Our team chose to work on Manhattan Transfer by John Dos Passos for our second group project.  The team included Miaoling, Raquel, Patricia and myself.  As soon as the assignment was given, we all proceeded to acquire a copy of the novel and started reading, each with some general ideas on how we would annotate the novel.  One week later we met an hour before class to discuss what we have discovered so far and to brainstorm for our next step. We all had many realizations to share with the group.  From my point, I realized how incredibly episodic and jumpy the novel is and mentioned that as I was reading, I was making notations of which scene lends itself to an annotation due to graphic descriptions as we had discussed in class (and from our readings.)  The other members thought it was a good, time-saving idea to do so. I also mentioned that I had acquired sound effects, musical numbers, and photographs that seemed appropriate for a specific scene I read.  For example, while diners were eating, I found busy restaurant ambient sounds, music from the era for when a scene was in a lounge, etc. During our discussion, Miaoling mentioned that she would like to take the annotations much further than what we mentioned and wanted to see how creative we could be.  Several ideas were brought up but when she mentioned that it would be interesting to see how AI generated images would work with the idea of the annotations we were discussing would play out, we all had the same reaction- what a great idea.  That caused a big spurt of energy and discussion. Then, Patricia mentioned that it would be very interesting to go along that route and add avant-garde paintings from that era to the annotations.  The group thought that our direction was coalescing.  We then divvied tasks for each member.  Miaoling would look into AI generated work; Patricia would look into art from that era; Raquel would take on the task of site engineer; and I would read the novel, note scenes ripe for annotations and continue acquiring images and sounds.

We communicated via email to update each member’s progress, and then we met again an hour before the next class to discuss our project.  At this meeting, we realized that we would only annotate the first chapter/section of the book as the novel became more character focused and less descriptive.  Miaoling looked into AI generated images and was excited by what she generated.  She also generated a visual map of the characters and their connections to each other.  Patricia discussed the different types of art she discovered to be included, the covers of the first edition of the novel she retrieved, and discovered that Dos Passos was also a painter himself and would like to include his work in the annotations.  Raquel was putting the site together using WordPress and adding elements to it, overcoming limitations and giving advice as to what is possible to be included. For my task, I finished reading the entire novel and summarized each chapter into 5-6 sentences and passed that long to the group. I stopped looking for sounds and images as that didn’t seem as exciting anymore.

Looking at the finished project, we were all excited for how it came out.  Although there were a few hindrances, such as not being able to play background sound while reading, we were very happy with the end product.  I believe our goal was achieved; the novel was expanded by several new reader-generated dimensions, and the story’s ‘program’ was heightened in unexpected ways. It was a very engaging project, and I leave it with new skills in hand and a memorable group project.

So, I emailed Jeff (hi Jeff!) rather than making a post because I thought my idea wasn’t fleshed out enough or good enough somehow. Now with some post-COVID clarity I realize I was wrong and my ideas are cool as hell. So here this is.

I’m planning on doing an analysis of authors and themes etc that “dark academia” Tumblr accounts often make posts about—they are often repetitive quotes and I find it interesting the grip certain authors, like Donna Tartt or Oscar Wilde or Richard Siken etc, have on this community.

That said, this is very niche so there’s not previous writing on this aside from user observation. “But Teddy, how are you going to cite anything?! How is this more than just original conjecture?!” I hear you cry. Well friend, people have been analyzing the behavior of Whovians, Trekkies, and weaboos for decades before this. The psychological part of this research is taken care of via other subculture research–it doesn’t have to be perfectly the same. Literally just searching Google scholar for “internet subcultures” or “Trekkies” or “Sherlockians” gives hundreds of results spanning even back to the 1970s with field observations and demographic and behavioral research about these sorts of people. It’s all really exciting! (This article is one of my favorites I found- observations of Trekkies at Comic Con, 1975.)

