One of the most basic analytical tools we employ in literary criticism is to consider the setting of a literary work: where does the action take place? Naturally, if the action takes place in a city with the same name and some of the same recognizable features as cities existing in the world, we assume that the fiction is set in the real city. At the same time, no city in a novel is precisely the historical or actual city you could up and visit. We all know that cities in novels are fictitious. They are constructs sometimes used to illustrate characters’ states of mind, sometimes used to point out ideological or political interventions, sometimes used to invoke historical narratives. And yet the impulse persists to think the city of Paris is the same as the Paris in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, or Jean Rhys’s Quartet, or Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night. This list could continue on. Most of the time, these two impulses—to identify the fictional city and the real city, and yet to disavow that identification—co-exist quite comfortably. We often behave as though the historical city and the city in fiction are the same, driven by the determination to discover the city in the novel, rather than the novel in the city. Against those approaches that try to map novels’ action onto actually existing cityscapes, our z-axis work privileges the cities in novels, giving primacy to the “warped” versions of reality that novels produce, and interpreting those warped cities on their own terms.

Indeed, the history of mapping literary works has tended to two key trends with which our own work takes direct issue: realism and isomorphism. First, realism. Because most realism is verisimilar—especially in its depictions of the everyday—it depends upon creating the illusion that the world of the fiction is the same world people live in. This illusion enables the second problem: isomorphism. When many literary critics interpret cities in fiction, they almost uniformly treat the fictional cities as reproductions of historical cities. For all their emphasis on psychological interiority, fragmented subjectivity, subjective experience, and fluid realities, modernist critics have not fared much better. All too frequently they think of modernist experimentation as simply heightened realism, following the sort of isomorphic approach to mapping novels enabled by technologies such as Google Earth, which uses precise pins and accurate base maps to locate fictional events in actual cities.

By contrast, many canonical modernist novels warp or transform historical cities to produce fictitious, highly biased, and subjective versions of them. Djuna Barnes situates the activity of lesbian characters in her novel Ryder in the Rue Jacob, which, as Amy Wells-Lynn documents, is not a street that actually exists in Paris. In Barnes’s other novel, Nightwood, Doctor Matthew O’Connor describes a carriage ride through the Bois de Boulogne as taking place somewhere near Pont Neuf. Elsewhere, Marya in Jean Rhys’s Quartet rapidly travels between cafes in multiple locations. To label these accounts of Paris inaccurate would be to overlook their deliberate transformations of its geography. Matthew O’Connor is nervous of the Bois do Boulogne because it makes him painfully aware of his class status; Marya jumps between multiple areas in Paris in an attempt to find a sense of place and belonging in a string of cafes and hotels. Rather than seeing people and objects as features situated within a city, many modernist writers provide partial, situated, and imaginary accounts of cities, themselves. As Debora Parsons writes in Street Walking the Metropolis, “The urban landscape needs to be studied as a feature that brings the psychological and material into collusion, in terms of theories and aesthetics that construct modern subjectivity and modern art from material urban experience. This is to interrelate the observed with the observer, and to assess how the identity of one affects the other.” Modernist literature confirms this phenomenon. For instance, the Parisian café life described through Marcel Proust’s Swann and Odette differs markedly from that of Rhys’s Marya or Barnes’s Robin Vote. These novels do not take place in the same Paris, but instead rewrite the city itself to produce distinct literary versions of Paris, or multiple Parises. Jon Hegglund confirms this practice, explaining that “writers meld their own city, leading to the simultaneous experiences of multiple cities (Parises in this case) as each writer constructs his or her own (and perhaps even multiple) geographic interpretations…” (80). Although critics may want to document the modernist dismantling of geographic isomorphism, the question of expressing these and other modernist cities remains: If existing geospatial approaches to modernism map the novel in the city by affixing literature to specific longitudinal and latitudinal points, then how might we instead go about mapping the city in the novel?

To this end, the Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) and Modernist Versions Project (MVP) teams have developed a methodology for producing maps of modernist cities, treating them as warped versions of the historical cities they appear to refer to most directly. In the spirit of the affective maps produced by the Situationists in the 1970s, not to mention recent work by Bethany Nowviskie, Johanna Drucker, and the Neatline Project, our z-axis research treats the cities in these novels as independent entities with mappable dimensions that only coincidentally correspond to geographical coordinates. The results are fascinating, and sometimes bizarre, and afford profoundly new ways of understanding the cities in these novels, and of thinking about the relationships between literature and space, literature and place, imaginary topographies, realism and modernism, verisimilitude and simulacrum.

The novels in question are both set in a city called Paris that shares many characteristics with the city of Paris many of you have no doubt visited. Barnes’s Nightwood details the sexual and romantic activity of a group of queer characters living in and around Paris’s Latin quarter. Jean Rhys’s Quartet is the semi-autobiographical tale of Rhys’s own ill-fated love affair with Ford Madox Ford, and it follows the protagonist, Marya, and her descent into poverty after her husband, who lives off crime, is thrown into jail. Rhys’s narrative describes Marya’s fall into poverty and trauma through her experience of the city, while Barnes explores the relationship between class and queerness through the Parisian lives of her characters.

To express the way Barnes and Rhys transform Paris through these accounts, our z-axis method transforms historical maps from the modern period into 3D maps that are warped according to each section of the city described by each novel. Through methodological attention to cartographic display, a z-axis approach unpacks the social and cultural depth of archival maps that are otherwise read as only surface or image. The workflow for producing the maps involves, first, geo-referencing a modernist novel in TEI. In a vein similar to Markus and Best’s surface reading, we tag each location directly described by the narrative to document the amount of description given to each section of Paris. Our TEI follows the narrative of the novel, including imaginary spaces and fleeting references, rather than plumbing the depths of figurative language and the like. The TEI is then transformed using XSLT to calculate the relative word count for each area in the novel, divided against the entire word count for the novel to produce a significance ratio. In the coming year, we will also be investigating topic modeling as a method for producing z-axis data and for visualizing complex connections between multiple areas on the map. In addition to text-based geographic markup of modernist texts, we also marked up each location in Paris through TEI embedded in an SVG copy of the scanned archival map. This image-based markup indicates the pixel location for each area described in the novel on the archival map, producing geographic coordinates rooted in the material properties of the historical map. The suggestion for using pixel location came to us from the Humanities Computing and Media Centre (HCMC) and work on the Map of Early Modern London (MoEML) based there; we would like to particularly thank Martin Holmes for his suggestions of best practices for this project’s use of TEI.

