“Intimate Fields is an installation work that brings together ‘near field’ technologies from markedly different eras to argue that secrecy, absence, and distance are constituting features of felt human intimacy. Looking back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, our project expands to digital technologies the concept of ‘the posy’ and the practice of its creation and dissemination. Posies are short poems designed to be inscribed on gifted objects, most frequently rings. These bespoke accessories are meant to be worn on the body and to signify or transact amorous relations, act as memento mori, or even enable private and subversive modes of religious devotion. Posies and their objects were widely held to act as reminders of intimacy or as portals to memory. At the same time, the inscriptions themselves, particularly on courtship rings, are often generic and were collected and published in printed books for use and adaptation. By inter-animating today’s methods of near field communication and early modern wearables, this project explores how text and code technologies and the languages they carry can create, interrupt, or re-shape interpersonal connection.

Intimate Fields allows users to explore these potentials through a compact installation work that can be placed on a small table for display. The installation consists of a wooden laser cut box with multiple compartments. The box is bundled with an NFC (near field communication) reader connected to an Arduino Flora microcontroller and miniature thermal printer. Items in the box include printed scrolls and notes containing NFC stickers, textile items containing knotted codes, and a series of six ceramic/steel rings with embedded NFC chips. On touching the scrolls, notes and rings to the NFC reader, scripts are triggered to generate brief affectively charged poems remixed from a range of historical and contemporary texts. An accompanying bot posts remixed versions of posies to Twitter at regular intervals.

Intimate Fields was inspired by the work of Jentery Sayers and the MLab at the University of Victoria. There, Sayers curates a series of maker-inspired digital humanities projects called ‘Kits for Cultural History,’ in which our project resides as Volume 4 in the series. The mandate for Sayers’ original Early Wearables Kit was to create what he called a ‘fluxkit for scholarly communication,’ drawing on the Fluxus model in which boxes are assembled of inexpensive materials to create a shareable art object. Sayers imagined using this model to create what he calls ‘small boxes of inexpensive materials assembled for media history’—kits that can be shared and recreated as scholarly objects that both reveal aspects of material history as well as ‘prototype speculations about the past’ based on absences in what we know—in other words, to build objects that ‘recover, repair, and re-contextualize the stuff of history.’ The Kits are designed to be reproducible and executable—shareable like code, while simultaneously being executed on a local material platform (in code’s case, a desktop computer; in the Kit’s case, a 3D printer, laser cutter, etc). Indeed, Intimate Fields makes use of some of the digital lasercutter schematics from the original Early Wearables kit; it is a fork, in Github’s vernacular, in which project files are copied, modified, and either given a new space (in this case, the repository for Intimate Fields) or pushed back to the original.

As a work in the Kits for Cultural History series, Intimate Fields seeks to share in some of these ideas: reproducibility, prototyping, speculation, play. As a work of media history, its aim is to reveal how media objects conveyed secrets in the early modern period, and extend ‘media objects’ as a term to encompass the smell of rosemary and rosewater, the tactility and luster of linen and handspun silks, the intimate feel of a ring hugging the finger or laying suspended from a thread next to the skin. At the same time, it is clearly a creature of our own moment in history: the inclusion of Near Field Communication chips and an electronic reader shift the reader’s awareness into the now, even while drawing attention to the way in which media objects have always held secrets, if only we knew how to read them. The NFC chip and its forerunner, the RFID system, bring to the forefront the idea of intimacy. There is a secret message here, in this seemingly unreadable and yet strangely beautiful object with its spiraling copper coils and magnifying-glass chip. But we can only ‘read’ it if we place it in intimate proximity to a reader, tuned to the right frequency, coded to find the right blocks of data on the chip. The reader induces a current in the coil, much as opening a secret message induces an affective current in the heart—anticipation, longing, release. Induction, magnetization. 13.56 Mhz of electric love. Typical visual representations of a NFC transaction—and it usually is a transaction, between a mobile device and a payment terminal—represent the moment of communication as a kind of ‘ray-gun,’ beaming information from active device to passive reader. But that’s not how NFC works at all. The reader itself induces current, creating a communicative field that, if it could be seen, would be more accurately characterized as a kind of ‘fountain’ of energy, moving through the chip, inducing new current, and spiraling back to the reader like the roil of the earth’s molten iron core. Magnetism has its own aesthetic.

