Midway through reading Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight in Luxembourg Gardens I pause. I exhale. I look to the left to a bench where I sat with a friend the last time I was here. I envision the route we took winding out of the garden and onto the streets.

Midway through georeferencing Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight I pause. I stretch my arms and twist to the left and crack my back. I exhale. I open Google Maps in a new tab and search to verify the location of the street the protagonist and her stray companion drunkenly saunter down in need of a café.

While the finished product of the z-axis workflow reveals points on a map that speak to Rhys’ invention of Paris, the material beneath this polished parabola of work has its own story of labour and imagination.

To create these maps out of text, there is the initial reading, then a closer reading, and finally georeferencing to parse the toponymys out of the narrative—cobblestone streets, cafés, high-end boutiques, shabby hotels, chic neighbourhoods, monuments, and defunct metro stations. Paris is comprised of notable names we access psychically even without traveling there. Afterwards, I calculate the word count and determine a ratio to represent where the novel dwells and how often. The workflow is oddly embodied labour.

Upon first reading the novel, guts churn and flutter as I raptly traipse through Rhys’s fatal cynicism. Her abject depictions of Paris puncture the touristy hot-air balloon dream of the city. Rhys pulls you out of one imagined version of Paris and thrusts you into another.

Georeferencing the novel is rigourous and time-intensive. I consider, locate, and relocate each point of Sasha’s narrative. She is often impoverished, paranoid, manic and sad, unveiling despondent vaults of the city and interacting with other exiles of nations and society like herself. She approaches another café in the Quartier Latin as if a pernod will proffer salvation. As she meets another ruffian, I zoom in on Boulevard du Montparnasse to affirm where her journey takes her. Georeferencing is like close reading as I scrutinize every gesture, in this case physical movement instead of form. But maybe those movements are form? When Sasha recalls the past, however melancholy it was, she is often situated in more affluent neighbourhoods than her later-life hag skulking. This is just a hunch I have.

These seemingly finite hubs of activity, represented in 3D in the z-axis maps we’re building, precipitate from this process of reading and working through an entire novel to map out and weigh the spaces of a city it inhabits. The data comes from bodies reading, mapping, and relating over a lengthy period of time. At this point, part of my workflow has been to abide the novel implicating itself into my own lived yet imagined memories of the city.

Post by Adèle Barclay in the ZAxis category, with the fabrication tag. Image for this post care of The H.D. Carberry Collection.

Beyond this question of which poems constitute Ariel, the BBC recordings of Plath’s Ariel-era poems embody further permutations of the oeuvre. Plath read for the BBC in October 1962, when many of these poems were nascent. The audio recordings not only showcase the intensely sonic quality of Plath’s poetry and her commanding voice and deep New England accent, but also disclose alternate versions of the lauded poems. In some cases the differences are slight and subtle: an extra rhyme or two slips into the broken alliterative lines of “Lady Lazarus.” In other cases, the audio recordings communicate entire sections of deleted material, as in the case of “Amnesiac.”

These discrete differences between audio and print versions of the poem demand critical attention.

Last summer, a conversation about versioning with Modernist Versions Project (MVP) players Tanya Clement, Martin Holmes, Susan Schreibman, and Jana Millar-Usiskin led to discussions about how audio figures within the enterprise of versioning. The case of the Plath recordings prompted the MVP to consider expanding the boundaries of versioning techniques and mechanisms to include audio files in addition to text files. This opening up of versioning to include audio helps articulate the mutability of poetry as well as emphasizes its deeply auditory dimension.