The second stage implements the ratio and pixel location from the data model to transform historical maps into 3D models. The transformation of the archival map into a three-dimensional model first requires scanning the original map and converting it into a displacement map. Displacement mapping is a computer graphics technique that uses difference in image contrast to displace the geometric position of points on a three-dimensional surface. The displacement map is then applied to a highly subdivided plane mesh in the Autodesk Mudbox 3D modeling software environment to produce a three-dimensional mesh. This mesh is then warped using the grab function in Mudbox, with the significance ratio entered as the function’s strength value and the pixel location as the effect radius. The z-axis data expresses the relative amount of description given to each area of Paris, while the x- and y-axis data—the effect radius—expresses the specificity of the geographic reference. In the following year, we will also be investigating automatic transformation of the maps using Open GL as part of our work with Compute Canada.

Applying this workflow to the historical map of Paris we used revealed important findings in relation to the novels under consideration. Specifically, we discovered that the archival map implements spatial warping and a two-and-a-half dimensional perspective to embed a capitalist logic into its cartographic expression. The Nouveau Paris Monumental map series was a famous tourist map of Paris used in the nineteenth and twentieth century as a pocketbook city guide. The z-axis map uses a map from the series made during the interwar period. Implementing a 2.5 dimensional perspective, the map conflates angled views of Parisian monuments and underground views of the metro with street-level views of major Parisian boulevards. The vertical shrinking of Parisian space occurs in tandem with the horizontal warping of Paris, itself—areas surrounding key Parisian monuments appear larger on the map than they exist in Paris, whereas streets and areas that do not generate revenue are either shrunk or ignored altogether.

1932 Nouveau Paris Monumental map

Comparable to the novels we are studying, the map does not depict Paris as it actually existed at the time, but instead a partial and biased representation of a Monumental and Metropolitan Paris. For instance, the bulk of Barnes’s Nightwood takes place in streets just around Saint-Sulpice and south of the Boulevard Saint-Germain—an area that barely even exists on the Monumental Map. Barnes’s literary transformation of Paris conflicts with the cartographic warping seen in the map, corresponding with Anthony Vidler’s claim that modernist understandings of space coincide with warped and transformed methods of geographic expression. As Vidler suggests, “From the beginning of the century, the apparently fixed laws of perspective have been transformed, transgressed, and ignored in the search to represent the space of modern identity” (1). This modernist aesthetic was implemented methodologically as early as the 1930s, where surrealist practitioners invented a game called “embellishment of a city,” which asked players to displace, modify, or suppress certain aspects of a city. In a similar, contemporary practice, speculative computing explores the expressive potential of graphical and material permutations in literary documents. Building modernism’s emphasis on subjective experience and spatial transformation into our geospatial methods, we are particularly responsive to Johanna Drucker’s call for expressions of subjective and constructed data, explained as “the difference between putting many kinds of points on a map to show degrees of certainty by shades of color, degrees of crispness, transparency, etc., and creating a map whose basic coordinate grid is constructed as an effect of these ambiguities.” Visualizing geographic ambiguity and uncertainty is thus a chief aim of our maps. We understand the modernist city as mutable and n-dimensional in nature, as a multiplicity of overlapping and interfolding cities, rather than a singular or essential geographic space. This in turn invites investigation into the city at scale. At once alongside and against the practice of Franco Moretti’s distant reading, our maps track trends and currents in modernist geospatial expression that appear through both pattern and instance. And crucially, the subjective experience of modernist narration, as it constructs multiple situated and partial expressions, produces the multiple maps through which our z-axis readings operate. The results are therefore in conversation with projects from the Stanford Literary Lab and the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia.

Street-level view of Barnes’s warped Paris

The maps also afford geospatial readings of the novels, themselves. One of our initial findings is that geographic references tend to appear in clusters, or that different areas in the same quarter are often grouped together. In the instance of Nightwood, popular areas in the Latin Quarter are fluid and permeable, whereas wealthy areas near the Champs-Élysées and the Opera are isolated and partitioned from each other. Clusters of references can overlap in cumulative fashion—this is the case for Barnes’s marginal characters who wander vaguely through the Latin Quarter, while also meeting and living in specific areas around Saint-Sulpice. On the other hand, references can appear scattered or contiguous, as is the case for areas where Barnes’s characters meet the wealthy Jenny Petherbridge. Furthermore, the class-based division of Paris becomes entwined with the topic of homosexuality through the carriage ride scene, which begins at Jenny’s house off the Champs-Élysées and ends in the Latin Quarter. Here, the escalating sexual relationship between Jenny and Nora in the carriage ride occurs in concert with the movement from the Champs-Élysées, through the Bois de Boulogne, and finally the fifteenth and sixteenth arrondissements. As the carriage ride moves to more impoverished and residential areas of the city, the geographic references become more vague, referring to the second half of the ride in “the lower parts of town.” Here, vague and imprecise geographical references coincide with Jenny’s sexualized attack on Robin. The situation becomes still more complex when the doctor retells this journey to Nora. In the doctor’s version of the carriage ride, the journey follows the Champs-Élysées to the Pont Neuf, before moving south into the Latin Quarter. After explaining this route, the doctor’s narrative shifts to the trees of the Bois de Boulogne, yet resists providing a specific geographic reference for this location. The doctor displaces the space of the Bois, which he describes elsewhere through markers of class anxiety, such that Jenny’s attack on Nora does not occur in tandem with strong geographic markers of their class distinctions.

Street-level view of Rhys’s warped Paris

Rhys’s Paris parallels the spatialized experience of class and gender found in Barnes’s Nightwood. In Quartet, and even more so in Rhys’s later novel Good Morning, Midnight, the descriptions of urban landscapes refuse or certainly make difficult the process of pinning narrative to a single point in the city as seen in Marya’s vague wanderings along the Boulevard Saint Michel or the Boulevard du Montparnasse. A key example of Marya’s construction of the Parisian city can be seen in her presence around but never in the Jardin du Luxembourg. She spends considerable amounts of time in cafés in the area, but her diminishing social and class statuses due to her gender and sexual practices prevent her presence in the classed spaces privileged in the monumental map. In other words, this map shows how Rhys’s narrative privileges spaces traditionally marginalized in social and economic discourse and inscriptively marginalized in popular maps at the time.