Intimate Fields also bears witness to Sayers’ observation that reproduction is inevitably an act of situated practice, in which the embodied act of prototyping necessarily changes the act of interpretation. The specific instance of Intimate Fields built for exhibit at the Conference festival here betrays our own particular passions, sourcing materials that speak to us in specific ways (for Maggie, the magic of finding specific letter-folding techniques and reproducing them in specific papers; for Helen, the snagging of raw silk fiber on skin, the twirl of the spindle’s whorl). Here, we offer two boxes: one that is ‘executed,’ complete, and imbued with our own bodily labor and affects, and a second one that is a schematic, a range of possibilities, a kind of historical narrative recipe for reconstructing secrets. In this way, Intimate Fields is a ‘kit for e-Literature’: a kit for reconstructing potential texts that include both material and electronic, hard and soft elements.”

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the KitsForCulture and Makerspace projects, with the news tag. Featured image for this post care of Helen J. Burgess and Margaret Simon. Visit the website and repo for Intimate Fields.

“Building and Sustaining Interdisciplinary Studies on Campus,” Thursday, April 6th, 3:30 pm, David Strong Building C103

“Interdisciplinary Boundary Crossing and Literacy for the Digital Age,” Friday, April 7th, 12:00 noon, Mearns Centre, McPherson Library, Room 129

We hope to see you there!

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag. Image for this post care of UVic.

Research Reels (Screening and Awards)
MacLaurin Building (MAC) A144
March 7th at 5:00pm
IdeaFest at UVic

Hope to see you there!

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace and KitsForCulture projects, with the news, fabrication, and physcomp tags. Image for this post care of IdeaFest at UVic.

I received an MSc in Sound Design (Distinction) from the University of Edinburgh in 2013, and started my PhD research at the University of York in October 2014. My research is funded by the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities (WRoCAH).

My main research focus is Sonic Interaction Design (Franinović and Serafin, 2013), and how to better link human action and sound together in digital interfaces and systems. I am examining late nineteenth and early twentieth century theatre sound effects to try to uncover what their designers knew about action and sound, and how we can use this knowledge for the design of new sonic interactions and digital sounding objects. This is an interdisciplinary piece of work, incorporating historical research, performance interface design, perceptual audio evaluation and practical/creative work to remake historical sound effects and prototype new digital sounding objects. I also have a research blog.

My creative work is mostly in sound design and music, focusing on systems for live performance. These include hand built audio electronics, mechanical sound producers, augmented instruments, sound props and software.

We’re looking forward to working with you, Fiona!

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag. Image for this post care of Fiona Keenan.

Mary Catherine and Tiffany prototyping all the things

Kat and Seamus scanning the spacecraft

Robin, Nick, Carrie, Mark, and Anne search for parts

Me, under the illusion someone is listening

Digitizing the cheesehouse!

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news, fabrication, and physcomp tags. Images for this post care of Danielle A. A. Morgan.

In the humanities, what are the settings of interpretation? How does design allow us to rethink the normalization of scenarios as well as “the user”? In this case, Sara Hendren’s work on accessible architecture is compelling.

How is interpretation embodied and situated in time and space? How does design help us attend to the particulars of situations, especially to the particulars that matter or make a difference? Here, we repeatedly drew from Karen Barad’s work on mattering and boundary-making practices.

What does a given design value or reify, and who does it exclude? Simone Browne’s recent work on surveillance technologies and practices is very informative here.

How is design also inquiry, or not simply an instrumental means to an end? Here, we considered work by Carl DiSalvo, Daniela Rosner, and Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby.

How are projects designed to be maintained and repaired over time? Which design methods frustrate “make or break” models premised on innovation above all else? In this instance, we might visit the “Reclaiming Repair” project by Lara Houston, Steven Jackson, and Daniela Rosner.

