Our readings this week focus a lot on methods intention behind knowledge gathering, sorting, retrieval, and output. Experts and “creative thinkers” are presented, seemingly as  human interface to the networked nodes of their learnings, and the articles give us insight into how they might best develop or lean into this capacity. At the same time, Ann Blair’s Note Taking as an Art of Transmission and Vannevar Bush’s As We May Think both have, between their lines, an invitation to question which works are worthy of reference and who exactly is doing the referencing?  

Both readings draw heaving from specifically European approaches to gathering information and knowledge.  Blair does make mention in passing of Chinese and Arabic   traditions, but spends the bulk of her writing in exploring Jeremiah Drexel’s delineation of note capturing motivations and techniques. In Drexel’s time a good memory is “a sign of moral worth and virtuous hard work.” Developing the memory, and the actively engaging in note taking, also seems to denote a pronounced effort to develop the self, elevating status as one is able to seamlessly and “silently” incorporate learning into intellectual expressions. Lemmata, adversaria, and historica, Drexel’s three types of notation, each serve a different purpose and speak to various relationships with a text and its author—yet each is heavily shaped by the ability and intention of the reader. Readers must be discerning, and therefore already well-versed to be able to determine the most original and striking passages and thoughts. Interestingly, Blair mentions that historica, notes related to “anecdotes of human behavior” meant to be incorporated into ones own work, and adversaria, excerpts copied directly from a text, can be incorporated into ones own work (intellectual and personal) without citation. Readers can ingest, reconfigure, and expel a new text that an unversed reader could mistake as original or potentially miss obscure references directed at experts and scholars. This technique recalls the hypertextuality of Joyce’s Ulysses as discussed in Elyse Graham’s Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires. This multi-layering and weaving of references generates jewel-like texts created in rarified conditions inaccessible to most. The items chosen for reference are each signals of what is of value—signs of the author’s (and knowledgeable reader’s) discerning and knowledgable mind, cementing status within specific circles of cultural expression. At the same time, these works act as a kind of mapping of dominance, each vertex a node of cultural reference to worthy values and interests of a time, place, and people. The nodes may stretch into historical spaces but not into others, telling us which moments are worth our notice and deeper exploration. They may also aggregate esteemed philosophical thought of dominant cultural thinkers, sidelining thought that doesn’t align with specific values and world views, suggesting ways of processing the past, present and imagine the future.

Bush’s piece also makes reference to the important work of knitting shared knowledge together. Having access to information in a way that mimics our associative brains is central to his discussion of the necessities of future technological advancements. What Bush does that Blair’s discussion of Drexel only hints at, is speak directly of the expert as the central and singular figure for which knowledge acquisition and processing is intended. It isn’t in the service of ensuring that knowledge is shared with a greater number of people that Bush stresses the need for technological advancements—he means specifically to empower the true creative thinkers. 

“For mature thought there is no mechanical substitute. But creative thought and essentially repetitive thought are very different things. For the latter there are, and may be, powerful mechanical aids.” 

With that, Bush creates a hierarchy between types of thought— suggesting creators are mature while repetitive thinkers, working within closed systems, are not. This worship of newness, of the erudite and innovative thinker as a pioneer who should not be bogged down with the drudgery (on which his work rests) sits in conflict with the great possibilities presented by the digital world he envisions. Bush’s vision, like Drexel’s, imagines the access and indexing of knowledge will inform the output of the learned scholar or expert. It’s important to call out the outright (and often sexist) relegation of the unseen contributors to the output to obscurity and a lesser-than status. In the sciences, the human computers of NASA of the 40s and 50s come to mind. Female engineers, mathematicians and scientists relegated to the background all the while providing critical input to major developments in space travel. Bush’s insistence on designating their thought as less mature and, therefore, of lower status, ignores the necessary expertise, insight, and creativity needed to complete their work. He betrays his own lack of expertise by imagining that this work doesn’t require extensive familiarity, curiosity, and dexterity as well was a special mental capacity and tendency for problem solving. 