I have a list of several Tumblr accounts that specifically post “dark academia” quotes and other blogs that explore these themes. I also have an ongoing list of authors that are considered “dark academia”. My plan is to analyze the quotes in Voyant to make a word cloud to see if there are similar themes in line with the values and aesthetic of the community (which were essentially outlined in The Secret History by Donna Tartt). I also plan on analyzing some of the works written by these Tumblr users themselves against the authors they’re inspired by in a program called the Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program (JGAAP) to see if these Tumblr authors actually have any similarity to their influences.

Essentially I will be exploring the psychology of a niche subculture by looking at the texts they interact with most. I do have some minor concern about hitting page counts with this topic since it’s so niche, however being that this project will be based in Linguistics I’m sure many pages will be spent elaborating on what exactly my methodology is and term explanation, though obviously I don’t want that to be most of what I’m doing and will try to write in multi-field-inclusive terms as much as possible. I also think the explanation of where this subculture comes from will be an easily large chunk of this paper.

I’m really looking forward into doing the psychology and philosophy research necessary for this paper. Speaking of philosophy, that is another topic I will inevitably have to explore as “dark academia” folks really like philosophers like Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. I’ve also toyed with the idea of exploring film scripts (“dark academic” folks have a long listen of movies that fit the aesthetic as well, like Dead Poets Society) as text in this case, but I think if I do that I’ll have to do two separate analyses with books and without books since I think the inclusion of film scripts due to their difference in format and text might skew results a bit.

Please give me extra ideas or criticism if you have it ’cause I feel like I need help!!!

There is this famous saying that lives on as a meme in the Continental Europe and in America in discussions when Soviet legacy and history is analyzed. The saying goes “They pretend to pay us and we pretend to work” ( I am sure people have heard of it) nobody knows exactly who said but it is a collective saying that can succinctly describe the lives of Soviet citizens in their relationship with the State.

HBO series Chernobyl perfectly describes this relationship and in digging deeper I want to explore the topic of “lies” and their effect on society. In the Western traditional culture we have one word that describes lying, lying is a form of dishonesty (which is forbidden as a sin in the scripture) and in ex-Soviet space which includes Eastern Europe and Central Asia (which for some reason is always overlooked in the media) lying had two forms. In many Slavic languages there is “lozh” which is translated as lying as in our Western understanding of the above word and then there is “vranye” which is also lying but has a more nuanced and deeper meaning that both parties of that activity understand and they partake in it willingly. Again I would direct my audience to see Chernobyl by HBO to understand that phenomena and they did do their research on that subject.

“Vranye” (system lie; I do not even know how to describe it) permeates the societies of ex-Soviet states and to a lesser degree satellite states such as Poland, Hungary, Mongolia, and even as far as Vietnam. “Vranye” is the type of a lie in which individual understands that it this is a lie and yet collectively partake in it. Hard to go against the grain, and it is the glue that binds many collectivist nations even today. Modern Russia still to this day has this vestige which expands and contracts with time (it is now expanding), and it seeps through the whole society. One has to look no further than the Ukrainian conflict and the Russian society and this “vranye” on how it affects the whole populace. Modern Russia is still a collectivist system, nobody trusts nobody, and even absurd claims are believable by vast majority of people.

So why this theme and concept? It is important to me and maybe to many others. It is in the air, in the news, and thus it is important to understand different societies. I can feel the demand for it in the web and in discussions. I can look some texts and novels that deal with it or have it in them. One that comes to mind is a famous Day Without Lying by Viktoria Tokareva which is a novel that deals about contemporary life in the 1960’s Moscow. I am not sure what it is going to be, I am inclined to do a Diagram software to design and show different webs of lies and how they affected protagonist and what other choices they may have had. You can create diagrams and even games regarding lies and truth since it is a binary but I want to look into more complex situations which deals exactly with “Vranye”. I am not sure about traditional paper since it is a DH course and I want to explore tools that I have not used. Miro is a good choice or diagrams.net also a good choice as both are free and open access.