Visualizations of the Ariel poems that incorporate the author’s readings would afford a multi-faceted and richer context in which to understand and approach the poetry of Plath for study. Providing scholars and students with audio recordings of poetry in online environments jostles the visual biases of the humanities that are so often reproduced in digital humanities. Plus, poetry recordings permit valuable insights into literary history. For example, the BBC recordings of Plath prompt considerations of the relationship between radio (both as a medium and cultural institution) and poetry, and the status of Plath within national and literary communities. Further, the making available of these recordings for study possesses the potential to open the field of literary criticism to examine further aspects of a poem, such as its status as a performance. The expansion of digital tools to accommodate both textual and audio versions of a poem fosters more layers of interpretation and criticism with regard to sound as well as broadens traditional conceptualizations of poetry as solely print-based. Ideally, the MVP’s interface will articulate both the audio and textual lives of Ariel, visualizing the key discrepancies between print and audio at the level of content, but also offering scholars an environment in which to investigate the public life of a poem and the intensely performative qualities of Plath’s poetry.

Post by Adèle Barclay attached to the ModVers category, with the versioning tag. Image for this post care of Sylvia Plath Info.

TimeLineJS: As I discussed earlier in the semester, I dabbled with TimelineJS in an attempt to temporalize the versions of Moore’s “Poetry.” I was drawn to the sliding sleekness of the tool, but ultimately the timeline format was not ideal for engaging and visualizing Moore’s multi-formed poem. While I would like to incorporate the variable of time into versioning, this tool more appropriately lends itself to articulating biographies, histories, and events.

GitHub: I deposited “Poetry” into GitHub, deploying the tool as a tracker of textual changes. I like the idea of creating a time-stamped repository of Moore’s poetry in which forks emulate alterations in the text. Strangely, the versioning of “Poetry” in GitHub functions clearly and simply on a visual level: colour-coding and plus and minus signs denote variations. Lines of poetry / lines of code: the analogy appeals because tracing poem variants like code acknowledges the inherent fluidity and history of the poem bound in its final iteration.

modVers: Daniel Carter’s modVers proffered a neat, useable visualization for Moore’s “Poetry.” The VM provides a line-by-line comparison and displays multiple, movable iterations of a poem all at once. The highlighting and annotating features allow scholars to embed pertinent information and interpretations into the presentation. “Poetry” in the VM coheres to the argument that Moore, over time, shifts from particularity and detailed passages toward generalization.

Post by Adèle Barclay, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured images for this post care of GitHub.

What narrative sustains and interprets this concurrent distribution of text? What valences precipitate out of this multi-faceted display? Just as “Poetry” comes to signify Moore’s attitudes towards her chosen genre, the differences across versions, especially the erasures, demonstrate Moore’s poetic trajectory, from her early to later days, from her magpie-like enthusiastic culling and collaging of esoteric sources to a final, compact version that celebrates terseness and repudiates her penchants for proliferation exhibited earlier in her career.

Moore’s assertive epitaph from The Complete Poems (1967) declares “Omissions are never accidents,” which resonates with the presentations that modVers avows. The eye pans from left to right, observing the drastic cut in length from the initial to final iterations. The display makes patent the steep jump from the lengthy first and second versions, 39 and 38 lines respectively, to the terminal rendition of “Poetry”—a four-line haiku-esque stub.

What material does Moore shed in the fray? The first two versions embody a few alterations in terms of word choice, arrangement and length of lines, enjambments, and the deletion of the lines “case after case / could be cited did / one wish it” that reduces the overall length of the poem and disrupts the consistent stanza scheme. Notably, the term “autocrats” morphs into “poets”; at first Moore blatantly airs and then, on second thought, masks the self-critical and derisive rapport with poetry underpinning her meditation on the form. Initially Moore describes the critic of poetry as “twinkling” in 1919 and then was “twitching” in 1924.

Obviously, the most striking difference emerges in the final version of the poem in 1967. Moore concocts a reduction of four lines to articulate her ars poetica, demonstrating such pithiness that the tone verges on curt. The annihilated stanzas from the previous versions emblematize trademark Moore characteristics. References to visual art, zoology, high-and-low brow culture, mixed media and materials, the technique of collage all evaporate. Moore strips away the real toads from their imaginary gardens. This oft-quoted phrase critics deploy to define Moore’s poetic approach (“imaginary gardens with real toads in them”) disappears, as does mention of concrete objects, animals, the bits and pieces of the collage in the final version. The quintessential materials that form the basis of contemporary Moore studies: visual art, the natural world, collage and mixed media, and even baseball evaporate over time. “Poetry” concludes its lifespan as barebones, brusque wisdom, crystallized salt.