Patterns also emerge across both novels, as expressed by the warped maps. Both novels demonstrate concentrated bursts of text anchored in places around key landmarks, including the Jardin du Luxembourg and Saint-Sulpice. Furthermore, narrative episodes that take place directly at or in monumental locations tend to document encounters with the upper class. Marya, Nora, Jenny, and Matthew O’Connor exist on the outskirts of the map’s consumerist vision of Paris, mirroring both novels’ traversal of the margins of Parisian society. The clustering of individual, but not overlapping, instances of warping in the Quartet map expresses the obliqueness through which Marya describes her journeys through Paris and the frequency with which she rapidly travels from one place to the next in search of belonging. For Barnes, on the other hand, the clustering of individual instances of warping expresses the isolated nature of encounters with the upper class, whereas the cumulative warping in the Latin Quarter reflects the frequency with which different characters encounter each other there. Both novels understand Parisian space through the lens of class and sexuality, but Rhys constructs a fragmentary and fugitive experience of a marginal Paris, whereas Barnes’s impoverished Paris is social and shared. Ultimately, the maps express not simply trends or patterns in the novels, themselves, but visualize how these novels understand Paris both in part and in whole.

While our findings feed digital humanities practice back into modernist literary scholarship, we also see value in extending modernist methods to the realm of digital praxis. We see our strange and surreal maps as an extension of modernist avant-garde experimentation, beginning with the Surrealist and Situationist movements, which employed speculation and experimentation as tools for political critique. We too want to infuse methodological experimentation with political engagement, exploring the ideological biases of existing mapping interfaces. To what extent do top-down and totalizing interfaces, such as seen via Google Earth, favor normative conceptions of space or make difficult the expression of marginalized narratives? Echoing Alan Liu, we believe that digital humanists are uniquely positioned to query the political nature of tools and interfaces, and to design new solutions that advance our cultural engagements with technology. By bringing culture to bear on method, by exposing the political in the interface, we see methodological experimentation as a process through which practitioners can craft meaningful interventions in the technologies we use.

Works Cited

Barnes, Djuna. Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts. Ed. Plumb, Cheryl J. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 1995. Print.

Best, Stephen and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations. 108.1 (2009): 1-21. Print.

Drucker, Johanna. SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009. Print.

—. “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display.” Digital Humanities Quarterly. 5.1 (2011). Web.

Drucker, Johanna and Bethany Nowviskie. “Speculative Computing: Aesthetic Provocation in Humanities Computing.” A Companion to Digital Humanities. ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, John Unsworth. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Web.

Hegglund, Jon. “Ulysses and the Rhetoric of Cartography.” Twentieth Century Literature. 49.2: 2003. 164-192. Print.

Kraus, Kari. “Conjectural Criticism: Computing Past and Future Texts.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 3.4 (Fall 2009): n. pag. Web.

Liu, Alan. “Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2012. 490-510. Print.

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2005. Print.

Neatline: Plot Your Course in Space and Time. https://neatline.org/. Web.

Parsons, Deborah. Street Walking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford UP. 2000. Print.

Ramsay, Stephen and Geoffrey Rockwell. “Developing Things: Notes toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2012. 75-84. Print.

Rhys, Jean. Good Morning, Midnight. New York: Harper & Row. 1970. First published in 1939. Print.

—. Quartet. London: Andre Deutsch. 1969. First published in 1928. Print.

Vidler, Anthony. Warped Space. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000. Print.

Wells-Lynn, Amy. “The Intertextual, Sexually-Coded Rue Jacob: A Geocritical Approach to Djuna Barnes, Natalie Barney, and Radclyffe Hall.” South Central Review 22.3 (Fall 2005). 78-112. Print.

Zeikowitz, Richard. “Writing a Feminine Paris in Jean Rhys’s ‘Quartet.’” Journal of Modern Literature. 28:2 (2005). 1-17. Print.

Post by Alex Christie, Stephen Ross, Jentery Sayers, and Katie Tanigawa, attached to the ModVers category, with the versioning tag. Cross-posted at mvp.uvic.ca. Images for this post care of Alex Christie and Katie Tanigawa.

Last spring, I conducted research on the editorial history of Marcel Proust’s unfinished nineteenth century novel, Jean Santeuil. Encoding the differences between the first two published editions of the novel, and using a tool called modVers to express the differences between those two editorial efforts, I suggested that the task of working through these editorial processes engages Proust’s modernist conceptions of temporal and individual development. As I described in my previous post on Jean Santeuil, versioning Proust’s unfinished novel did not simply allow me to read Proust’s modernist technique; it also allowed me to actively work through the genesis of that technique. This hands-on, procedural experience of encoding Proust forced me to unpack Proust’s fragmented construction of narrative chronology.

The fragment I encoded describes Jean’s trip to Penmarch during a stormy day. In the original draft pages of the book, Proust wrote two contradictory versions of the trip that were left unrevised. In one version of the passage, Jean travels by car to Penmarch; in another version, he encounters two women and a biker on a train (the biker comes back in a later section of the book). The first published edition of the novel, edited by André Maurios and Bernard de Fallois, argues that Proust intended to join these scenes through the process of revision, excising a paragraph and reordering the two passages such that Jean’s car journey becomes continuous with his travel by train. The scholarly edition of the novel, edited by Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, maintains the separation between these two accounts, preserving a fractured, contradictory, and unfinished narrative.

Encoding the difference between these two editorial interpretations of the passage works through Proust’s evolving construction of temporality. In order to structure the rearrangement of narrative events using TEI, I had to navigate between disparate sections of the document, copying and pasting variant chunks of text that appear in different sections of each version. As I navigated the spatial arrangement of the XML file to express the changing temporal arrangement of the narrative episode, the manual labor taken to structure the document fashioned an editorial experience of Proust’s modernist technique. I used location IDs to link fragments of text that appear in different sections of the document, constantly moving back-and-forth between different spatial and temporal permutations of the same episode. This is how Proust composed À La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, written in separate fragments that he connected systematically through the process of composition. His modernist technique, known for creating multiple scenes that recall and echo each other (embodied in his concept of involuntary memory), was fashioned by refining the process that remains unfinished in Jean Santeuil, interlinking temporally fragmented episodes into a harmonious and resonant narrative.