To be honest, I don’t have a concrete concept. In looking at the examples, I think it would be interesting to work with Twine, so my only inclination (at this point) is to exploit the form of Twine itself and play with themes of audience agency, or agency as a whole. I think it might be interesting to explore interactivity with a text that hinges on agency or control. Immediately, I thought of 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, but neither text is set to enter public domain until the 2040s. Regardless, this is an idea in its infancy. I plan to explore the features of Twine and see if there’s any aspects of the form that demand acknowledgement in the project, or that bring up any interesting concepts or challenges.

I’m also considering different formats such as Inform and Bitsy, but that may be best for more freeform, spatially-oriented interactivity (i.e. walking around a map vs. the choose-your-own-adventure format of Twine). The implications of this kind of play bring to mind the video game Undertale. For the uninitiated, Undertale is an 8-bit game released in 2015, where the narrative relies not just on your immersion in the game, but your understanding that you are not just a character on the screen. Certain characters intentionally break the 4th wall and talk to you, the player. They even interact with metadata of the game by affecting save files, and preventing the player from using buttons built into the game screen. The overall effect is the understanding that you as the player have choices outside the mechanics of the game. You don’t have to follow the form of the video game RPG and cut a bloody path through the game to gain levels and beat the boss. You can choose to be merciful, and in doing so, you break the pattern of the game itself and save everyone, even the villains.

I think this is an interesting mechanism. Especially in dour social commentary, the ability to move within the story without the same shackles as its characters is a powerful narrative device. In writing this, themes of helplessness or oppressive structures, etc. might also be interesting to explore. Regardless of how hopeless the narrative may be, speculative and cautionary fiction rely on the idea that the audience should learn from the story. In giving the audience freedom to move within the story, we can produce not a lesson learned, but a sense of freedom to enact that lesson. Alternatively, one could use the same agency to drive home any feeling of hopelessness. By structuring the playable product in a way that allows the player agency but no power to change the narrative, one could create a deeper empathy in the player for the characters that are “trapped” in the narrative. For now, I’m not sure which direction to go, or which text to explore. Any suggestions would be fantastic.

Concrete poetry is a literary movement from the 1950’s which uses arrangements of letters and linguistic elements to enhance the meaning of a poem. Since it relies so heavily on design and typography, it can also be considered an art movement born from the anti-impressionistic, non-representational concrete art of the 1930’s which attempted to create universal art. Being an intermedium between text, typography and sound, concrete poetry is a ripe area to explore using digital technologies. Using the works of prominent concrete poet Eugen Gomringer, my final project will re-imagine his poems in a digital landscape in an attempt to detach the text from its paper roots (or, keep it in dialogue with its counterpoint) and provide new readings based on interactions. Using various coding practices including html, css, and javascript, a selection of Gomringer’s poems from The Book of Hours and Constellations (Something Else Press, 1968) will be re-presented digitally and experimentally while maintaining the minimal aesthetics of the original form. Interactions and sound will offer another layer of interpretation and turn the reader into a performer and player of the text. The experimental nature of this project may yield messy, unexpected results but I am open to the possibilities that could arise.

In the example above, one of Gomringer’s most well-known poems, the word “silence” is repeated 14 times and alludes to the 14 lines of a sonnet. Traditional linear structure and punctuation has been abandoned. The resulting frame forms an empty space which can be interpreted as silence itself. In this way, the meaning is created by both the presence of the word and its visual form. In digital form, the space might be enlarged on a mouse-hover, the words might fade or become larger or smaller, a sound representing silence might be heard, or three-dimensional space might be used as opposed to two-dimensional. Other possibilities might include collaged text and onomatopoeia techniques seen in Dadaist and Futurist poems that only appear as the result of a reader’s actions. These are characteristics that cannot be experienced on a paper page and offer opportunities to create expanded interpretations – in this case, what is and isn’t “silence”, what does it look like, sound like or feel like?