I was already aware of the significant differences across versions before processing the text through modVers. Yet visualizing and entertaining “Poetry” as a triadic poem allowed me to enlist this specific narrative of erasure and markedly note how the disappearance of specific material mapped onto what scholars define as typical traits in Moore’s poetry. ModVers, like a trellis, guides and exposes the text and narrative. With the whole hand showing, I could construct, mobilize, and visualize Moore scholarship in relation to her versioned poetry.

Post by Adèle Barclay, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured image for this post care of Adèle Barclay and her use of the MVP’s modVers tool.

Sometimes things fit perfectly into other things in pleasing and useful ways. And sometimes the inspired impulse to repurpose a JavaScript timeline tool to version modernist poetry dies in the murky waters of the cool digital sea. Last week I envisioned plotting the shape-shifting text of Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” with TimelineJS as a means to document and compare the alterations in the text over time. I imagined the mutating poem slowly scrolling across the screen in a panoramic display that would not only gather all the variants but also somehow illuminate their significance and beautifully argue a history of Moore’s poetic praxis. Text would alter and dissolve and the timeline would profoundly articulate my dyad image of Moore as poet and editor.

I tried to make linear time fit my ideal visualization of versioning.

My attempt failed for a number of reasons—both conceptual and practical. I wanted to use evolution as a metaphor and not as an ideology. I figured I could represent changes over time without enforcing a teleology of the text and yet the timeline format necessitates a linear narrative. This attempt forced me to question how to present text temporally without inducing teleological implications. So, like, how to undo all of Western thought in this MVP case study?

On a basic level I lacked the technical skills to manipulate the timeline to adjust its features to serve my project. Ultimately the form of the tool lends to registering accounts of historical events. And so, for example, the timeline can’t represent multiple nodes or events at the same time. While the fluid transition between points appeals to my sense of how to represent variants, the timeline merely conjures continuity rather than simultaneity.

As such, TimelineJS provides a glance and general overview of changes amongst versions over time, but the linear scroll doesn’t permit detailed scrutiny and comparison. I would return to the tool in order to construct a biography, a bibliography, a publication history, or even to post a collection of dated facsimiles. Fortunately Daniel Carter’s brilliant modVers tool came to the rescue. Currently I’m splicing lines of poetry with lines of code. Coming soon: Mo[o]re on making the machine.

Yours,
Adèle

Post by Adèle Barclay, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured images for this post care of fleetwoodmacfoxes.tumblr.com, thingsfittingperfectlyintothings.tumblr.com, and Timeline JS, at timeline.verite.co.

What is the half-life of modernism in Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”? Through versioning I aim to trace Moore’s shifting modernist techniques by way of the 1919, 1924, and 1967 incarnations of the text. These versions articulate different visions of Moore over time. Perhaps, even, there’s an account of modernism embedded in the mutating poem, as it stretches from the early to mid twentieth century. Maybe it’s simply the story of Moore’s relationship with modernist poetics.

Moore edited her poetry incessantly and with severity. And yet the earlier versions of poems she disavows established Moore as a high modernist poet alongside the likes of William Carlos Williams, H.D., Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot. While studying earlier versions of Moore’s poetry casts light on the younger poet of the 1910s and 1920s who contributed to the literary movement of Anglo-American modernism, what scholarship precipitates out of engaging the multiple incarnations of one text in tandem? Can we identify and argue for trajectories in Moore’s career and relationship to modernism based upon the evolving versions of a text? As “Poetry” embodies a poet’s rapport with her medium, these multiple versions disclose the poet’s shifting attitudes towards poetry.

