is likely an impossibility. The neoliberal regime doesn’t simply exist in digital platforms but casts the neoliberal-subject into a realm of non-time, the early stages of this mentioned by Benjamin in his statement on loss of “open-ended time, for the openness of idleness or inactivity” noted in The Storyteller. In a model of immaterial production, rituals of closure are destroyed by the “neoliberal imperative of optimization and performance” that does not allow for any sense of completion, constantly incentivizing the production of “new stimuli, excitement, and experience” so that such experience (once lost but now found by the market) caters to the serial perception of consumers as we are rendered incapable of producing the subsequent experiences of duration or lingering, ultimately depriving us of the capacity for reflection that allows for the development of wisdom (Han, 2020, p. 8-9). The narrative, the novel, the ritual of storytelling, all operated as a form of closure, characterized by a beginning and an end in a closed order. Benjamin’s and Lasch’s dreaded rise of information, by contrast, is purely additive, antithetical to that of the narrative. As Byung-Chul Han states, “Information… does not combine into a story, a song, that could form the basis of meaning and identity. Information can only be endlessly accumulated…” (Han, 2020, p. 31). As time grows inhabitable, as objects are produced without structural endurance, forcing further production and consumption, as both ritual and wisdom are determined to be archaic, obsolete and cast aside, as even moral values are marketed and consumed purely as “marks of distinction,” what is left for the narcissistic neoliberal-subject but distracted consumption and the optimization of the self? (Han, 2020, p. 5). What does a Brechtian reevaluation of our approaches to the mediums available to us look like and how do the atomized work to reestablish the community and the rituals capable of constructing and holding such a collective together? What does a rejection of the psychological goods peddled and produced by us, for us through the immaterial mode of production look like and what is the “role of the author” within this process? What does a seizure of the means of production look like when we are the means of immaterial production? Who knows. So, as we strive to begin answering some of the questions and reflect on the genealogy of decline that led us to this moment, I’ll punt to a quote from Gilles Deleuze as to shift our sights back to the future, whether it will recognizably exist or not;

“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”

Resources

Benjamin, W. (1934). Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1931-1934 (Vol. 2). The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Benjamin, W. (1968). Illuminations. Schocken Books.

Han, B.-C. (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. (E. Butler, Trans.). Verso.

Han, B.-C. (2020). The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present. (D. Steuer, Trans.). Polity Press.

Kermode, F. (1967). The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford Univ. Press.

Lasch, C. (1979). The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. W. W. Norton & Company.

White, Richard. (2017). Walter Benjamin: “The Storyteller” and the Possibility of Wisdom. The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 51(1), 1–14. https://doi.org/10.5406/jaesteduc.51.1.0001

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!

Hypothesis

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.

Manifold

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)

The Teaching-Learning Center (TLC) and the Grad Center Digital Initiatives have some great-looking workshops coming up. In particular, check out the workshop on social annotation with hypothes.is this Wednesday (details below). We’ll be using hypothes.is and talking to hypothes.is OG and VP, Education Jeremy Dean about the platform on 10/17.

The 10/5 workshop will touch on Manifold Publishing, a platform that might appeal to groups for the second group project. Note that the 10/12 workshop will go deeper on Manifold’s possibilities, so that is must-see-TV for groups who want to use Manifold!

The final component of your first group project is to reflect on your group’s work and your role within the group.

To repeat the simple prompt from the assignment,

The last requirement is that you compose a brief post for the blog (500 words or so) reflecting on a) the process/product as a whole and b) your specific role within it, with an emphasis on what the experience taught you that merely reading about audiobooks (or, of course, merely reading the text in question) would have missed. The post is due on 10/17.

If you’d like to see an good example, check out Lisa’s from a very outre approach to Melville from 2020…

The time Walter Benjamin was writing The Storyteller was not dissimilar to our own.  Both eras had economic upheaval; both had tumultuous political rattlings; both had cultural gyrations; and both had new technologies coming to the fore.  The focus of his essay is a critique of the writer Nikolai Leskov, and in expounding his views he prefaces his points by analyzing what a storyteller is and what is their trade, concluding that the art of storytelling is dying, if not already mostly dead.