In a theoretical framework, this project also explores paratext in digital media. Can code, interfaces, screens, keyboards be considered paratext and how do they differ from the original idea of paratexts in relation to the codex? Gerard Genette, in addition to defining the term “paratext”, also described it as a “threshold”, “an undecided zone”, “the fringe”. This project takes into account those terms as a central principle of how to present these poems, how to design their interface, and how to encourage the reader to interact with its content.

As sources of inspiration, I cite the lo-fi First Screening, a series of kinetic poems developed by “bpNichol” in 1984 on an early Apple computer. The original code is no longer available but others have since re-created the project in more current coding languages. Although there are many contemporary examples of kinetic text and experimental writing on the internet using coding, this is one of the earliest examples I could find which speaks to the project’s ability to counter the obsolescence of many digital endeavors. As a more contemporary example, Eugen Gomringer’s own website is uniquely developed to showcase his poetry, writing and other musings using digital media. The user must type in a word to start and is then presented with a series of texts, videos, and photos related to Gomringer and his work. It’s like a collaged film/narrative where the user will never encounter the same sequence twice. I’m particularly interested in this aspect of the reader as a performer with the ability to create something that can never be repeated again in the same way.

“The constellation is a system, it is also a playground with definite boundaries. The poet sets it all up. He designs the play-ground as a field-of-force & suggests the possible workings. The reader, the new reader, accepts it in the spirit of play, then plays with it.
With each constellation something new comes into the world. Each constellation is a reality in itself & not a poem about some other thing.” –Gomringer, 1968

This quote by Gromringer, written in the preface to the book I intend to use as the source material aptly describes the project I hope to accomplish. Gromringer’s ideas of “reading” and “playing” directly relate to the readings from this class.

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Birke, D., & Christ, B. (2013). Paratext and Digitized Narrative: Mapping the Field. Narrative 21(1), 65-87. doi:10.1353/nar.2013.0003.

Drucker, J. Multiple sources …

Genette, G., & Maclean, M. (1991). Introduction to the Paratext. New Literary History, 22(2), 261–272. https://doi.org/10.2307/469037

Gomringer, Eugen, et al. (2021). Words Form Language: On Concrete Poetry, Typography, and the Work of Eugen Gomringer. Triest Verlag für Architektur, Design Und Typografie.

Gomringer, Eugen, and Max Bill. (1960). 33 Konstellationen. Tschudy.

Owens, Trevor. (2012). Glitching Files for Understanding: Avoiding Screen Essentialism in Three Easy Steps. The Signal. http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2012/11/glitching-files-for-understanding-avoiding-screen-essentialism-in-three-easy-steps/.

Rothenburg, Jerone. (1968). The Book of Hours and Constellations: Poems of Eugen Gomringer. Something Else Press, Inc.

My research focuses on woman writers/poets in Japan and I examine the multifaceted life stories presented by them in their works. In the meantime, my work in DH 720: Doing things with Novels inspired me to think further about the smoothness of our reading experience and the materiality of digital remediations.

For the final project, I choose to work on a short story collection, Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), written by a Chinese-British-Canadian-American writer Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton, 1865–1914). The text is in the public domain, giving me flexibility in reproducing it in new forms. My research questions are: 1) how to present parallels between North American and Chinese culture, voices of immigrant women, and family memories in the diaspora on a digital platform; 2) how my choice of materials (the materiality of digital culture) speaks to the textuality of the story. I have asked a question once in my response to Graham’s and Drucker’s articles: can we say that a hypertext work remediated via digitalization transforms the implicity of intertextuality? I aim to provide some answers to the question through this project by creating annotations (Mrs. Spring Fragrance, Asian Americans in the early 20th century, and Chinese Culture in the diaspora) and making a new hypertext-beyond-narrative path that leads readers to explore themes of exclusion/inclusion, mixed-race heritage, and immigrant identities.

The whole project will be built on a WordPress site where I can provide the complete text, enable plugins, and embed images/maps/recordings. I am still building up my specific aims for the final project but currently I have designed the following sections.