I have some more observations with regard to the poem—the content, lines, stanzas that dissolve as decades proceed—but I will save that research for a later post. Beyond all my hypotheses, I want to visualize the multi-formed poem in a meaningful and useful way for scholars. A tree with its diverging branches would serve as an apt metaphor for the text and its variants and as a means through which to sustain and represent the differing versions at once. Notably GitHub, which we’ve been using in the Lab to coordinate our projects, conceptualizes repositories of text and its changes. Perhaps this tool could emulate the history of a piece of text, tracking the differences like rewritten code, and afford scholars the ability to quote these multiple versions simultaneously. The goal of this versioning, visualization, and method is to facilitate close readings of “Poetry” that could then refer to the text, its iterations, and publication history all at once.

Already received notions of Moore have begun to recede for me. Despite her reputation for composing rigid crystalline forms, her strict editing actually generated a proliferation of versions, lending a more fluid quality to her poetry that I had not originally perceived. I think what “Poetry” makes manifest through its markedly different versions is the multiple lives all poems come to lead.

Post by Adèle Barclay, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured images for this post care of The Paris Review, from theparisreview.org; and Adèle Barclay, from her use of the MVP’s modVers tool.

In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
The raw material of poetry in
all its rawness and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, you are interested in poetry.

— “Poetry” by Marianne Moore from Observations (1924)

Hello, scholars, surfers, and readers.

First: The Elevator Spiel 

I am a second-year PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, studying the poetry of American women writers in relation to the language of science and the emergence of environmentalist rhetoric in the early-to-mid twentieth century. My CGS SSHRC-funded dissertation will focus on the triumvirate of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Sylvia Plath. Additionally, I am researching digital humanities projects in the Maker Lab and Electronic Textual Cultures Lab (ETCL). My work in the Maker Lab springs from two research initiatives based at the University of Victoria: The Modernist Versions Project (MVP) and Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE). I’m curious to examine how digital environments mobilize data and make accessible resources and research in the humanities. I am investigating how digital tools lend to the research of modernist studies and book history.

Further: Projects in the Making and Doing

Currently I am analyzing the implementation of RDF and Linked Data in humanities projects. Linked Data is a method of publishing structured data that emphasizes the interconnected relationships amongst the data. Most basically, it connects heterogeneous sets of data for users to query. Projects such as Linked Jazz and Out of the Trenches: Linked Open Data of the First World War digitize archival materials and provide users with visualization tools to explore the data.

In light of these initiatives, I return to the questions: How do Linked Data projects produce research? How do the visualizations of Linked Data (as in the case of, say, the network of musicians in Linked Jazz) not only organize data, but also inform scholarship? What happens when historical and cultural information is translated into Linked Data? Furthermore, I’m interested in examining what these endeavours offer and/or obscure in order to consider how the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism, edited by Stephen Ross at the University of Victoria, may deploy metadata and RDF ontologies for scholarly use.

The Modernist Versions Project has embarked on the testing and reviewing of versioning programs as tools for studying the multiple versions and publication histories of modernist texts. The MVP dovetails with my own scholarly interest in the history of publication of Marianne Moore’s poetry. As a severe editor, Moore has left behind a rich and multi-formed body of work that serves as an exemplum for the study of versioning. What do these various incarnations of her poetry tell us about the poet’s form as it mutates over the decades? Which versions of her poetry were accessible to her peers, fans, and protégés at various points in time? Can we access and assess the younger Moore’s poetic ethos and style through these versions?

As you can see my work in the Maker Lab these past few weeks has spurred mostly rough, raw questions. I’m intrigued not merely by what digital humanities can bring to literary criticism, but hopeful about how those trained in literary criticism can contribute to digital scholarship and debates concerning the translation and representation of cultural artifacts in digital environments.

Many questions,

Adèle

Post by Adèle Barclay, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured images of Marianne Moore’s “Poetry” care of Others 5.6, New York: William C. Williams, 1919-07, digitized by the Modernist Journals Project at Brown and Tulsa.