After our chat, Jeremy shared a link to crowdlaaers, a site that generates analysis of commentary on hypothes.is. Pretty fun. You can play with it yourselves (just plug the URL of the Barthes into the cell in the upper right of the site), but here’s the tale of the tape from our most recent reading (go Jenna!):
As we chew on the Bauer/Zirker piece on how to theorize and enact social annotation, I thought a few examples might be worthwhile, prior to our attempts to create our own texts. First, you might look at Bauer/Zirker’s own platform: here’s the beta version in which students have annotated Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper (obviously this is their test case in their article). Bauer/Zirker also mention the “social edition of the Devonshire Manuscript” on wikibooks, David Bevington’s editions of several of Shakespeare’s plays, and Whitman’s works at the Walt Whitman archive. Also see the Annotated Books Online and Digital Thoreau sites mentioned by Schacht: the latter was produced using CommentPress (see below). The Bevington and the Bauer/Zirker are the closest examples for what we might do: both add gloss to aspects of texts that might be opaque or challenging to students or nonspecialized “lay readers.”
In terms of platforms, in addition to hypothes.is, we might consider:
You might enjoy an early 2000s Bartleby hypertext edition that I’ve rediscovered via the Internet Archive’s invaluable Wayback Machine. It starts with Bartleby’s blank wall and goes from there: cute, no?
Pretty cool version of Bartleby edited by a Slate writer, Andrew Kahn, last year. It’s richly illustrated and contains a wide range of notes that provide historical context and a sense of some of the diversity of critical opinions on the text over the years since its publication. And there’s even an audiobook version on the site for good measure.
As such, it also points towards our second collaborative project together, in which we’ll be doing something similar (though with much lower production values!) with Benito Cereno, so as you check it out, think about what Kahn did to make this work. Or not.
Finally, although it sometimes seems like ancient history, Bartleby played a starring role in the Occupy Wall Street movement in and around Zuccotti Park in 2012. I’ve collated a few pieces from that time that capture the flavor of the way Bartleby haunted that space and that time:
A central feature of this course will be the writing we do on this site. In what follows, I will outline three things:
First things first: why blog?
So how do you post? Once you get enrolled as an “author” on the site, it’s really easy. Here’s a step-by-step with screen shots from Evan Cordulack at William and Mary. I’ll also note that WordPress gives you several other ways to initiate a post, so feel free to explore the dashboard and find your own best way.
What makes for an excellent post? For this class, posts should:
Here’s a simple rubric, adapted from Mark Sample, that I will use to evaluate your work (see how the academic blogosphere encourages sharing and exchange? I told you so!):
| Rating | Characteristics |
| 4 | Exceptional. The post is focused and coherently integrates examples with explanations or analysis. It moves beyond summary to engage the text critically, articulating weak points or dubious assumptions (for secondary texts) or giving a sharp, original close reading (for primary texts). It makes useful connections to other texts and raises novel questions. |
| 3 | Satisfactory. The post is reasonably focused, and explanations or analysis are mostly based on examples or other evidence. It provides a compelling summary of an argument (or dutiful reading of primary text) but fails to engage the argument/text more than glancingly. The entry reflects moderate engagement with the topic and/or rehashes what was said in class. |
| 2 | Underdeveloped. The post is restricted to summary, without consideration of alternative perspectives, and may contain misreadings of the argument at one or more points. The entry reflects passing engagement with the topic. |
| 1 | Limited. The journal entry is unfocused, or simply rehashes others’ comments; it fails to grasp fundamental aspects of the argument. |
| 0 | No Credit. The journal entry is missing or consists of one or two disconnected sentences. |
Last but not least, here’s an example of a good-looking post. It’s not perfect–no such thing–but it is a high 3-low 4 in terms of the above. It paraphrases and quotes the text frequently, takes a stab when it isn’t quite sure what the (very difficult) text is getting at, and it speculates on how the text (written in the 1930s) might relate to our own moment and the study of “digital humanities.” Extra bonus: you too will be reading Benjamin’s essay soon!
Just a quick note to welcome you to the course. You can browse the site, but note:
Just a quick note to say that I’ve just finished evaluating your final projects (and everything else). It was a real pleasure to see the amazing, creative work many of you did at the end of the course. I hope everyone has a great summer and look forward to seeing you around campus in the fall (and perhaps even in English 390, “ABC of Modernism”?).
A couple of notes:
I’d love the liberty to post or link to your projects on our course site. If you want to OPT OUT of this, feel free to do so via email. Otherwise, if I can get organized, I’ll put together a little showcase of your work for future students to see.
Speaking of opting out, remember that our course site and our hypothes.is feed are open to public view. If you like, you are welcome to delete any or all materials from those platforms. If not do not do so, that’s great, and I might even share your brilliance with future students now and then.
That’s all for now. Good luck with the end of the term!
[posted for James]
[reflection on audiobook]
Audiobook Reflection
The idea of a do-it-yourself audiobook struck me as very much within the scope of an English class seeking to both honor its roots in a certain literary tradition but to extrapolate vastly forward into the technological age we live in. I have perused LibriVox only a handful of times, once having downloaded a few dry works of Continental philosophy like some kind of self-help serum that goes down easier through the ears. However, my time with the works was fairly short lived, and I recall their quickly serving me more as a sleep aid than anything else. In my younger years, though, I once had a very positive experience with an audiobook in the car of an English teacher who took me on a summer camping trip—this one, as I recall, had a single narrator who very deftly took on voices of various characters, considerably unlike the tone of the narrator in the LibriVox work I encountered. Anchored in this positive memory, and also recalling the juvenile eagerness with which I always volunteered to read out loud in elementary school, I was pretty enthused at the idea of working on an audiobook.