For Benjamin, the storyteller is one who practices his craft orally.  The source of stories is oral tradition which contains practical and useful life insights. As he states, “experience which is passed on from mouth to mouth is the source from which all storytellers have drawn” (Benjamin 84). He continues to explain that there are two types of storytellers equivalent to those who stay round their homestead practicing guild craftsmanship and those who travel afar and return to share their escapades.  Both types perform similar services which is to pass along, “openly or covertly, something useful’ to act as “having counsel” in several modes whether it be moral advice, practical advice or a proverb (Benjamin 88). This counsel is not so much an answer as it is a “proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is unfolding” (Benjamin 88). In this way the listener gains valuable insight themselves and at the same time propagates the culture because stories have many interpretations and will be interpretated appropriately for each era. They are appropriate because they are motivated by the universal human condition of death, which is the fundamental motivator of all stories.

Death as a motivation for stories is developed in more detail by Peter Brooks in his essay Freud’s Masterplot. In it he explains that the model of a narrative plot- a story- “is constituted in the tension of two formal categories, difference and resemblance” (280). The transformation between them is a synthesis which can be called a metaphor (Brooks 280). I believe it is this metaphorical aspect that allows stories to withstand time and are interpreted differently in different eras. The specific key in metaphor is metonymy which provides the movement, the tension, of a narrative. Quoting Todorov, he states, ‘[transformation] is an operation in two directions: it affirms at once resemblance and difference; it puts time into motion and suspends it, in a single movement; it allows discourse to acquire a meaning without this meaning becoming pure information; in a word, it makes narrative possible and reveals its very definition” (281). He makes clear the distinction between story and information which Benjamin was discussing as a major reason that storytelling is fading. What makes us gravitate towards stories as a moth to a flame is as Barthes noted,” the passion that animates us as readers of narrative is the passion for (of) meaning” (Brooks 282). Barthes continues with the idea that passion is a desire for the end whether it baffles us or fascinates us (Brooks 282). The example of the strongest articulations of this point is from Sartre’s La Nausee where Roquentin says, “In reality you have started at the end…but the end is there, transforming everything” (Brooks 283). Brooks restates, “ the beginning in fact presupposes the end.  The very possibility of meaning plotted through time depends on the anticipated structuring force of the ending” (283). In other words, the beginning is predicated on the ending, so we animate our lives with death in view and as the animating force to tell our story.  It is indicative that Sartre, a proponent of Existentialism, which views the individual as being responsible for their own life creating meaning and purpose- creating their own story- as the person who articulated most clearly (according to Brooks) what animates a narrative.

While Benjamin was heading down the pessimistic path for stories and their death by thousands of novels and newspapers, others aren’t as fatalistic. Danton wrote ”What is the history of Books?” in 1982 focused on book history to gather a cohesive overview of the field as, at the time, it seemed very discombobulated.  He discovered that the communication leading to a book had 6 stages and surprisingly, historically, the mundane stages took the majority of effort.  Getting paper was 50% of the effort. Revisiting the article in 2007, he had further insights.  Although fragmentation was still in existence, he proposed three questions for the field: How do books come into being? How do they reach readers? What do readers make of them? (Darnton 497) He also noted that an exciting endeavor of book history in 1965 was “history from below” (Darnton 496). This started the discussion of ordinary readers on the street and their reading habits and away from those higher up the reading scale. What he discovered through McKenzie’s work was that text resonate across the ages and through social class (Darnton 506). He notes how McKenzie showed, “the character of Congreve’s plays was transformed from scrappy, bawdy quartos of the late 17c to stately classicism of the 1701 octavo edition. Although the texts remaind essentially the same, their meaning was modified by page design, new modes of presenting scenes and the typographical articulation of all the parts” (Darnton 506). A historical example of meaning modified by design.

In an interview with Merve Emre, Leah Price noted that book history “represents a shift in understanding from looking at texts through the vantage of the author to looking at texts from the vantage point of the reader” (Emre 2). She continues with the vantage view ‘from below.” Bringing book history to our era shows the distinction between our point of view and that of Benjamin.  Whereas he was sentimental and fatalistic, our era is more optimistic. Johanna Drucker in The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space ushers us into our present environment. Although the birth of the e-space has had its spurts, it is stabilizing. One hindrance that held the e-book back was the insistence of publishers to try to mimic the physical codex in electronic form- a kitchy proposal (Drucker 216). The approach now in view is not about replicating the way a book looks but extending the ways a book works as we go digital (Drucker 216). Taking how a book works as a starting point, we can move forward with our approach to stories and storytelling.  Drucker appropriates an architectural metaphor in explicating how a book works. The architectural profession says ‘program’ for the formal structure of an entity to denotes how it works.  “Program” consists of the activities that arise from a response to the formal structure (Drucker 220). With this in mind, she continues that the “program” of a book involves activities that she names the phenomental book- the complex production of meaning that arises from dynamic interaction with the literal work (Drucker 221). From there we can develop virtual books to replace the traditional codex.  Features of the electronic space need to add new functionality for it to be relevant and not repeat the mistakes of the origin of the ebook (Drucker 219). Tracing the history of reading puts this in perspective. She draws a summation. In the 12^th century, reading was monastic where reading was solitary followed by contemplative prayer. This was followed by an emphasis on Aristotelian rhetoric and logic. During that time, readers needed meta-textual structures to help with analysis. Heads, sub-heads, tables of contents, page numbers, etc. (Drucker 225). Our era is a continuation of that development. Examples such as Sophie at SpecLab and Collex are attempts to push the boundaries further of the ‘program’ of a text.