How might humanities projects start with design instead of ending with it? That is, how is design much more than the “polish” we apply to surfaces immediately prior to publication or release? Here, Anne Balsamo’s work on design and culture is key.

How might we design contexts for interpretation, not just stuff or objects? The book, Context Providers, by Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, and Victoria Vesna, prompted this question in particular.

Finally, how might design foster deviance in interpretation, or expose and experiment with norms in a material or affective way?

I was honored to present with Kim, Padmini, and Jacque. Our MLab work is inspired by Kim’s “Fashioning Circuits” project, Padmini’s work on “making culture,” and Jacque’s collaborative approach to data, sound, and touch. My notes for the panel, which was oriented toward group discussion, are below. They draw from my experiences with the Kits for Cultural History project.

A Design Practice to Prototype the Past

In the MLab, we’ve been “prototyping the past” by prototyping absence, a process that involves remaking historical technologies that no longer exist, no longer function, or exist only in part in museums and collections. Thus far, we’ve remade technologies such as early wearables (1860s), early magnetic recording devices (1890s), and early optophones (1920s-40s). In so doing, we produce digital models of these technologies as well as tactile components for assembly. These materials are circulated online and by post, and we also exhibit them in galleries and other memory institutions. With them, our aim is to not only test historical claims about early technologies—how they functioned, how they were embedded in culture, and how they were maintained—but also foreground the labor at play in them, including work by people such as Mary Jameson (a key developer of optophones; photographed below) who are largely, if not entirely, absent from scholarship in media history. At the same time, we research against the assumption that we can inhabit or fully recover the positions of people and things in the past.

Mary Jameson reading Anthony Trollope’s The Warden on an optophone, ca. 1921, care of Blind Veterans UK

You might call “prototyping the past” an instance of multimodal scholarship. However we define it, design has played a key role in its articulation across the humanities and fine arts. In fact, during the last year or so, we’ve been moving toward a particular sort of design. At HASTAC, I briefly outlined this design approach (such as it is) in about five minutes through six points. In the MLab, we’ve become especially interested in:

Design as an attribution practice, which attends to the intricacies and specificities of labor. For instance, we often use patents and illustrations to prototype early technologies in 3-D. However, patents very rarely give attribution to people who ultimately maintain or develop the technologies at hand. To what degree can design highlight those missing names today? Or how can it prompt people to consider important differences between labor now and labor then?

Design as inquiry (see Rosner), where we develop scenarios for interpretation, not replicas of historical objects. When we tell people we’re prototyping the past, they tend to assume we’re making exact reproductions for display and circulation. However, we’re not invested in copies. We’re interested in treating design like writing, archival research, and trial-and-error experimentation, among other techniques. The resulting objects manifest arguments made about the past, not re-presentations of history. How, then, might design resist tendencies to treat objects that look historical as historical reconstructions?

Design for experience (as opposed to form) without “users,” but with people who are negotiating with materials—testing, twisting, bending, altering, misusing, repurposing, glitching, and critiquing what’s in circulation. Put differently, we’re leery of creating instructions for people or giving them step-by-step instructions to follow in order to assemble early technologies, in part because instructions are biased (e.g., the invisible narrator) and generally foreclose spaces for experimentation or alternatives. How do we design research so that inquiry continues through other entanglements of meaning with matter (see Barad), against the “receipt” of dead objects to be used or frozen labor to be cited?

Design for responsibility. The very word, “prototyping,” typically elicits speculations about the future, but we can conjecture about the past, too. (See Butler and Kraus.) When we do, we need design paradigms that push conjecture beyond play or “screwing around” toward responsibility: to recognize how experiments with history involve spectres of the past. Through sonification, tactile media, and collective experience, Wernimont and Stern’s The Eugenic Rubicon gives us examples of how to engage history with such sensitivities (or sensitive data) in mind. In short, how do we design to combine entanglement with action and attention to difference?

Design-in-use (see Botero et al.), where iteration and frequent testing across settings eclipse prototyping in the abstract toward some ideal form. When it calls itself “critical,” this approach to design interrogates norms, including how technologies shape experience and proliferate values. Such norms emerge from the privileged positions and embodied habits of designers, together with the default settings of technologies and spaces, and iteration may expose or rewrite them as well as commonplace proclivities toward “the user.”

