Hi all, I took some workshops in the past about Hypothesis and Manifold, and I wrote a blog post about them for a previous class. Thought it may be useful to share here as well as we get ready for our next unit. Robin and Wendy are great, so I highly recommend their workshops!

Hypothesis

The Introduction to Hypothesis Web Annotation workshop was led by Alex Gil (@elotroalex), the digital scholarship librarian at Columbia University Libraries. Hypothesis is a tool that allows annotation of any webpage. You can annotate publicly (for anyone who has Hypothesis to view), or you can create private groups so only members of the group see the annotations. It is free to use and built with open-source technology. All of your annotations are saved to their cloud. There is a paid version where they will work with your institution so the information is saved to your own servers, but this workshop focused on the free version. As it is open-source, you could also build your own site and integrate the Hypothesis code directly into it.

Hypothesis adds a layer to the webpage you want to annotate; it does not alter the content on the webpages. You can access it via browser extension, or you can add “via.hypothes.is/” before the URL of the page you want to annotate. Their development team is working toward enabling annotation of images, but at the moment Hypothesis annotates text. They do have an Optical Character Recognition workflow so you can turn images of text (e.g., scanned PDFs) into readable/annotatable text.

The Hypothesis interface is relatively intuitive (see their tutorial on Annotation Basics), and it’s very fun to use. We’re using this tool for another one of my classes this semester, and I’ve found it to be a very useful way of having conversations about the readings outside of the dedicated class time (especially in this time of virtual learning). You can also add images, gifs, and videos in your annotations. And you can add tags to your annotations as a way to keep your notes organized. For instance if you were annotating with a class, you could agree to use “question” as tag to alert the professor you have a question to ask them. As you create an account with an email address, when someone responds directly to your annotation you get an email notification.

You can be in many groups, but it is very easy to accidentally post your annotations to the wrong group. Unfortunately there is no way to move your annotations from one group to another; the only fix is to redo it. The other caveat is that if the webpage you’re annotating is taken down, all of your annotations will be lost along with it. There is a way to download your citations if you want to back them up, but this will only represent your notes as they existed when you downloaded them. There is also the ability to share your annotations, or a specific annotation, directly to other sites (such as Twitter).

Alex suggested this tool could be used for web-based DH project development for the team to collectively comment on functionality and content, which I thought might be beneficial to some of our project-building this semester. Here is an example of a team who used Hypothesis in the creation of their DH project: The Caribbean Digital & Peer Review: A Musical Passage Hypothesis. Alex has also successfully used the tool in a virtual conference, as an alternative to synchronous video conferencing.

Manifold

The Introduction to Manifold Scholarship was led by Robin Miller (@robin_r_miller), an open educational technologist and librarian at The CUNY Graduate Center (GC), and Wendy Barrales (@WendyBarrales), a Manifold graduate fellow at the GC. Manifold is a completely open-source publishing platform. The platform was created by the University of Minnesota Press and the GC. Anyone can download the code for free and create their own “instance” of Manifold. The CUNY instance of Manifold promotes open educational resources, with all texts being openly licensed or made available by the creators. It is free for anyone in the CUNY community to publish on Manifold, and the publication of student work is encouraged.

The platform allows for the publication of dynamic texts, with the ability to embed multimedia resources. It also has a built-in Hypothesis-like annotation tool which allows you to create public and private reading groups. When creating a new project, Manifold offers very customizable layouts. You can include resource pages and tools, as well as pull in social media feeds based on hashtags. The platform has dynamic screen sizing and is optimized for mobile use. The publication page you create is crawled by search engines, so you can optimize your content for this. You can enable epub options so that content is easily downloaded, improving access for people with limited internet connectivity.

Manifold is a publishing platform only, not an authoring one. You create your project by “ingesting” (uploading) the text such as an EPUB from Project Gutenberg, Google doc, Word docx, Markup, or HTML. Manifold speaks HTML, so you may have to tinker with non-HTML texts to preserve your desired formatting. If you have to make any changes to the text, you have to make them in your file and re-ingest. If you re-ingest the same file, Manifold will recognize the changes and implement them quickly. If you need to make changes after your text has been annotated by readers, any annotations associated with the previous version may be lost, depending on how extensive the changes are.

Here are some additional links about Getting Started with Manifold and the CUNY Manifold Maker Guide.

(Originally posted here: https://dhpraxis21.commons.gc.cuny.edu/nycdh-week-intro-to-hypothesis-manifold-and-palladio/; Feb 13, 2021)

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

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

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

To repeat the simple prompt from the assignment,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How we look matters as much as what we see.

“The Paper Menagerie” by Ken Lui is a short story told from the point of view of a young, Chinese American man as he recalls his relationships with his American father and his Chinese immigrant mother, who was trafficked from China to marry an American man. Being the child of immigrants, the story is profoundly moving to me and I was curious if the audio version would have the same emotional impact of reading the text.

The official Simon & Schuster audiobook is available on audible.com. It is narrated by a single, male voice. The reading is straightforward with no special effects or music in the background. The quality is very good and the narrator sounds like a professional voice actor. However, I did notice some odd choices in this audiobook version. In the story, the mother does not speak English well. In the text, when she speaks Chinese, the phrase is in quotes with the English translation presented in the next sentence (“Laohu.” Look, a tiger.). In parts of the audiobook version, the English translations have been omitted. Perhaps, the publisher or narrator felt providing the English was cumbersome or not necessary? I disagree with this decision, it would have been helpful for the listener to hear the English. Although it doesn’t take away the meaning of the story, it’s a small detail that did not need to be removed. Not being a Chinese speaker, I can’t comment on the pronunciation of these sentences in the audiobook. However, they blended seamlessly with the rest of the audio.

The narrator does change his voice for different characters. It was particularly noticeable when the mother is trying to speak English – at times, the narrator subtly attempts what appears to be a Chinese accent which I found slightly distracting and maybe even inappropriate. To be honest, I’m not sure how I feel about this – we already know the mother is Chinese and does not speak English, is the audiobook enforcing a stereotype by having the narrator raise his pitch and speak with a (seemingly) Chinese accent? The narrator also changes his pitch (higher) when speaking as a child and lower when speaking as the father.

I also came across another audio version of the story in the “LeVar Burton Reads” podcast where Burton reads a short fiction in each episode. It was interesting to compare the two audio versions of the same story. Curiously, this version also omits some English translations. I’m a fan of this podcast so I expected a high production value. This version has ambient music playing in the background and each time a character speaks, it sounds like an echo coming from the right or left speaker. These details add texture and dimension to the story. And, although there is also a single, male narrator, Burton carries the story much better in my opinion. He characterizes his voice for effect but doesn’t attempt the Chinese accent, instead focusing on the emotion of the character, like speaking in a hoarse voice when the mother is sick or a loud voice when the young man is angry. Lastly, Burton’s version is almost twice as long as Simon & Schuster’s. His pace of reading must have been much slower but it was not noticeable. In fact, I appreciated his pauses and clear enunciation.

In some ways, the audiobook versions forced me to slow down and pay attention as opposed to speed reading a book. But overall, I still prefer the printed text version of this story. It’s hard to ignore the interpretive nature of someone reading out loud.