The publishing industry is publishing more and more, with a strong growth of audio books bringing ‘reading’ to more people, more often.  The drive for narration is alive, well, and thriving.  One can say that it has taken a utopian element in that Librvox is a community that is based on idealistic tenets and it is thriving. It has a community that shares and cares for its members without the added negativity that is usually contained in ‘reviews.’ The space is a public collective repository of public domain texts that are made into audio books by volunteers (Weber 210).  It is a new iteration of a traditional book community with an innovative aspect. “Librivox demonstrated how collaborative, amateur forms of production could work in a cultural space” (Weber 211). It has not only added a new functionality, which was a point that Drucker mentioned, but it has also “engaged the reader in ‘a process of creation’ that involves both (re)interpretation and then (re)creattion” (Weber 213).

Unlike Benjamin where for him storytelling was bound to fade away, the converse is happening. Librivox is one example which has elements of a fully participatory utopian community where everyone is an author and an artist. What next? Political reform?!

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller.” Illuminations. Schocken Books. NY

Darnton, Robert. ‘”What Is The History of Books?” Revisited’. Modern Intellectual      History. 2007 doi: 10.1017/S1479244307001307

Drucker, Johanna. “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space”.

Emre, Merve. “Public Thinker: Leah Price on Books, Book Tech and Book Tattoos” Publicbooks.org. 2022

Weber, Millicent. ‘”Reading” the Public Domain: Narrating and Listening to Librivox Audiobox. Book History, 24.1. Spring 2021.pp. 209-243. Johns Hopkins Press.

Reading the articles for this weeks, rereading previous articles, and incorporating new sources, I had a framework in mind when I went to listen to the first audio book. This is something that I haven’t done in a very long time, so I was curious for the experience.

First, I found a copy of Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour and gave it a listen at home at my desk. The quality of the reading was high as it was done by a professional. The voice was clear, crisp, with strong Standard English enunciation. I followed story and kept my focus on it. About 1/4 of the way through I fidgeted as I didn’t appreciate a man’s voice for the narrator. Interesting, I thought. This put on the trail of other versions, which I found- 3 to be exact, all male voices. This gave me pause, so I went searching for another book- Sweat by Zora Neale Hurston.Again, I found a copy voiced by a male with high quality production which I listened to with the same reaction. Searching further, I discovered one voiced by a female. However, this wasn’t professionally done but was done by an academic. The quality was acceptable but distracting. The speaker was a Southerner which lent the voice a closer connection to the words, but the misspeaking and throat clearing were a distraction. This made me think of the points that English brought up in the article, “Teaching the Novel in the Audio Age,” where he listed drawbacks that have to be overcome as we incorporate aural books into our classrooms, a concern for me. This also made me reflect on D..E..McKenzie’s point in his sociology of text where he mentions text may be the same but the meaning is modified by page design, new modes of presenting scenes, and articulation of the parts. I continued and searched for  Steinbeck’sChrysanthemums. This was off putting as the male voice was heavy handed for the male and lisp for the female. I continued  and  I searched for Gogol’s The Overcoat and was going in circles until I found that audio versions have it translated as The Cloak. I have very long daily commutes, where I usually read. One day, I put on my earbuds and listened to the story. I was happy to give my eyes a rest. Something I didn’t notice until half way through the story. I also found myself unwinding a bit by sitting back and closing my eyes. This was a treat. This made me think of Price when she was having an interview with Emre and she said that, no, her work is not to be a  “killjoy” but the opposite and bring more into lives.

A new chapter is happening and I didn’t even turn a page.