Design for diffraction (see Barad and Wark), where prototypes of the past do not duplicate or mirror history but instead navigate and foreground our contingent relations with material culture. The past and present are produced together, over and over again, with patterns and change. Following Wark’s language (see pages 158-165 of Molecular Red), we might say that prototyping the past does not prototype the objects of history; it prototypes processes of knowledge with an emphasis on the apparatus of knowledge production. How might design focus on the physical arrangements and phenomena that distinguish process from product, observer from observation, or this sensation from that one—on the matter, meanings, and practices that, in short, make boundaries?

I’m in the middle of writing a short publication (in design studies) that details some of these points. More soon!

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the news, fabrication, and physcomp tags. Featured image care of HASTAC 2016.

“There’s a new labcoat on campus. From making video games to imaging the tongue, humanities research can be more hands-on and collaborative than you may think. Join us for this panel discussion about the exciting projects that take shape in our labs: the Humanities Computing and Media Centre, the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, the Maker Lab, the Digital Language Learning Lab, the Speech Research Lab and the Sociolinguistics Research Lab. A world of discovery awaits!”

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag. Featured images care of IdeaFest 2016 at UVic.

the ways that maintenance, care, and repair are negotiated—often collaboratively—in use and the meaning-making associated with use, rather than the meanings pre-specified by designers. In . . . case studies, we saw that the process of breakdown and repair was not something that device designers or event planners could effectively script ahead of time. Based on these observations, we argue that designers’ intentions to plan or divert such outcomes can often be rendered ineffective without accounting for the specific material, economic and cultural infrastructures that are at play in use. (Rosner and Ames 2014: 9)

In “Why Fabricate?” I was specifically interested in types of projects, such as historical prototyping projects, that may use care and repair as a paradigm for research. When juxtaposed with a make or break binary, a care and repair paradigm may imply that the creation or obsolescence of technologies matters less than their maintenance, that the novelty or datedness of media is less significant than how they are stewarded, or that the spectacle of digital technologies is flipped to examine their everydayness. How, indeed, is digital work quite routine? This emphasis on the everyday is rather common in media and technology studies, where narratives of creation and obsolescence are frequently associated with either lone inventor myths (as if technologies spring from genius minds) or avant-garde proclivities for ruptures, radical breaks, and the “new” (as opposed to iteration, incremental change, or redescription). For me, then, a care and repair paradigm prompts us to understand techniques such as digital fabrication and rapid prototyping in terms of remaking or reconstruction, and it may even involve some suspicion of innovating or breaking things. It also anchors creativity and critique in labor and infrastructure studies, without rendering “imagination” a bad word.

I appreciate Rosner and Ames’s description of negotiated endurance not only because it privileges situations over ideals but also for its emphasis on how the fine-grained dimensions of infrastructure and labor influence knowledge production. In this sense, it very much echoes existing work by Donna Haraway (Situated Knowledges), Susan Leigh Star (Standards and Their Stories), Karen Barad (Meeting the Universe Halfway), and McKenzie Wark (Molecular Red), as well as recent concerns about maker culture expressed by Debbie Chachra. For my purposes here, I also wonder if negotiated endurance enables ways to interpret two contemporary phenomena at once: “on-demand” economics premised on “curating” services and data, and the individualist or romantic innovation frequently informing most maker cultures. Given their widespread influence, both of these phenomena seem important to digital studies today.

For an example of the former (on-demand economics), we might refer to Uber or Airbnb, which owns no vehicles or real estate, respectively. Recently, at CUNY’s “Digging Deep” event, Allison Burtch observed that these companies manage to make nothing (2015: n. pag.). One consequence of this approach is that they displace the onus of care and repair onto their service providers, usually in the name of sharing or peer-to-peer networking. They also traffic almost entirely in what Manuel Castells calls the “space of flows,” which is distant from the “space of places” (see Castells 2010, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed.). That is, using networking applications, companies may now invest in real-time exchange (e.g., between driver and passenger) as an abstraction without having to invest in labor, lived time, infrastructure, or situated experience “on the ground.” As the Journalist’s Resource at Harvard suggests, the cultural consequences of these economic models for on-demand sharing are not yet clear (2015: n. pag.); however, they do point us to examples where using technologies to curate services may not be synonymous with caring for infrastructure and social relations.