Purely visual representations of the Penmarch fragment fail to capture this editorial experience. Working through Proust’s modernist temporalities requires an interactive and hands-on experience (an editorial experience) rather than a purely textual and visual representation (a readerly experience). That is, communicating my argument about the genesis of Proust’s modernist technique using digital methods calls for a dynamic and operable interface. Frameworks for this approach exist in the field of videogame design, and indie game development platforms offer tools for developing such an interactive scholarly experience. In September, merritt kopas led a workshop on videogame design as part of the Building Public Humanities project. For the workshop, she demonstrated game design fundamentals using Twine and her work with Construct 2. How could such design tools and principles be implemented in a scholarly context? In the instance of Proust, I’m considering how Twine could be used to produce a dynamic and interactive experience of the text that asks users to work through its spatial and temporal arrangement. Such an approach requires combining representation and design, reading and doing (if those acts can be neatly parsed). The product would not be an electronic text that moves the printed text onscreen, but rather an operable game that communicates the critical functions of scholarly editing. With this goal in mind, I’d like to unpack the connections between postmodern theories of textual editing and procedural rhetoric—connections that reveal a shared set of concerns, investments, and approaches across both textual criticism and game design.

Postmodern theories of textual scholarship examine the multiplicities of the work created by textual difference, emphasizing scholarly editing as an interpretive act that produces one among many possible views of the work. In his analysis of W. W. Greg, Sukanta Chaudhuri suggests: “Editorial action does not reduce or neutralize the unstable, expansive tendency of the text, but draws it into its own operation. Objective text-based criteria cannot finally yield an objective output. . . . Greg is implicitly proposing two principles: first, of editorial divergence as inherently derived from the textual material; and second, of reception as guiding the editorial function” (106). Reading Greg as an early postmodernist editor, Chaudhuri emphasizes the active work of editorial operations or functions upon the text that construct an interpretive, persuasive view of the work through the hands-on act of editing. Jerome McGann picks up the same language of function and operation in editorial practice in Radiant Textuality, where he writes:

In what I would call a quantum approach, however, because all interpretive positions are located at “an inner standing point,” each act of interpretation is not simply a view of the system but a function of its operations. . . . Its most important function is not to define a meaning or state of the system as such—although this is a necessary function of any interpretation—but to create conditions for further dynamic change within the system. Understanding the system means operating within and in the system. . . . “The Ivanhoe Game” was invented to expose and promote this view of imaginative works. (218-219)

Here, McGann proposes a more radical iteration of Greg’s early editorial operations, suggesting that, by viewing the work as a dynamic environment capable of multiple states, interpretations, or editorial “views,” the editor can create an operable, interactive system in which users can explore the multiple permutations of the original work. If Greg advocates “reception as guiding the editorial function,” then McGann proposes a model for deploying that function in electronic environments, where the dynamic, operable nature of electronic environments can communicate the dynamic operations of interpretive scholarly editing. Of course, leveraging the affordances of electronic environments to transform the practice of scholarly editing is not a new concept. The Ivanhoe Project, developed by Jerome Mcgann and Johanna Drucker, is one existing instance of a scholarly editing game. Elsewhere, Neil Fraistat and Steven Jones have explored textual operations in electronic environments through their concepts of “Immersive Textuality” or “architexturality.” John Bryant’s fluid text environment and D. F. McKenzie’s sociological approach also examine textual fluidity and multiplicity, while exploring the affordances of representing textual change in digital environments. Whereas these approaches focus on new spaces for scholarly editing online, I would rather look at the operation of textual interpretation itself, considering how the algorithmic and procedural operations of videogames offer not only new environments but also new interpretive mechanics that allow the operations of scholarly editing to function in new ways and engage with new audiences.

The concepts of functions and operations are key elements of videogame design, which uses game mechanics to structure interactions within the game world. Just as postmodernist conceptions of editing see the editorial function as an act that engages and transforms the work through material interactions, videogames offer hands-on operations through which the player instigates material change. As Alexander Galloway explains:

What used to be primarily the domain of eyes and looking is now more likely that of muscles and doing, thumbs, to be sure, and what used to be the act of reading is now the act of doing, or just “the act.” In other words, while the mass media of film, literature, television, and so on continue to engage in various debates around representation, textuality, and subjectivity, there has emerged in recent years a whole new medium, computers and in particular video games, whose foundation is not in looking and reading but in the instigation of material change through action. (4)

Galloway’s distinction between looking and doing, or between reading and acting, is complicated by theories of scholarly editing, which reveals textual operations as acts of interpretation and engagement that prompt material change in texts. Still, through his characterization of videogame interactions as dynamic operations that effect material change (as opposed to static acts of reading and looking), Galloway reveals deep ties between the operations of videogames and editing.

Whereas existing connections between scholarly editing and videogames emphasize a mutual investment in interpretation, performance, and multiplicity, I would instead like to consider the acts, themselves through which this multiplicity is realized. I want to suggest that if scholarly editing is premised upon material acts through which the editor crafts specific experiences or interpretations of the work, then videogame design offers new methods for expanding and communicating editorial functions. In other words, the dynamic operations of videogames can communicate and expand the operations of textual scholarship. Ian Bogost provides a method for using videogame design to craft editorial arguments through his concept of procedural rhetoric. As he explains:

Procedurality refers to a way of creating, explaining, or understanding processes. And processes define the way things work: the methods, techniques, and logics that drive the operation of systems. . . . Rhetoric refers to effective and persuasive expression. Procedural rhetoric, then, is a practice of using processes persuasively. . . . Procedural rhetoric is a technique for making arguments with computational systems and for unpacking computational arguments others have created. (2-3)

If scholarly editing reveals the methods, techniques, and processes of production that shape a given text (in order to produce a scholarly argument about the work), then it shares deep affinities with procedural rhetoric, which uses systematic ways of working through processes in order to craft interactive, operable arguments. As a design principle deployed to structure persuasive interactions with dynamic media, procedural rhetoric thus resonates (if only in part) with the methods and concerns of scholarly editing. The persuasive operations of videogame design and the interpretive operations of textual editing offer a rich overlap through which scholars can craft hands-on critical experiences that communicate textual arguments. How can we enrich and extend arguments about modernist technique through the algorithmic logic of game design? I look forward to sharing our findings in future posts.

Works Cited

Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. Print.

Chaudhuri, Sukantra. “W. W. Greg, Postmodernist.” Textual Cultures 4.2 (Autumn 2009): 102-110. Web. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/TEX.2009.4.2.102>

Fraistat, Neil and Steven E. Jones. “Immersive Textuality: The Editing of Virtual Spaces.” Text Vol. 15 (2003), 69-82. Web. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/30227785>

Galloway, Alexander R. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2007. Print.

McGann, Jerome. Radiant Textuality: Literature after the world wide web. New York: Palgrave, 2004. Print.

Post by Alex Christie, attached to the ModVers category, with the versioning tag. Image for this post care of Alex Christie.