But beyond this shortcoming, there is still the fact that the digitization Bush proposes has, in practice, broken down the crisp edges and hierarchy of the siloed “mature” and immature thinkers. The potential for a richly woven piece of work doesn’t sit squarely on the shoulders of the author or expert, it is now possible, and often beneficial, to share its development with a wider community. It may have been too difficult to imagine social computing and its impact on the scholarly process he subscribed to. It had stood unchallenged for generations, and its shake up came in waves when it did come. It wasn’t until Web 2.0 that we really saw a reconfiguration of digital information architecture that dramatically widened the potential for reader activities and collaboration (From Reading to Social Computing, Alan Liu ). Inviting in a wider number of perspectives has helped shine a light on who we have elevated as experts and luminaries—and who has wrongly been excluded. We now routinely question and try to evolve the traditions from which experts emerge, allowing for a more varied understanding of knowledge acquisition, processing, and importance. The web of references in Ulysses would look very different were it written today—pulling in nodes previously overlooked, misunderstood, or demeaned—shifting across traditional western points of value and importance to cast an even wider net. 

One of the great dangers of unchecked celebration of innovation, and Experts is the passing on of faulty, biased, or uninformed interpretations positioned as groundbreaking or visionary. Historians, for example, have evolved their interpretations of the past based on previous writings but also the political and cultural moment from which they write. Looking at the telling of antebellum United States, for example, presents a distinct evolution of perspectives, contemporary tellings to present day, influenced by racial bias, periods of social upheaval, cultural awareness, and the arrival of the digital world. Historians play an important role in our understanding of our institutions and conventions, and their work can have a huge impact on policy and social norms. With the ability to access more information quicker it’s easier for archives to be mined for new insights, but, more importantly, connectivity has provided the ability to pull in a great number of perspectives from various scholars in the same field and beyond to better triangulate an interpretation of the past that gets us closer (never perfectly) to understanding what transpired before from a multifaceted perspective.  

Certainly Drexler and Bush would be blown away by the tools so readily available to scholars, professional and amateur. I would, however, love to know what they thought of an audience who also has greater access to information and talks back, insists on collaborating, and questions authority. 

Over the course of this semester, I am increasingly viewing “the book” as a verb (or at least more related to verb than noun) – capable of being interactive, inspiring actions by its readers, creating spaces of performance around it. Drucker’s article “The Virtual Codex” has not only made the case for the historical links between codices and digital media, but she also has a convincing argument for the continued and future potential of the book format in printed form, while electronic books and other born-digital publications may be stalled by the screens’ reliance on print culture. When Drucker writes “rather than think about simulating the way a book looks, we might consider extending the ways a book works as we shift into digital instruments”, I think of digital media’s (or perhaps those who work in its boundaries) frequent inability to recognize how its inherent new spatial models could possibly work, instead of merely expanding the notion of print. As Drucker points out the conceptual and intellectual motivations behind a book’s structure and format, I wonder what unique motivations drive the construction of websites and digital publications that aren’t borrowed from print. Even the terminology we use has the all-too-familiar book references: webpages, files, documents, scroll, forms, tabs, menus, etc.

Since “The Virtual Codex” was written in 2003, it is understandable that the digital projects Drucker cites as examples of promising new environments for “e-spaces” are now defunct. Sophie, an electronic book publisher, has not been updated since 2008. The Institute for the Future of the Book, the think tank responsible for Sophie, now lives in the past with its last blog post dated 2017. The Ivanhoe gameplay concept, while still available and usable through Github, goes to a dead link for “future directions for Ivanhoe”. Meanwhile, artists’ books, zines, and independent publications continue avant-garde art movements’ traditions of pushing the boundaries of print. F.T. Marinetti’s inventive use of layout and typography in Futurist publications and Dada journals’ challenging content and form are early 20th c. examples. More recent history has produced countless artists from Dieter Roth to Irma Boom who invent new ways of creating experiences from print. Zines continue to reach communities of subcultures, sometimes using digital media to their advantage by social networking. Even popular novelists can dabble in the book arts.