1. I plan to choose passages from these short stories and generate AI-art images (I have tried Midjourney and believe it is the best, but I will give more AI tools a try) based on my chosen plot keywords. The results of the above step will inform an extended scope of the project at which I write an analysis of my AI adaptations based on the materiality/textuality presented by the AI tools, followed by a tutorial I write for readers who are interested in using AI-generated art to make visual/video adaptations of literary works. How is this kind of adaptation different from film/TV/theater adaptations? What are the roles of human creator and AI creator? Are these tools working well in different language settings or drawing a foreign cultural object?
2. If we ask our readers to become one character in these short stories, what kind of choices will this reader make for the fictional figure? I intend to design a simple interactive story (or even a scene) using Twine to provide options. This idea was inspired by Dot’s Game, a single-player game where a young black woman travels through time to key moments in her family member’s lives and understand how individual choices were made by social inequalities. My question behind this mini decision-making game is if there were alternative ways of living for an immigrant woman in the early 20th century. In the Game page, I also plan to write an introduction discussing the possibilities/challenges in utilizing games in reading literary works following nonlinear paths.

Works that I found relevant to my final project are:

Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Ellestrom, Lars. “Adaptation within the Field of Media Transformations.” In Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, edited by Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, 113–132. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G., Richard Ovenden, Gabriela Redwine, and Rachel Donahue. Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections. Washington D.C: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2010.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Taylor & Francis Group, 2001. ProQuest Ebook Central.

Ryan, Marie-Laure. “Transmedia Storytelling as Narrative Practice.” In The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies, edited by Thomas Leitch, 527–542. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Schober, Regina. “Adaptation as Connection – Transmediality Reconsidered.” In Adaptation Studies: New Challenges, New Directions, edited by Jørgen Bruhn, Anne Gjelsvik, Eirik Frisvold Hanssen, 89–112. London: Bloomsbury, 2013.

I once worked with Dr. Mary Chapman and will also refer to her public humanities projects on Edith and Winnifred Eaton.

As We May Think by Vannevar Bush was a sumptuous article that I had to read twice.  For a person to have such a grasp of so many varying fields, their present state of development and to be able to foretell by several generations where each field is headed with specific designs was stunning to me.  His understanding of how, “Machines with interchangeable parts can now be constructed with great economy of effort” will revolutionize the various scientific fields is hyper foresight. I was taken by how prescient Bush was in the specifics of inventions that would occur in many areas.  He articulated so many specific examples that I had to remind myself of the date it was written.  Some examples that stuck out are: “The camera hound of the future wears on his forehead a lump a little larger than a walnut,” is the Go-Pro of today. “There have long been films with diazo dyes which form a picture without development, so that it is already there as soon as the camera has been operated,” foresaw the Polaroid by several decades. “Consider a future device for individual use, which is sort of a mechanized private file and library… (the) memex,” is the PC or smartphone. The list he included is much longer. For an individual to have such a grasp they must need to have a high vantage point only achievable after some focused and serious work.  I was struck by his knowledge, his grasp of the material at his disposal, and his easy going, articulate matter-of-fact manner with which he dispensed his nuggets of wisdom.

Reading the article a second time with its sheen somewhat faded due to exposure, I was a bit more critical.  Yes, he has some brilliant observations and predictions (ignoring the dated sexism.)  The first to come to mind is the catch-22 that is a bane of our present age: We are bogged down by specialization but need specialization for progress, he notes. How can we continue to specialize and yet contribute to the larger field of science when most everyone is telescopically focused and we publish much but don’t understand most. He states, “A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored and above all it must be consulted.”  And here’s the rub: nowhere in the piece does he mention how given the incredible achievement of the scientists during this period to have come together to work together and achieve a common goal (defeat an enemy) this focus, this comradery could be used for the benefit of humans.  We won the war; could we not have gone on to win the peace? Why progress for progress’ sake? Given the era he just emerged out of, why not think of humaneness?  Why not harness this incredible energy to solidify institutional, scientific codes or systems of humaneness- progress must serve specific human endeavor, e.g. eradicate hunger, build affordable homes, renewable cooking contraptions for nomadic peoples?  Reflecting of those ideas made the piece a bit different for me.  Yes, he was still prophetic, but, now, as a somewhat, detached scientist wanting to only progress for progress’s sake.  An element of hubris drifted in, something of a Victor Frankenstein element. Technology is not an altar to worship at but a toolbox only to be consulted conscientiously. This echo rang in my brain.