Although Bourdieu is more interested in exploring notions of class, his deployment of the sense of taste, I believe, enriches Saito’s approach to everyday aesthetics. As both he and Saito explain, our classification of the aesthetics of our everyday encounters and environments, our judgments directed at the others around us, also reflect back upon ourselves. For instance, I deplore my coworker’s office because I associate messiness with a lack of self-discipline; my own office, on the other hand, is very orderly. In making these aesthetic classifications, I expect that my coworker will classify herself in relation to myself, recognizing my own taste as representative of the self-discipline I seek to embody. By invoking Bourdieu to conceptualize moral-aesthetic judgments, I seek to emphasize the subjective and embodied nature of the aesthetic lives of objects. The ways in which we physically interact with everyday objects reveals aspects of our own worldview.

The act of classification thus expands the everyday aesthetic encounter across a range of scales, as our global conceptions of space, time, geography, and social difference (to name but a few options) are conducted through our moral-aesthetic judgments of daily objects. As Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star suggest in Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences: “A classification is a spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal segmentation of the world” (10). They continue to suggest that classification works through “the relationship (first conceptualized as a kind of gap) between formal systems of knowledge representation and informal, experiential, empirical, and situated experience” (193). Bringing the situated, embodied, and tacit experience of classification to bear on Saito’s deployment of moral-aesthetic judgments allows us (and I believe Saito supports such a view) to read the aesthetic experience of everyday objects as acts through which “larger” subjectivities of self, world, and other are constantly (re)negotiated. Focusing on the subjective experience of space and time, I would like to investigate two encounters with everyday objects that negotiate modernist constructions of geotemporality. First, I will discuss Proust’s experience of involuntary memory in In Search of Lost Time, focusing on cubist and impressionist experiences of environments. I will then consider the everyday aesthetics of 3D printed objects, and conclude by exploring methods (such as the Mudbox sculpture pictured to the right of this paragraph) for using 3D printing to access modernist representations of lived time and space.

And once I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy) immediately the old grey house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre to attach itself to the little pavilion, opening on to the garden, which had been built out behind it for my parents (the isolated panel which until that moment had been all that I could see); and with the house the town, from morning to night and in all weathers, the Square where I was sent before luncheon, the streets along which I used to run errands, the country roads we took when it was fine. And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. (Proust 64)

The main narrative force of Proust’s novel is set into motion by the everyday event of dipping a madeleine in a cup of tisane. Here, Proust’s experience of tasting the mixture recalls his earlier lived experience of drinking tea at his aunt’s house as a child, prompting the involuntary, embodied memory of his childhood that begins the bulk of the novel. The elevated, or extraordinary, description of this everyday gustatory act occupies the tension between art and the everyday described by Saito and could perhaps be characterized as a moment guided by wabi-like sensibilities. At the same time, Proust’s aesthetic experience of the tea invokes larger classifications of space, time, and self, as it negotiates memories of his childhood village. I would therefore like to investigate this aesthetic encounter in its metonymic relation to subjective representations of geotemporality.

In the madeleine scene, Proust’s fragmented, disjointed experience of extracting memories from his tea demonstrates what Saito describes as “the temporal dimension of experience.” Proust evokes his childhood memories by slowly taking one sip of tea after another, using the temporal space of his encounter with the tea as a venue for accessing the larger, lived time and spaces of his childhood. The narrative and aesthetic process by which Proust gleans isolated fragments of his childhood before revealing the full scene of Combray at the end (which continues in the following portion of the novel) recalls Saito’s description of Japanese gardens, which play with partial views of landscape for dramatic effect. The temporal unfolding of Proust’s gustatory experience also brings to mind Saito’s description of Japanese cooking, and tea in particular. She writes: “The sensibility of the cook is reflected in the careful spatial arrangement on the plate, which sets the stage for us to compose our own gustatory symphony. . . . Graham Parkes aptly describes this aesthetic effect: ‘The meal can then be appreciated as a multilayered process rather than a single linear event'” (231).

The connection between Proust’s aesthetic techniques in representing his experience of drinking tea and Saito’s characterization of Japanese design is not incidental. Proust’s writing, and his reference to Japanese aesthetics in the madeleine scene, is marked by the influence of japonisme, which refers to the influence of Japanese art on turn-of-the-century French art, including cubist and impressionist painters and authors, such as Proust. Although my purpose here is not to investigate the histories of Japanese design and japonisme in France, they do share a common aesthetic investment in subjective, temporal experiences of environments. While cubist and impressionist representations take up subjective positions relative to their subject (emphasizing incomplete views and embodied perspectives), Proust’s lived, incomplete view of his childhood village (as it emerges in bursts of disjointed times, faces, and locations from memory) also represents the subjective experience of lived space, rather than whole, objective, or totalizing views of Cartesian, geographic space. In other words, the temporal dimension of Proust’s everyday aesthetic encounter recapitulates larger, subjective experiences of inhabited geography.

Reading the madeleine scene through Saito’s everyday aesthetics suggests that encounters with common objects also function as aesthetic experiences that work through subjective and embodied notions of time, space, and place. However, locating this experience cleanly within the realm of the everyday poses an issue. Although Proust frames his experience of drinking tea as a quotidian event, and his reaction demonstrates the heightened aesthetic sensibility that Saito believes can exist (if only temporarily) as part of everyday experience, the status of the experience as literary still suspends it within the world of art. Even though the event represented is of the everyday, the literary framework in which it is embedded (and through which Proust’s aesthetic rendering of subjective time is read) classifies it as art. After all, it is Proust’s embodied experience we are considering rather than our own, and the subjective experience of lived time at hand here still exists at the level of artistic representation, removed from our own bodily experience. With this consideration in mind, I would like to turn from modernist representation to recent advances in 3D printing, with the goal of considering contemporary object fabrication as a method for expressing modernist experiences of lived space.

Desktop fabrication (including 3D printing) is currently entering the household space, allowing anyone with a computer and a 3D printer (which can now be purchased for as little as two hundred dollars) to fabricate their own objects. These objects range from the utilitarian to the decorative, including sink stoppers, dish racks, egg holders, keychains, superhero figures, jewelry, replacements for lost screws, and toys for children. In other words, the advent of do-it-yourself fabrication is influencing the everyday aesthetics of domestic space (and giving added significance to Saito’s concept of “built environments,” since it enables users to fashion and customize objects traditionally manufactured outside the home). A home filled with fabricated objects may remind us of the knick-knacks that signified the taste of the modernist nouveau riche, or we may classify fabricated objects as a sign of the wealth associated with technological access and savoir faire. Does the fact that these objects are usually fabricated using recyclable PLA plastic, meaning they can be recycled and replaced (rather than sent to a landfill and re-purchased), allow us to classify the everyday practice of domestic 3D printing as a instance of Saito’s green aesthetics? Also ripe for consideration is how we classify the labor required to produce these objects, since users must model an object and wait as layers of melted PLA plastic are laid on top of each other by a heated extruder. Is 3D printing a new form of domestic labor, or is it conspicuous leisure? In this case, what are the meaningful differences between the two?