So, where is the “new” in new media when it comes to reading? Sure, we have annotations, hyperlinks and can embed videos, tweets, etc. but I question whether this is really a new experience or whether we just keep adding layers of information (noise) to make the content seem richer instead of truly thinking about how the reader participates in a text. This is not to say there aren’t people doing interesting things with digital media beyond Kindle editions. Especially, if we expand our definition and look beyond fiction works, we can include virtual games with no shortage of examples. But, maybe there is no audience for new virtual reading worlds? If the codex is already virtual as Drucker argues, perhaps our acceptance of its ubiquity may be preventing us from moving forward in new “e-spaces”.

Dracula as a Story of Note Taking

There are two ideas that I found particularly striking in this week’s readings, both of which got me thinking a bit differently about Dracula (which my group is annotating for this section of class).

The first is from Ann Blair’s “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission” in which they are talking about the changes in the purpose and content of note taking changing over time, and moving “toward the diary based on personal experience and away from notes primarily based on the reading of authoritative sources” (page 102). A diary as notes on experiences? This kind of blew my mind. Especially given the strong association (at least in my mind) between note taking and academic pursuits. I was mostly taught how to take notes in relation to reading sources and writing a paper in school, and I assume many people are taught to think about notes in this narrow way. But why not think of diaries as a means to take notes on experiences, and why can’t those notes be just as useful/important as those of the academic variety. The majority of Dracula is told through the diary and journal entries of three characters, so–perhaps with some extrapolating on my part–Dracula is a story of note taking. And even within some of those entries the characters leave memos and notes to themselves. For example, in Jonathan’s first entry (and the second paragraph of the whole story) he’s left a note to himself to get a recipe for a dish he’s eating: “I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem., get recipe for Mina.)” Notes within notes!

The other idea is from Seth Lerer’s “Devotion and Defacement: Reading Children’s Marginalia.” In the opening they provide examples of children’s note taking in the margins of books and discuss the frequently negative reception adults give those. “How the adult reads the child is thus the centerpiece of my analysis, and I am interested in those marginalia that provoke scholarly inquiry into an understanding of the annotator as an imaginative subject” (page 128). This is definitely more of a tangent, but it got me wondering, if Dracula is a story of note taking, what is Bram Stoker telling us with the notes. More interestingly, what is he telling us in who he even allows to take notes on their experiences? Dr. Seward has the most diary entries, followed closely by Mina and Jonathan Harker. Lucy Westerna’s storyline is pivotal to the overall plot, and yet she is only allowed 5 diary entries (there are more than 140 in the novel). So her story is almost entirely shared from the perspective of others. Her character has real “too beautiful to survive” vibes, and thinking about note taking in this way seems to support this reading of her.

Technological Inheritance

Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” was an interesting little read, but right from the get-go I was nervous about the transition from wartime to peacetime technologic advancement. When tech is built to support the war machine, and then built upon for other applications, what is that inheritance? What kind of biases are are we baking into that tech? Indeed even one of their most prominent examples of the application of their imagined tech is to be better able to study historical weaponry: “The owner of the memex, let us say, is interested in the origin and properties of the bow and arrow. Specifically he is studying why the short Turkish bow was apparently superior to the English long bow in the skirmishes of the Crusades” (section 7). Certainly technology can make many things easier, but this article was a good reminder to me that we must retain a critical eye when we use and adapt propriety tools for use in our digital humanities endeavors.

In my martial arts school, our curriculum was fairly rigorous, for both adults and children. Adults were strongly encouraged to take notes on certain aspects of technique and children were required to at a certain point. For many of the kids, this was their first experience having to take notes, so it became an exercise in learning to put their thoughts on paper. The Blair piece and the Bush piece both brought be back to the experience of teaching this skill, specifically to one analogy I used consistently over the years. “You have three brains to try and remember your technique,” I would say. “You have your mind brain, your paper brain, and your me brain.” To translate, I meant that they have their internal memory of the technique, their notebooks to remind themselves of it, and if both of those fail, they could ask me (or other instructors). The goal, of course, was to eventually have it in their ‘mind brain,’ because in a belt test or–keeping the worst case scenario in mind–an actual self-defense situation, they wouldn’t have me standing there to ask, and they wouldn’t be able to check their notes.