Like many others in the class, I felt considerable alarm at the prospect of a group project. I scratch my head, but fail to recall the last instance in which it was necessary to collaborate with others on schoolwork. Like many others noted as well, I quickly became aghast with the sound of my voice—it is probably good that I waited till all my takes were done to listen back to any single one, because I fear that the anxiety induced by a single listen would have tainted the quality of the work moving forward. Surely, this feeling is not unique. However, upon listening to the work of my group mates, I felt greater pleasure at the quality of their narration than of my own, and hoped perhaps someone in the group might have a parallel sentiment as a way of soothing myself.
The editing work was probably the most fun part of the entire process. I enjoyed the multitude of bodily sounds—gurgles, slurps, throat noises, phlegm—that had been afforded by the very sensitive iPhone microphones we opted to use. Luckily, cleaning these kinds of things up was fairly simple—in a digital rendering of the sound files, little bumps in the wavelength corresponded to these minor disturbances and a quick scan made it easy to locate and eradicate the unwanted byproducts. I contemplated amplifying them and embracing the absurd humor of such an act, but I figured the rest of the class might not find it as funny as I do. After several rounds of cleaning, I proceeded to check that each portion of audio ran comfortably (meaning, no awkward pauses within a single file, or uncomfortable gaps between portions of text, and smoothly running transitions between narrators), and lined everything up. Finally, I added a track by Nils Frahm to augment the emotional weight of Ezra’s reading of the book’s conclusion.
All in all, a fun attempt at a forward thinking exercise that hit mark in remediating a traditional text that benefited from its sonic treatment.
[post on Benjamin]
“This patient process of Nature… was once imitated by men. Miniatures, ivory carvings, elaborated to the point of greatest perfection, stones that are perfect in polish and engraving, lacquer work or paintings in which a series of thin, transparent layers are played one on top of the other—all these products of sustained, sacrificing effort are vanishing, and the time is past in which time did not matter. Modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated.”
In his discussion of oratory tradition, Benjamin makes this note about a fundamental way in which temporality and artistic process has changed. I can only take guesses as to what has contracted modern man’s patience, but my best guess will be something about a shift in the mode of production, and one’s relationship to land.
Benjamin’s notion of the storyteller is bimodal, being the combination of the land-bound artisan who stays permanently in place (on the land: fixed spatially but thus hyperaware temporally) and the sea-farer who brings with him stories of far-away (here, the temporal dimension is somewhat suspended but the spatial changes are what engender the storytelling). But the scale of time they are working with seems to be pre-modern, or of antiquity. Just as a craftsman prior to industrial-mechanized-automated labor worked as a lifelong process of improvement, the oratorical traditional was like, as Benjamin figuratively describes, many thin transparent layers of lacquer culminating in an organic enrichment of the story. Works handed down over generations (religious texts strikes me as a good example) seem to engage a passing of time that feels supernatural in scope—in the Biblical voice, the feeling of time is somewhat timeless, a procession of events that cannot be pinned to any temporal marker comfortable to our modern minds. The works handed down over the years exist in relationship to their setting, where the craftsman has been fixed, subsisting from the Land to whom these stories belong.
When Benjamin notes that “modern man no longer works at what cannot be abbreviated”, it feels like a jibe, and disingenuous dismissal of modernity (even he, later in this essay, seems to concede that literary time enables, like a Futurist or Cubist artwork, the colliding of multiple time-perspectives). The relationship to the land (or at least the immediacy of that feeling) seems to be lost; humans no longer think or feel out in the world—perhaps labor alienation has caused them to withdraw deeper into their own psyche, where I feel the realm of the novel is situated. And a more inner, psychological assessment of time feels timeless (not in that monumental Biblical sense mentioned earlier), all senses and scales of time compounded and folded into a single point of access within one’s mind, from which one can travel back, forth, and dilate at will. I would argue that perhaps it is not that modern man fails to have patience at anything that can’t be truncated (though I would argue that perhaps over time, our attention spans have narrowed—and this discussion is more than pertinent to Digital Humanities if it seeks to grapple more with our relationship to technology), but rather that modern man no longer sees the need to conceive themselves in sweeping arches of time that emanate from Earthly posterity. In conceding to the thought of Lukacs and his idea of “transcendental homelessness”, it feels that Benjamin does certainly grasp this symptom of modern man and thus the novel, in which “the meaning of life”, and its unity, can be “compressed in memory”.
To review some of the next steps we talked about yesterday prior to Tuesday’s class in the LIBRARY in Room 404:
Since we might not all remember intimately the recent history of e-book design, I thought I’d show an example or two of the kind of “nostalgic” design Drucker mentions with scorn, design that focuses on how books “look,” not how books “work.” Here’s an example of the ersatz page-turn via Apple’s iBooks app as late as 2013:
And here’s the “bookshelf” that an iBooks user would have selected titles from, also as late as 2013:
This is called “skeuomorphic design” and involves in the case of e-books, making screen-based objects resemble their 3D counterparts in the real world. Apple has recently moved in the opposite direction, as you may have noticed, towards a “flat” design that foregrounds the two-dimensionality of its screen-based objects/spaces/environments.
ACERT is coordinating a new prize for the best example of “digital writing” on the part of students. Our audiobook project very much qualifies, and group submissions are welcome, so by all means, apply! If your group applies, designate one member to fill out the app and enter the names of the other participants in the “additional comments” section of the form.