Rocket Egg Cup by Johannes

In addition to everyday objects, however, desktop fabrication is also being used to replicate art objects. The Art Institute of Chicago has released 3D models of sculptures in its holdings, which can be downloaded and printed free of charge. These 3D replicas straddle the distinction between art and the everyday—they can be fashioned at home and integrated into any built environment; they can be held and manipulated however we choose. Yet despite the ostensible democratization of art afforded by desktop fabrication, the process still works to hold the piece in stasis. The plastic model is merely a synecdoche for its counterpart chiseled into rock, inviting us to appreciate its artful features. Despite the labor required to produce the everydayness of these replicas, the object itself is still immobilized against time, and rather than respecting the materials of production at hand (melted plastic), the materiality of the fabricated model is simply a substitute for the real thing.

Figure of a Youth from a Funerary Stele by Art Institute of Chicago

The materiality of these fabricated models does, however, assert itself when printing goes wrong. Failed prints demonstrate truth to materials in a way that substitute objects, standing in for objects that exist elsewhere, do not. The strangeness of these objects invites further inquiry, focusing particularly on the temporal construction of the object’s spatial properties (since objects are created over time as plastic laid down in layers by the heated extruder). Much like the incomplete views provided by modernist art, which use spatial distortion to represent the temporal experience of objects and environments, failed prints call attention to their temporality by inviting us to reconstruct the duration over which things went wrong. The strangeness of these artifacts, much like the defamiliarizing techniques of cubism and impressionism, asks us to consider the material particulars of the object, focusing on the interrelation between time and space, rather than abstracting the art object as something with aesthetic properties that are disembodied, atemporal, and purely visual or auditory (rather than tangible, material, and mutable).

The spatio-temporality of warped and distorted 3D prints functions much like Proust’s experience of his tea in In Search of Lost Time (and Saito’s temporal conception of spatial arrangement). In both instances, the strangeness of our aesthetic encounter with the object invites a tacit, embodied experience of working through constructions of space and time. With this in mind, I would like to consider the possibility of using principles of everyday aesthetics to model and replicate modernist experiences of embodied, subjective time.

Rather than suspending modernist representations of everyday aesthetics within the realm of art (which I believe Proust’s novel, as an instance of high literary modernism, does), 3D modeling and desktop printing offer new methods for working with modernist aesthetics in an everyday setting. With this goal in mind, my colleague Katie Tanigawa and I prototyped a 3D-printed, tactile map that represents the subjective experience of modernist geography. Focusing on the lived, quotidian time of Joyce’s Ulysses, we designed a 3D-printable map that uses warping, displacement, distortion, and georeferenced word counts to represent the amount of time spent in each section of Joyce’s Dublin. The prototype was developed by taking a high-resolution scan of a historical map of Dublin and carving it into a 3D plane; the plane was then warped vertically in order to account for the amount of time—corresponding with word counts from the novel—spent in each section of the city. The result is meant to represent the subjective, temporal experience of geography in Ulysses; at the same time, the map’s aesthetic design accesses temporality through the spatial arrangement of its component materials. Taking modernist methods of representing lived, embodied time (demonstrated by the defamiliarizing effects of cubism and impressionism at work in Proust), Katie and I attempted to fashion a hands-on, tacit experience of modernist temporality.

Warped Dublin

The defamiliarized landscape of Dublin is meant to invite embodied forms of inquiry that investigate the aesthetic properties of the map in order to understand modernist deformations of Cartesian geography. The distortions in the landscape are guided by truth to materials, since the details that make up the “haystacks” are grain from an original 1925 map that have been rendered in three dimensions. Furthermore, printing the haystacks using a 3D printer would either require splitting them into component layers (to be stacked atop one another) or allowing the heated plastic to distort and deform as small layers bent under the weight of heavier, higher layers. In these instances, investigating the spatial arrangement of the deformed, subjective landscape prompts inquiry into the time taken to build the printed map. Much like Proust’s tea, the embodied, aesthetic encounter with the map is meant to work through local experiences of space and time that open inquiry into the modernist representation of subjective temporality and geography at a large scale. In this instance, the modernist representation of inhabited environments is deployed as a method for producing built-media that facilitates tacit, everyday encounters with modernist techniques (and facilitates arguments about the modernist expression of time). Keeping everyday aesthetics in mind, I am therefore curious how 3D printing can be used to build artifacts that bring modernist aesthetics into the realm of the everyday, using literary techniques to structure hands-on aesthetic encounters that both display and perform arguments about the subjectivities of everyday modernist experiences.

Working with the Modernist Versions Project in the Maker Lab, our research team will be expanding this initial project to compare multiple modernist accounts of the city through warped 3D maps, building off the prototype presented here. We seek to consider, for instance, how Proust’s account of Paris differs from that of Barnes, and how versioning their subjective accounts of the modernist city reveals not only different embodied modernist experiences, but also new disciplinary methods for accessing, investigating, and working through modernism’s deeply political accounts of urban life.

Works Cited

Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. London: Routledge, 2010.

Bowker, Geoffrey C. and Susan Leigh Star. Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1999.

Proust, Marcel. In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way, Vol. 1. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff. New York: Modern Library, 1998.

—. Du Côté de Chez Swann. Paris: Grasset, 1914.

Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford U P, 2007.

Post by Alex Christie, in the ZAxis category with the fabrication tag. Images care of The Art Institute of Chicago, Thingiverse, Alex Christie, and Katie Tanigawa. This post is a version of Alex Christie’s talk (given on Sunday, September 1, 2013) at the Modernist Studies Association’s 15th Annual Conference.

A Maker Lab kit on early games is meant to address the materialist and tinker-centric experience that a history of videogames demands, blending physical computing components, 3D models, schematics, fabricated mechanisms, and dynamic media with text-based scholarship. One goal of such a kit is to provide an embodied scholarly experience that makes an argument about the location of an early game within larger social, cultural, and political histories of technology and media. This approach is informed by Ian Bogost and Nick Monfort’s platform studies and builds on scholarship by Anna Anthropy, Anne Balsamo, Alexander Galloway, Kristen Haring, Steve Jones, Matthew Kirschenbaum, George Thiruvathukal, and Play the Past, among many others. For the balance of this post, I’ll discuss William Higinbotham’s 1958 game, Tennis for Two, as a case study for a cultural history kit, and conclude by sketching out some future directions.