The reality of this analogy had always rung true for me. To my surprise, it also seems to be true within the field of perception and memory research as well. The philosophical study of the nature of perception had many different schools of thought. Materialism, in particular, is  grounded in physics and can seem cynical in a sense. essentially its the school of thought that on an atomic level, there’s no difference between an action potential in a brain cell and a molecule in a rock rafting to the normal force of the ground beneath it. As such, the idea that notes on a page are an extension of the mind is quite literally true. Materialism asks the question: where do we draw the line between the brain and the body, between the body and the world? And if the information stored outside of one’s brain is readily accessible, where is the line between what is my memory and what is yours? I wouldn’t tell my students as much, but in reality, and depending on your definition, you have infinite brains. Every piece of information, sensory, verbal, recursively generated, could be considered a thought of your own. As such, notes can be considered thoughts extended. Text can be considered memory, especially as annotation can be used to amend and alter the text upon revision, just as organic memory has been proven to do.

Personally, I think pure materialism is an interesting thought, but does not offer a lot of practical jumping-off point for certain fields of study. By the same token, however, discounting materialism entirely limits what we can observe of the role of tools in our cognition, in our histories. Infinite brains are a lot to account for when studying humanity. Three brains, on the other hand, seems to work out pretty well.

Following our reading of Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires, the languished efforts to create and sustain a critical hypertext edition of Joyce’s Ulysses brought to mind a similarly “ideal subject for hypertextualization”: Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project (Graham, 2019). For those unfamiliar, The Arcades Project is an unfinished text (or, collection of texts) by German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin that sought to trace the phantasmagorical experience of life sedated and seduced by capitalism as it existed in 19th-century Paris, in hopes of “awakening the world from its dream about itself,” quoting Marx (Benjamin, 1999, p. 456). By focusing on the debris of history, “the unattended and the seemingly unusable,” Benjamin accumulated a catalog of “quotations, descriptions, excerpts, and observations” from the period, creating an eclectic saunter through the metropolitan lifeworld of the pre-Haussmann experience of the flâneur beneath the city’s iron-and-glass covered arcades, or “inner boulevards, glass-roofed, marble-panelled corridors extending through blocks of buildings… lining both sides… [consisting of] the most elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, a world in miniature” (Tadepalli, 2019; Benjamin, 1999, p. 3). Attempting to create an interpretive “literary montage” that would encourage and enable readers to “generate their own commentary” (mirroring Benjamin’s observation that “Commentary on a reality calls for a method completely different from that required by commentary on a text”), The Arcades Project seemed to provide the same hypertextual-playground for Digital Humanists that Joyce’s Ulysses offered, leading me to ask questions such as: Have such projects been attempted? If so, did they face the same fate as those produced by pioneering Joycean Digital Humanists? If such scholarship has not been pursued, has anything specific prevented such a project from coming to fruition? And considering my fascination with this text, would it be possible to develop an analysis of The Arcades Project rooted in hypertext theory in the future? While Joyce certainly provided a literary predecessor for hypertext, Benjamin, beginning this “theatre of all his struggles and all his ideas” seven years following Ulysses’ publication, could be said to offer a philosophical antecedent in a similar vein.

So, after discussing this briefly with Jeff in class and realizing that obvious issues such as copyright law and the recent nature of the text’s translation are likely to be what has prevented it from being approached similarly by Digital Humanists as to that of Ulysses, I was curious to see if any “alt-ac” approaches to the text had been produced at any point during its 23 years of being translated into English. Having a vague memory of a sloppily-produced WordPress attempting something similar to that which I’m envisioning that I had once stumbled on years ago after completing Benjamin’s text, it took me close to a half-hour of rearranging words and phrases in Google’s search bar before I was able to come across the modest “hypertextual extension” to Passagenwerk that is the anonymously produced Arcades Awakening.