In the case of Uber, for example, the Center for Economic and Policy Research observes that, even if “Uber drivers on average earn a gross premium of $6.00 an hour over the pay of drivers of traditional cabs . . . the key issue here is the use of the gross premium rather than a direct earnings comparison. The difficulty . . . is that we don’t know the costs incurred by Uber drivers, who use their own car” (2015: n. pag.). By extension, both drivers and passengers remain responsible for any risks involved. Reading the fine print of Uber’s terms and conditions, Stacy Perman writes: “[I]n effect, Uber says it’s neither an owner nor an operator, just a piece of software that connects riders to cars. Have a run-in with a driver? Not our problem, says Uber” (2015: n. pag.). From the perspective of negotiated endurance, Uber’s software designers cannot script how and to what effects riders are connected to cars and drivers. They can only facilitate the connection. Moments of breakdown—be they social, technical, or a blend of the two—also exceed or complicate the space of flows, situated such as they are in the space of places (on the ground, in the car, in lived social reality).

While on-demand economics likely have more severe or pressing implications for how we study emerging social relations and forms of exchange, romantic notions of innovation common across maker cultures are also significant for their influence within popular cultures. A few examples come to mind here: nostalgia for pre-digital living (e.g., a withdrawal from contemporary society via manual or mechanical technologies from the 19th century); certain brands of do-it-yourself (DIY) production anchored in bootstrapping and possessive individualism; fetishizing glitches as ways to break or critique systems in a reactionary fashion; the reduction of manufacturing or repair to weekend hobbyism (as opposed to a full-time occupation); or the reanimation of lone inventor myths (prototypically able-bodied, masculine, white, and male) through publications such as Make magazine. Of course, we can learn a lot about new techniques from reading various Make publications (e.g., Hartman’s wearables book or Igoe’s talking objects book). However, these publications are not really intended to prompt considerations of care and repair, including histories of care and repair. After all, they are Make books, not maintenance manuals.

Negotiated endurance helps us unpack these present-day paradigms of romantic, individualist innovation by moving beyond a desire for origin stories, articulating technical work as a collaborative social effort, privileging the stewardship of infrastructure over its creation or obsolescence, and steeping technologies in narratives of constant development, care, and change. Again, a lot of this is quite everyday. Nevertheless, as critical gestures, a care and repair paradigm (following Rosner and Ames) might allow us to engage contemporary issues (such as sharing economies and romantic nostalgia for pre-digital living) from multiple positions, including the positions of labor and infrastructure, while also asking what sort of ethos we wish to foster through work on technology and culture.

That said, during the last year or so I have been considering how to think small about negotiated endurance, gradually shifting from projects to practices motivated by care and repair. These practices inform the graduate seminar (“Prototyping Texts”) I am currently teaching at UVic, but also a lot of collaborative research in the MLab and elsewhere, with an emphasis on learning and experimenting with technologies. While I am still determining how to best articulate these practices, six of them are listed and described below. As ways to think small about negotiated endurance, they might be considered exercises in the routines of technology and culture.

Attribution Study: Inspired by well-established projects, such as The Orlando Project and INKE, attribution studies are incredibly informative ways to foreground the negotiated endurance of collaboration and collaboratively produced materials. Who is acknowledged and supported for their work, how, and where? How is the project’s infrastructure entangled with the people who contributed to it? While The Orlando Project and INKE are models for ethos and clarity here, matters of attribution are often mysterious when it comes to digital projects in and beyond the academy. Drawing people’s attention to these matters encourages them to account for who maintains the technologies and data that people regularly use. Here, work by scholars such as Lisa Rhody, including her recent talk at MLA 2016, have addressed these care and repair issues in detail.