Photographs of Tennis for Two, care of The Gamer’s Quarter

Created in 1958 at Brookhaven National Laboratories, Tennis for Two is considered one of the first early videogames. Its creator, William Higinbotham, sought no patent for the game, ultimately leading to his involvement in a patent dispute with Magnavox Odyssey’s Tennis and Atari’s PONG, among others. These better-known videogames came decades after Higinbotham’s creation, when early arcade platforms that blended analog and digital computing sat alongside mechanical coin-ops in arcades (and gradually entered people’s homes). Unlike these often better-known ball-and-paddle games, Tennis for Two was completely analog. It was created using a Donner Model 30 analog computer and an oscilloscope as the graphical display. As Higinbotham writes in his notes on the game, “the instruction booklet that came with this analogue computer described how to generate various curves on the cathode-ray tube of an oscilloscope, using resistors, capacitors and relays.” The analog computing that made the game possible is central to an archaeology of Tennis for Two because the game’s graphical display and expression are functions of its hardware platform.

That said, many of us in the Maker Lab believe that tinkering with the construction of Tennis for Two—using, for instance, schematics, an oscilloscope, and a programmable microcontroller—would augment our reading-, writing-, and text-based approaches to media history, affording a tacit, hands-on understanding of how the game’s graphical and technical elements are intricately tied to historically contingent notions of gameplay. Even if the original Donner analog computer was simulated using, say, an Arduino microcontroller, a Maker Lab kit about Tennis for Two would still allow scholars to unpack the technical cultures and contexts that shaped the game’s tennis-based mechanic.

Tennis for Two Schematic care of Brookhaven National Laboratory

The development of Tennis for Two can be traced back to the computing functions of the Donner Model 30, whose instruction booklet provides examples for calculating ballistic missile trajectories, bullet trajectories, and a bouncing ball (accounting for gravity and wind resistance). The use of the oscilloscope to display these trajectories also has an earlier historical precedent: before researching at Brookhaven, Higinbotham developed the first CRT-based radar displays (at the MIT Radiation Laboratory) that were later implemented in the radar tracking system for the B-52 bomber. Again, in his notes, Higinbotham writes: “This involved designing means to present the echoes returned from distant targets on cathode-ray tubes, in angle and distance, not far from the problems involved in the tennis game display.” Higinbotham also developed electronics for nuclear bomb deployment as part of the Manhattan Project.

With this history in mind, the graphics and mechanics of Tennis for Two are deeply embedded in the link between early computing and World War II, since they emerge directly from computing tasks first developed for missile tracking. Working through the construction of the game via a hands-on kit would therefore help people wrangle with the historical contexts for Higinbotham’s game. And it would do so by treating the game’s attributes not as purely aesthetic matters, but rather as mechanisms and algorithms that could be tried and tested (based on historical details and documents). By extension, using computational methods for tracking ballistics during World War II in order to reproduce Higinbotham’s game could also provide a playable, physical argument about Tennis for Two. Such embodied learning and situational knowledge are what the Lab’s cultural history kits seek to offer, all the while acknowledging that we cannot play videogames like they did in 1958.

Notably, Tennis for Two is not the only early videogame that employed analog computing. As Karen Collins notes in “One-Bit Wonders: Video Game Sound before the Crash,” early home and arcade videogames used digital methods to drive analog sound generators, including beepers (piezoelectric speakers), programmable sound generators, and even four and eight-track tape players. Music for these early games was written in low-level assembly language. Rather than being abstracted from the hardware of the machine, early game sound was deeply embedded in the constraints of the hardware at hand. For instance, the PONG sound was created using the onboard sync generator (rather than a dedicated sound generator). This resulted in multiple versions of sound for the same game, which changed depending on the material components of each platform.

The transition from analog to digital methods for producing early videogames largely existed before the formation of the game industry as we currently know it. Today, many aspects of these early games are accessible thanks to emulation software and retro indie games. The accessibility of physical computing components lets us tackle aspects of early videogames that emulation alone cannot offer, and to experiment with techniques for examining the machine behaviors of early games and game platforms. Understanding the cultural and historical conditions for many of these early game technologies reveals their place in the longer history of the twentieth century. These histories include the links between computing and World War II, but also the ties between computing and labor as well as the rise of mechanical gambling, penny arcades, and other amusement devices that began in the nineteenth century (topics that Erkki Huhtamo explores in “Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble”). By providing a method for tinkering with—rather than simply describing—early game platforms, our “Kits for Cultural History” will prototype new methods for producing and sharing scholarship on early videogames and other old media.

Selected Additional Reading

Anthropy, Anna. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters. New York: Seven Stories P, 2012.

Burnham, Van. Superarcade: A Visual History of the Videogame Age 1971-1984 . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

DeMaria, Rusel and Johnny L. Wilson. High Score!: The Illustrated History of Electronic Games. Berkeley, CA: McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2002.

General Instruments. AY-3-8910/8912 Programmable Sound Generator Data Manual, 1979.

Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2006.

Haring, Kristen. Ham Radio’s Technical Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Herman, Leonard. Phoenix: The Fall and Rise of Videogames. Springfield, NJ: Rolenta Press, 1997.

Juul, Jesper. Half-Real: Videogames between Real Rules and Fictional Worlds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

Karen Collins. Game Sound: An Introduction to the History, Theory and Practice of Video Game Music and Sound Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

Montfort, Nick and Ian Bogost. Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.

Raessens, Joost and Jeffrey Goldstein, eds. Handbook of Computer Game Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

Steven L. Kent. The Ultimate History of Video Games. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001.

Wolf, Mark J.P. Before the Crash: Early Video Game History Detroit: Wayne State U P, 2012.

Post by Alex Christie, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the physcomp tag. Featured images for this post care of Brookhaven National Laboratory and The Gamer’s Quarter.