The Tale of Genji (Genji) was written by Murasaki Shikibu (c. 970–c. 1019), a female attendant born into the middle ranks at the imperial court in the Heian Japan (794–1185). Japanese scholars believe that this work is a masterpiece that represents Japanese national character and therefore is a must-read for both Japanese and those interested in Japanese culture. The original text is written in Classical Japanese and is hard to understand for readers without years of language training. In addition, no single manuscript could be verified as the only source of this work. There have been fragments and different versions being passed down over the years. Since about the 1910s, modern Japanese translations that are complete and accessible have appeared, followed by translations in other languages.

The story is about the life of Genji, the son of Emperor Kiritsubo. Although the central figure Genji is fictional, many of the characters in Genji are loosely connected to historical figures during the Heian period. There are a massive amount of love and sexual affairs surrounding Genji in the book, but you could also read this book as an epic of Japanese aristocratic lives, profoundly depicting traditions, ceremonies, arts, politics, religions, etc. The whole book is so sophisticated in its plots, delineation of characters, and literary and aesthetic forms. I have read this work multiple times but am very curious about how we might “read” the text through audiobooks and appreciate/understand the stories in a radically different context from our own.

I found the audiobook version of Genji through audible: The Tale of Genji Volume 1 Audiobook This link only leads you to the first volume of Genji.

If you are a subscriber of audible, you could get access to this volume using one credit. You can also buy the audiobook version from amazon for $7.35. However, I had difficulties locating it at libraries and also am not sure how it works if I wanted to assign this volume to my students if I am going to teach about Genji. I could not imagine how to organize my class if I gave up the physical copy of a Genji translation and instead only assigned students to listen to this audiobook version. But this volume might be a good possibility to explore. It is an unabridged version based on Dennis Washburn’s recent translation. Washburn’s translation departs from the original but has excellent readability for modern and western readers, which, I think, is why this translation has been made into an English audiobook. The audiobook version sticks to the Washburn’s translation but the chapter numbers in the audiobook version do not match the actual chapter numbers in Genji, which will be annoying if we are going to refer to a certain episode.

The audiobook Genji is narrated by Brian Nishii, a professional voice actor born in Tokyo with a background in multilingual cultural activities. He delivers a flawless narration and pays special attention to Japanese people and place names. I appreciate his pronunciation and the varied tones he chooses for different characters. Heartfelt emotions are very well acted out, especially when he chants love poems. His voice is professionally recorded and edited, but I can still feel awkward when he plays female roles. You would still inevitably find in his voice an exotic Asian woman image. I am unsure if it is okay to assume a seemingly natural connection between high-pitched voices and feminization. But one scene in this volume impressed me a lot when he plays a role named Lady Rokujō whose spirit rushes out of her body, possesses Genji’s wife, Lady Aoi, and confesses her hatred and anger for Aoi. Nishii’s voice as Lady Rokujō is not adorable but emotionally rich and attractive, which breaks stereotypes of Japanese women. However, to what extent does the richness of this character come from the actor? To what extent is it derived from the work itself? If the producer decides to use more actors, would it help the readers capture more of the nuanced emotions?

I would say the process of listening to this volume is a smooth one. With textual close reading alone, we have a lot of room for imagination, although it can be challenging and uncomfortably inconvenient. This audiobook offers its readers convenience and smooth experience, but what would our imagined world be like with his voice? Is it possible to “read” a foreign text or foreign characters with an open mind while listening to a familiar/domestic and single cast audiobook?

Sharing a couple of articles I thought were interesting in relation to what we’ve been discussing in class for anyone with extra time on their hands. They are fun fairly quick reads, I promise! The first, is a response to a letter written into the Wired magazine advice column, Cloud Support, looking for reassurance that disdain for emoji and gif usage is valid. The second is an Ezra Klein piece (NYT) that contains interesting thoughts around content and platform pairing. The article, with quite a bit drawn from McLuhan (surprise!!), spends a lot of time discussing television’s tendency to create the expectation of being entertained in the viewer. The implication being—what does that do to news, education or other types of information that may not appropriately pair with that expectation? What does that mean for audio books? How has television influenced our expectation beyond that platform to be entertained? If you record a book without embellishments do you actually mimic the “blank slate” presentation of print that allows the reader to actively engage in world creation? If you apply sound effects, spirited embodiment of characters and music how are you changing the reception of the information (spoken and unspoken) contained in the text?

Am I Wrong to Judge People for Talking to Me in Emoji?

WIRED’s spiritual advice columnist reassures a literary reader that it’s OK to communicate with images.

Opinion | I Didn’t Want It to Be True, but the Medium Really Is the Message (Published 2022)

How we look matters as much as what we see.