Arcades Awakening, in the author’s own words, is a project determined to overlay the convolutes (Benjamin’s term for sections within the text) “with hypertext to sate [their] urge to read [the text] as a non-linear constellation.” Attempting to create a wandering-like experience akin to that of Benjamin’s Baudelarian flâneur, the goal of Arcades Awakening was to produce an environment in which readers such as myself could think of the project as a tool to “be used in conjunction with a physical copy of the book” in order to strengthen one’s understanding of the text and be given the opportunity to annotate the project so that passages might be better interpreted, deciphered, and discussed. Employing a system of tags drawn from Benjamin’s notes, similar to that of Blair’s second method in which passages of interest are “copied and sorted under a thematic or topical heading to facilitate retrieval,” the anonymous author of Arcades Awakening provides an option of selecting between 138 topics (basically functioning as hashtags) in order to jump to passages within the text that discuss that which was tagged (examples being “Modes of Lighting,” “Iron Construction,” and “Painting, Jugendstil, Novelty”) (Blair, 2004). Operating as an interesting merger between Blair’s Note Taking as an Art of Transmission (considering Benjamin’s The Arcades Project was, quite literally, just a collection of compiled notes with the occasional insight into his thought and analysis of them) and Elyse Graham’s Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires, Arcades Awakening, despite its outwardly rugged nature and unachieved potential, is a stellar example the note-taking stratagem outlined in this week’s coursework and the faltering state of many grand digital projects that attempt to openly excavate the intricacies of a text through digitally hypertextual means.

The seemingly defunct Arcades Awakening provides hyperlinks to “projects in the same spirit,” allowing users to browse the similarly deceased visions of Heather Crickenberger’s The Arcades Project Project or The Rhetoric of Hypertext and bear witness to the 404 File Not Found page that sits in place of the (presumably) once great Fragments of the Passegenwerk: A Meander Through the Arcades. It’s hard not to laugh at the discovery that that which was constantly brought to mind over these last two weeks through our discussions of hypertext, note-taking, and annotations has a little digital graveyard of its very own.

References

Benjamin, W. (1999). The Arcades Project. First Harvard University Press.

Blair, A. (2004). Note taking as an art of transmission. Critical Inquiry, 31(1), 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1086/427303

Graham, E. (2019). Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires. Debates in the Digital Humanities. Retrieved October 30, 2022, from https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/untitled-f2acf72c-a469-49d8-be35-67f9ac1e3a60/section/38d72a93-4bad-48c2-b709-59145658dc98#ch29

Tadepalli, A. (2019, December 23). Syllabus for the Internet: The Arcades Project. Real Life. Retrieved October 30, 2022, from https://reallifemag.com/the-arcades-project/

Divide and conquer was the motto and that motto is always useful when undertaking projects such as creating an audio book. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to group projects. It is of utmost importance importance to understand each of our strengths and in this particular project me being an introvert and english being my third language makes it more challenging for me to be a speaker or a presenter when dealing with this type of a project. Teddy is a wonderful presenter with a joyous voice able to bring points across with brevity. Sean on the other hand has a mature voice of a radio presenter that can speak with gravitas and give the text the needed time correct voice of the Lost Generation of the Hemingway. Miaoling, Hampton and Faihaa were our editers of the audio and mixes. Me, well I did research on Hemingway and gave our presenter Teddy the material and points about Hemingway’s life. How he was influenced by the turbulent times of the early 20th century and how his adventures as a “fly in the wall” of historical events of epic proportions were taking place.

To be honest I really do hate group projects as they present a dilemma. A dilemma of work load and a constant waiting game for the other party to finish their part and it is coming from a person who is trained in computer science and whose work is mostly solitary with minimal verbal contact with the peers. In context of Digital Humanities I guess it is important to be a team player in humanities as the discipline does require a constant cooperation between peers. It all speaks again about the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of each peer. A person might be a strong historian but if he is weak with Data and math, he can use the colleagues and create models of shipwrecks for example in order to understand ancient trade.

I learned that dividing the work right at the beginning helps a lot and people do understand their own abilities. Overcoming that first obstacle is a key a successful project. Text choice was also a factor as it was neither hard or easy. It was enough and importantly it was in public domain (unlike the Mickey Mouse which will probably be always with Disney). Project taught me value in cooperation as it is one of the tenets of Digital Humanities.