Sourcing Exercise: While conducting media history research, sourcing exercises ask where component parts of a given technology come from, where they are manufactured, by whom, and in what conditions. Nina Belojevic’s article on circuit-bending demonstrates how such sourcing is in fact quite difficult to do, particularly when determining the origin of, say, chip manufacturing for electronics. Even when data sheets are available, replacement parts for many technologies are hard to acquire, and they are rarely, if ever, distributed by big-box stores such as Best Buy. As Belojevic suggests, one effect of sourcing exercises is an inquiry into labor and material conditions. Another is nudging digital studies beyond software and source code. And yet another is underscoring how the ontologies of devices are opaque at best. This opacity is only increased when we move from treating technologies as component parts to examining them as compositions of rare earth elements such as neodymium and yttrium.

Reverse-Engineering and Reassembly: Whereas reverse engineering is quite common in the sciences, it is less familiar to the humanities, with Anne Balsamo, Edward Jones-Imhotep, Kari Kraus, and William J. Turkel conducting some of the most compelling research on the topic, in addition to using reverse-engineering as a research technique. In terms of negotiated endurance, reverse-engineering necessarily involves considering how technologies break down, or can be broken down and demanufactured. More important, it highlights the spaces between parts. These spaces gesture toward the actions or behaviors involved in assembly and maintenance—how, if you will, things stay together. By using reverse-engineering as a research technique, then, we can demystify the infrastructural components we often inherit but also break them down to imagine what else they may have been and how they were, and continue to be, repaired. True, this may be considered a rather irreverent approach to history (e.g., the object is neither whole nor sacred). But reverse-engineering historical materials need not imply a lack of regard for them. That is, it can be done deliberately, with care and stewardship in mind.

Shift in Modality: When working with technologies, especially digital technologies, what needs to be repaired is rarely obvious or easy to perceive. As goes the vernacular, breakdown surprises (or frustrates) us. Shifting the modalities through which we interpret technologies may facilitate insight into these surprises. Here, Shintaro Miyazaki’s “Sounds from a Coil” is informative. Instead of treating phones as objects at which we stare, or as instruments for conversation, it sonifies their electromagnetic emissions, which might otherwise be ignored. What’s so compelling about Miyazaki’s experiment is not that he reveals something that’s hidden. It’s that he demonstrates how technologies are entangled with the senses, and thus how meaning-making with technologies is intertwined with how they are perceived.

Change Histories: Version control systems such as Git are sparking new research about how repositories, as well as books, articles, and code, are iteratively developed. In short, with a given repository, we can access the final product together with its change history. Of course, change histories do not happen automatically. Ideally, they involve considerations of metadata, including time-stamps, attributions, and descriptions of change (or “commits”); and if they are done for collaborative projects, then they can document and share how those projects were written, edited, formatted, and, indeed, maintained before and after public release. A survey of digital humanities projects using GitHub offers a foundation for studying this maintenance and speaking to its oft-ignored role in the field.

The Five-Year Plan: In both the MLab and the classroom, I have benefited immensely from articulating (with students and other researchers) five-year-plans for projects, including writing projects. In five years, how will people access these materials? In what formats? Via what mechanisms? With more time and support, what would we change or revise? How could it be improved? How could it be more accessible? What aspects could be more persuasive? What should we document for future reference, or for future audiences? These sorts of questions are familiar territory in writing and information studies, especially approaches based in the composition of portfolios. That said, I have found them helpful for thinking beyond a given semester, academic year, funding cycle, or research outcome. While it is certainly important to act upon responses to these questions, the first step is asking them, and humanities students (in particular) may not always be encouraged to ask them.

As I mentioned earlier, I am still struggling with how to best articulate these practices, but I hope those of you at INKE 2016 find them informative as ways to think small about negotiated endurance, or to move from make or break binary to a care and repair paradigm. And as we proceed with work at the intersection of technology and culture, a related issue is—echoing a question recently posed by Alan Liu during the “Care and Repair” panel at the 2016 MLA convention—how much care and repair work we can maintain, ethically or humanely, over time. To engage this issue, digital studies might turn to the long, long history of care and repair paradigms in cultural criticism, including Eve Sedgwick’s notion of “reparative reading” (see Touching Feeling (2002)), to approach the maintenance of digital projects from social and ethical positions.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag. Featured images care of a Sears catalog.