Deformance and Interpretation by Samuels an McGann reads like a treatise with all of the attendant aspects such a monograph involves, such as returning to it over and over, to gain insights, guides of action, ways of understanding, and novel techniques to use in the area.  This is definitely the case in this laden dissertation. The authors extend our ability to interact with an imaginative work. Instead of, “the usual object of interpretation (which is) ‘meaning,’” the authors postulate, “… alternative moves to break beyond conceptual analysis into kinds of knowledge involved in performative operations- a practice of everyday imaginative life.” They want the reader to gain new insight into a work by the act of poiesis rather than just dissection or criticism.  Because a creative work is open for performance, it’s also open to more. They give 4 possibilities for such an extension: reordered (reading backward), isolating, altering, or adding. They draw from history to show lineage of these ways of interrogating a text to help a reader open up more avenues than just plain meaning.  They refer to Blake who wanted this extension as well as Dickenson who wanted to discover what is possible from an imaginative piece to Dante for whom ‘meaning is a dynamic exchange than a discoverable content, and that the exchange is best revealed as a play of differences.” Several of the deformations made intuitive sense to me.  It is something I practice in a visual mode.  When looking at a photograph or a painting, I (when physically viable) turn it upside down.  This opens up new ways of looking at the piece.  New relationships, new compositional elements, new negative space elements show themselves. Following a footnote led me to a musical equivalent by John Cage in his Silences: Lectures and Writings where he deformes Satie and Varese.  This stimulated the grey cells a bit faster and I realized that this was the birth of what is now hip-hop.  The birth of hip-hop is rap where an individual practiced 2 of the methods mentioned- reordered and isolated the original creative piece to extract new meaning – poiesis! By ‘reading backward’ the LP or 12” and isolating certain sections, the ‘reader’ was able to create new meaning from the original piece. The process was exactly the same as that elucidated by Samuels and McGann. The original imaginative piece was used as a basis of poiesis rather than mere interpretation or analysis. Samuels and McGann offer a useful tool to add to my creative toolbox.

We’ll put our heads together and choose a text to “play,” beginning next week. There are no hard and fast rules on what makes for a good text, but in my view here are some general criteria:

• size matters: there’s a lot of work (well, play) in order to read the text and understand it, plus do enough research on your character in order to play them competently. So novella-length is good. Also, a modest number of main characters is much better than a Tolstoyan dramatis personae.
• rich history helps: the play really cooks when you can activate the penumbra around a text rather than just enact what happens within its pages. So texts that have interesting reception histories or performance histories or controversies around them are a good fit.
• lively voices: since you’re basically ventriloquizing characters, authors, readers, etc., one hopes for fun, lively characters to inhabit.

A few suggestions:

• At the risk of tedium, my earlier suggestion of Sinclair Lewis’s novel imagining a dystopian fascist USA, It Can’t Happen Here, would be great. I dimly remember that it was turned into a play that was widely performed in the 1930s and would be interesting to delve into.
• How about Jonathan Franzens’ The Corrections, given that it sparked the notorious Oprah Affair and occasioned all kinds of discussions about literature, media, and commerce?
• A novel with a coterie of famous readers around it might be cool, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?

I’m sure you’ll have your own ideas, and we can have 2 or 3 games going on different texts if we like.

Finally, a few examples:

• These 720ers played Nella Larsen’s 1920s Harlem Renaissance novel of passing, Quicksand.
• And these Hunter undergrads played a cycle of Charles Chesnutt’s revisionary plantation fiction stories, The Conjure Tales.
• Finally, these 720ers played Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye