The Dracula of my youth

When we started this project, we had intended to do something more interesting standard annotations. What we ended up with was something on the more standard end of the annotation spectrum. I think there’s a reason for that, and it’s simply that traditional annotation works. I think there’s a beauty in that. Sure, it’s nice to see all of the history of memes surrounding Dracula all collated into this fancy interface, but when considering annotation we also have to consider the user, not just the future recipient of those annotations. We can bully those who highlight and underline a book to illegibility all we want, but maybe that worked for them, even if it makes the book difficult for you now.

So with that said, our annotations work/ed for me. I read Dracula at the back of the pack from the rest of my group, so when I was reading, I got all the notes they had already made. I didn’t need to Google obscure words as much, or wonder if there was a cultural connection there, or if someone already thought that sentence was racist (though, don’t get me wrong, I still had a LOT to contribute- there’s a lot in this text). I think our annotations helped me read the text, not just for guiding me through the odd archaic term, but also for sort of forcing me to read and actually understand what I was reading. I had a mission: make annotations about the cultural context of Dracula. That meant that I had to understand and convey information in an understandable way. Not just annotating, but purposeful annotating was an extremely helpful exercise.

I think the fact that I actually read and annotated about 70% of Dracula directly on our own blog really speaks to its usability, and I also came out of this with a love for Hypothesis as a tool. (The other 30% was on my Kindle copy of Dracula since I’m travelling—that said, those are still being transferred to Hypothesis when I have wifi).

As far as my approach to annotations in concerned, we had all divided the group up to different sorts of annotations “you gather the memes, you go get historical context, you get this that” and what have you, but we didn’t actually end up doing that at all. Once we got to the text, we found… wow, we all have so much to say about radically different things. And we just rocked with it! We decided that that was in the spirit of annotation and collaboration and should be exactly what we do! I made some historical notes. I also commented “that’s gay” a lot. I also added a few of my reactions to the text. I tried to keep stuff that was repetitive to a minimum, and I did have to go back into Hypothesis (read: still need to do even more) and cull some of my annotations so they’re actually useful (ie, not highlighting and underlining the whole page) to any future readers, but it’s also nice to see the reactions people have to a text. I even used GIFs and memes sometimes like Natalie and Faihaa!

You can read about annotation and the best styles and how to note take etc all you want, but until you actually try to do it with purpose I don’t think you can really understand why it has evolved the way it has and what’s a good annotation and what’s a bad one etc. I don’t think a lot of that theory ends up mattering as much if we all end up going back to the tried-and-true at the end of the day. And it’s tried-and-true because not only does it work for the recipient, but it also works for the user.

Mapping Mihály
Capturing the mental state of a traveller on a Journey by Moonlight

Antal Szerb’s novel, Journey by Moonlight, features the erratic, exciting, and somewhat tortured adventures of Mihály, a young Hungarian newlywed on his honeymoon in Italy. After abandoning his new wife for a hysteria-fueled adventure through the country that stirs up old memories of his youth. As he travels around the country meeting new characters and running into old friends (and frenemies) he grapples with that age-old conundrum: pursue the wild abandon of unknown possibilities and freedom or follow the carved out “respectable” path laid forth by custom. Through memories we are shown the events of his youth that inspired his curiosity for complete freedom, and through each person he comes in contact with we see him offered a new potential path forward. In the end, he is confronted with the exact figure of his youth who most dramatically inspired in him a susceptibility to questioning tradition and chasing reinvention and the unknown.

For my final project I would like to create a visual schematic of Mihály’s memories, his journey through Italy, and the characters he interacts with—branching out and connecting the influences that weigh on his mind at all times as he grapples with this major life decision. In this way, I can present as evidence the various elements that contribute to his behavior and the decision he makes at the close of the novel. Building on insights garnered through work in Miro for the second group project, I would like to bring Mihály’s mental pathways to life using the same platform. Using the project board, I would like to create a framework that indicates the interconnectivity of the past and the present, and the physical locations and individuals who impact Mihály. I do not intend to account for the entire novel—there, for example, a portion is devoted to the misadventures Erzsi, Mihály’s wife —but I will account for every character whose existence presses on Mihály’s mental state—creating the push and pull he struggles with throughout the novel. The final piece will resemble a narrative only up to a certain point—using hyperlinks within the text, a user will be able to jump between areas of Mihály’s world and potentially travel through Italy, but ultimately the goal is to account for Mihály’s experience. I think it’s important to be able to see the schematic fully—or at least portions of it at a time—as a way of representing the constant retreading down neural pathways and constant hum and glow of all of the emotional, intellectual, physical, and social data we process as we maneuver the world. Using a digital storytelling platform like Twine would help the user slowly build up some idea of Mihály’s situation and mental state, but by using Miro I can immediately present the pressure he feels and holds within him and start to mimic the sensation of navigating his anguish and indecision.

After users have explored Mihály’s world, I will invite them to select the path that is most attractive to them, before revealing Mihály’s own decision that closes out the novel.

Contos Maravilhosos is a WordPress website that reimagines how children can experience bedtime stories. The website presents a selection of eighteen bedtime tales written in Portuguese by Tereza de Castro Callado, a Brazilian writer, teacher, and philosopher. As a bedtime story is a traditional form of storytelling, where a story is told to children to prepare them for sleep, Contos Maravilhosos is presented in a multimedia format. Each text has an audio version, which is displayed on the website as an audiogram.

As Contos Maravilhosos follows a fantastic genre, a literary style characterized by fictional narratives centered on imaginary elements, distant from reality, they easily incentivize children’s imagination. Therefore, we engage children to create their own illustrations, providing guidelines on how to develop and share them as notes and comments on the website. 

To help children create visual elements for the stories, we present two tools: Dreamstudio, an online platform that generates illustrations using AI, and Animated Drawings, an online tool that creates animated versions of simple sketches. We also have a chapter on the website that showcases a collaborative album of illustrations shared by the audience.

In addition to these elements, we have a special section on the website with the author’s story. We present it as an interactive timeline using Storyline.

What I plan to present as a final project

For this project, I plan to launch an initial version of the website. This version will be developed in two phases:

Phase 1: Text and audio only

November 16th – November 27th

In this initial phase, the website will present only three stories with their respective audio versions. We’ll share the website with a small audience and ask for their collaboration in illustrating each story. We should collect their feedback on their experiences reading and listening to the stories and their thoughts on using the tools we suggest to generate illustrations and animations.

Phase 2: Illustrated tales with audiograms

November 28th – December 5th

Based on the contributions and feedback collected in Phase 1, Phase 2 will present the three stories with illustrations created by the audience. We should also develop audiograms with these images, which can be shared on other platforms, such as Youtube.

Inspirations

This project was inspired by the Manhattan Transfer project, a digital annotated version of the book written by John Dos Passos. Similarly to Contos Maravilhosos, this project also uses a WordPress website to present the story, which is illustrated by AI images. It also engages collaboration by using Hypothesis, a plugin that enables users to share their thoughts on the reading.

Our group (Raquel, JP, Patricia, and I) did a digital annotation of Manhattan Transfer and chose to use platforms and tools like WordPress/Kumu/Midjourney/Headliner to present multimedia paratextual elements. I am responsible for drafting the About page, the character map, and AI-generated images for some scenes in the novel.

John Dos Passo writes this novel like a reporter who combines incidents, lives, conflicts, and monologues into a flashing continuity. The novel is like a remix of several films with the theme of metropolitan New York. Our group discussed why this novel has never been adapted into a movie/TV series and how we invite readers to do things with it if their first reading experience might be quite fragmented.

I am inspired by the method of character mapping used in novel writing. For example, writers use character mapping to decide which character must stay and what the conflict/nexus is. My mapping of characters in Manhattan Transfer aims to give readers a possible starting point to understand interactions in the novel and explore some abstract ideas that lie behind some potentially less popular scenes. If readers look at my character map, they might ask who the protagonists are, how certain characters are connected, and where/why a peripheral character appears. One peripheral example I chose to include is Anna Cohen, who only shows up a few times but is an interesting woman who shows resistance in her personality. Raquel helped me develop my map into a more interactive one using Kumu and we added AI-generated images for scenes to the Kumu map as well. By introducing some peripheral characters, I am not suggesting a completely alternative reading of the novel but would like to encourage readers to pay attention to some invisible roles/scenes.

The next question is if we can restore the documentary effect in the novel through visual presentations and invite readers to contribute to our site by reproducing their favorite scenes. Patricia and I discussed book covers and how images of steamboats are used as icons of the 1920s New York. JP sent us many photographs of the NYC streets in the 1920s. After reading Patricia’s introduction to artists like George Grosz, I decided to choose some scenes in the novel and test Midjourney to see if this AI art tool can help me produce visual adaptations of scenes in Manhattan Transfer.

We have an AI Images page on our site where I wrote the rationale behind our decision, links to tools, and keywords/passages I chose. In addition, my AI art attempts are connected to the character map so that readers can also try it out by selecting the characters/scenes and following/challenging my keywords. For example, I wanted to keep the metropolitan style, urban modernism, and expressionism in his writing, so I included keywords like metropolis, aquarium effect, George Grosz, and 1920s. I adjusted my works several times with Midjourney to find a balance between abstract and photorealistic. Raquel also designed a comment-posting feature for our site for readers to interact with the text, images, and us. Please see the examples below.

Keywords: brick houses, lamplight, policeman, metropolis, leaned out window 

Keywords: Broadway, New York, 1920s, a young couple, store windows, electric signs, aquarium effect

Keywords: skyscrapers, a scudding sky, follies girls, a lonely man, George Grosz

Keywords: department store, Brooks Brothers, fitting room, two men in the same suits, New York, 1920s

Finally, to give readers basic directions to our site, we designed a navigation bar and used internal links on the About page. The info on About page is pretty concise, which serves as an amusement park map. Visitors certainly will find many surprises while going to different sections. A lot of surprises are hidden via the Hypothesis annotations. Imagine a message board at the exit/entrance of a museum! We want readers/visitors to bring back some memories of Manhattan Transfer and leave their footprints at our site. We were once debating whether we used too many additional tools and might overload our visitors but by looking at the final result, I think we carefully and beautifully crafted them!

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

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

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

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

End of rant.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working Bibliography:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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