For the 2014-15 award, students from across the UVic were invited to submit projects (of all types, in a variety of formats) that demonstrate scholarly innovation through digital humanities research, teaching, learning, and communication. This year’s two successful projects met or exceeded the following criteria: 1) they were completed within the course of study for an 2014-15 undergraduate or graduate class in any department at UVic; 2) they met the course’s stated learning outcomes or expectations; 3) they demonstrated an innovative use of digital technologies for research, teaching, learning, or communication; and, 4) they blended computational methods with a critical approach to a humanities question or problem.

Elizabeth Bassett’s essay for English 507 (Spring 2015), “‘But no matter what I thought’: The Governess’ Untold Bildungsroman in Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey,” challenges scholarly claims of Agnes Grey’s simplistic narrative form. Using deformance as her method, Bassett created two alternate versions of Brontë’s novel: one which omits Agnes’ references to the details she withholds, and one that is made up solely of these references. By analyzing the two “deformed” versions alongside the original to argue that Agnes’ personal story—her bildungsroman—is deliberately withheld from readers, Bassett explores how the subtly complex narrative form of Agnes Grey is constructed to reflect on the stifling impacts of the Victorian governess occupation.

Nadia Timperio’s project for English 507 (Spring 2015), “‘Conveying more’: A Narrative Critique of Richard Wright’s Native Son,” takes up previously established parallels between antihero Bigger Thomas’ psychological disorientation and social conditions responsible for his predicament to inform an algorithmic reading of the novel. Using Python for text analysis, it illustrates how failed attempts to access Bigger’s interior monologue reveal the narrator’s inability to relay Bigger’s authentic story. This failure to narrate responsibly reflects Wright’s growing frustration with the Communist Party’s inability to solve “the Negro problem.”

For the Award, both of these students will receive a certificate of recognition, together with a 2016 Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) scholarship.

Please join us in congratulating this year’s two award winners for their innovative and inspiring research!

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag, and cross-posted at etcl.uvic.ca. Featured image for this post care of Nadia Timperio.

The Wearables Kit prompts people to reverse engineer and reassemble an electro-mobile skull stick-pin intended for cravats, designed by Gustave Trouvé, built by Auguste-Germain Cadet-Picard, and exhibited at the Exposition universelle in Paris in 1867. Powered by a 1.5-volt zinc-carbon battery located in the wearer’s pocket, the skull was said to snap its jaws and move its eyes. To activate the battery, the wearer would flip the pocket battery from a vertical to a horizontal position. Once activated, the battery would trigger a mechanism (resembling that of an electric bell) hidden inside the skull, which was less than two centimeters in diameter. This combination of electricity with jewellery was not only unique for the 1860s; it also suggests the stick-pin was an early wearable technology.

To our knowledge, only one instance of this stick-pin exists in a memory institution today, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. However, it cannot be accessed, and it is not accompanied by the original battery. After significant research, including archival work and rapid prototyping experiments, the MLab wonders if the skull was ever fully automated. So, with the Kit, we submit our suspicions for conjectural manufacture: a combination of critical distance from early wearable culture with immersion in the particulars of the pin’s design.

The repository for the Wearables Kit is now online, and a poster for our “Prototyping the Past” panel is below. Hope to see you on Friday, November 20th!

“Prototyping the Past” | A Panel Discussion
Tiffany Chan (MA, English), Katherine Goertz (BA, English), Danielle Morgan (BA, English), Victoria Murawski (MFA, Visual Arts), and Jentery Sayers (Assistant Professor, English)
Friday, November 20th | 12:30pm | David Strong Building C116 | Poster

The UVic Maker Lab will discuss their approaches to rapid prototyping and media history, with an emphasis on their Early Wearables Kit (Volume 1 in the Kits for Cultural History series).

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the news tag. Poster by Victoria Murawski.