As my title suggests, our tools, practices, techniques, and shared values not only inform how we think, but also reflect praxis and its relation to humanities scholarship. As Alan Liu suggests in the March 2013 issue of PMLA: “Just as meaning [in digital humanities] is both a metavalue and a metaproblem, so is collaboration as it bears on such urgent issues in the digital humanities as coauthorship, collective project building, multigraph books, open peer review, social media, crowdsourcing, and the hiring and promotion implications of all these” (412). Thinking critically about how the Lab works as a team allows graduate researchers to explore the place of their work in relation to emergent changes in the discipline, and to do so through the everyday practice and stuff of research. As such, our choices about infrastructure have emerged from discussions at the recent Scholarly Communication Institute meetings on Rethinking Graduate Education, and they respond to changes in the humanities advocated by Bethany Nowviskie, Kari Kraus, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick.

As I begin reading for the Department of English’s comprehensive exams in digital humanities this fall, working through digital methods (as they register changes in the discipline more broadly) adds an embodied, engaged, and tacit element to my graduate education that reading cannot provide alone. I will therefore pull back for a bird’s eye view of the tools and practices we are considering (for 2013-14) before returning to a view on the ground, where I will discuss the importance of humanities lab and makerspace infrastructures in rethinking how graduate students approach their research.

The Maker Lab’s workflow is currently divided into three principal sections: tasks, logs, and posts. My time in the Lab usually begins with a quick review of my ongoing projects and deadlines, which—in 2012-13—we managed using Asana. Asana’s web application lets us set due dates for tasks, share draft documents and other resources we’ve discovered, and send brief updates on the status of our work. By consolidating project updates, progress, and deadlines in one place, Asana eliminates the need to dig through my email inbox before returning to work on a project. Reducing e-mail is key to ensuring that project details don’t become fragmented and that collaborators remain updated with ease.

Logging our work in the Lab is currently managed through GitHub, using a shared folder in the Lab’s “logs” repository, which—if only to decrease the stakes and pressure of regularly communicating our research—can be viewed and changed solely by Maker Lab members. Each research log is maintained as a Markdown (.md) file, with new commits added under a header (h2) for each date. Whenever I am in the Lab, I typically log a list of work done along with screengrabs and a list of ideas and concerns for the day. These updates are then pushed from my local machine to the main branch using either the terminal or the GitHub client for Mac. This method allows us to maintain local access to our logs without relying on internet access. Pushing updates through text and screengrabs to a shared repository online (where the Markdown is displayed as html) also asks researchers to work through how this becomes that as we compose and format our logs (Fuller 85), push them from our local machines, and maintain conversations via GitHub. Working through GitHub promotes the concerns and approaches we share in the Lab, and it does so by asking collaborators to focus not only on what work we do as a team, but how we do it.

We also use GitHub to facilitate conversations between researchers. For instance, everyone in the Lab can see and revise whatever I commit to our working repository, fostering dialogue across documents and revision histories. In my experience, a research and process log functions more as a conversational space than a record—I commit and push the work I’ve done on a given day along with thoughts, roadblocks, and concerns, which are then taken up via commit comments or inline feedback in GitHub. The blend of online communication (using Asana and GitHub) and face-to-face collaboration (in the space of the Lab) creates a feedback loop through which record-making becomes a venue for articulating and working through new ideas. In a lab focused on humanities inquiry, cultivating these moments of shared critical reflection through the platforms we use promotes the blend of algorithmic and critical inquiry that lies at the center of digital humanities research.

The findings of our work are shared with a larger public through posts on this WordPress site. Each semester, we all try to publish at least three posts, with progress toward completion expressed through GitHub’s issue tracker and milestones, drafts and working thoughts shared via our logs, and final drafts submitted for internal review and copy editing prior to publication here. Integrating the documentation we generate across a range of media and formats is a key element of composing the posts. So far, we’ve worked with video, audio, posters, exhibits, plain text, code, and fabricated objects, not to mention a range of tools, methods, and publications. Communicating our work through a suite of media—from screengrabs to text to high-definition video—invites us to attend to and unpack the platforms, procedures, and strategies for sharing multimodal research on the web.

Together, these three key elements of our shared workflow—tasks, logs, and posts—compose a set of shared resources and methods that teach us how humanities research can be collaboratively undertaken and shared with larger communities. However, these screen-based interfaces are also blended with hand-driven counterparts maintained in the space of the Maker Lab. Planning meetings for new projects always begin at the whiteboard, where we work through our thoughts as a group and draft them on the board. New items of interest are displayed on the large monitor in the Lab, and often prompt discussion as we turn from our workstations to discuss our shared problems in person. Questions about a research problem are frequently addressed by pulling a book from the shelves in the corner and consulting with a neighbor. That said, when I conceive of a shared workflow as infrastructure, I refer not only to a set of tools and tasks, but also to the objects, surfaces, and spaces through which collaborators build and share their ideas.

Communicating through these resources, both on-screen and in-hand, lets us approach our graduate work through a range of scales and a variety of materials. While devising my approach to a new task, I will also think about how that workflow could be circulated via GitHub for others to fork and deploy at their home institutions. Working in the Maker Lab asks me to consider what collaborative projects and spaces produce and what venues, methods, and media exist for sharing that material with others engaged in similar work. I find that as we conduct our daily research in the Lab, my fellow researchers and I continually assess how scholarly communication functions across a range of scales, from the collaborator across the room, to research partners on Skype, to local and larger disciplinary communities. By enmeshing research in a shared, physical infrastructure, our workflow reconceives solitary research activities as collaborative practices that hopefully engage larger publics.

Post by Alex Christie, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news tag. The last image aside, all featured images for this post are care of the Maker Lab’s use of Asana, GitHub, and WordPress (at maker.uvic.ca). The last image—of, from left to right, Katie Tanigawa (standing), Adèle Barclay (foreground), Shaun Macpherson (foreground), Nina Belojevic (background), Alex Christie (foreground), and Stephen Ross (foreground)—is care of Jentery Sayers.

Nearly a quarter of a century after Proust’s passing in 1922, his niece opened a cabinet in her home to reveal stacks of notebooks and piles of torn draft pages that had been hidden away since the close of the nineteenth century. The mass of archival material, generated more than two decades before the appearance of Du Côté de Chez Swann, composed the manuscript pages of Proust’s nineteenth century novel—a novel Proust never finished.

The status of the manuscript materials that compose Proust’s unfinished early novel embody Proust’s non-linear sense of time. The narrative is fragmented across torn stacks of paper and seventy notebooks, some numbered and others left with no clear indication of their eventual location in the book. Throughout the pages, narrative contradiction and inconsistency are pervasive: the names of main characters often change suddenly and the same narrative episode can be found in multiple scenes, the details of which contradict each other. Proust constantly slips between third-person and first-person narration. The discontinuous shards of narrative that exist across these manuscript pages gesture toward a complete novel that will never exist, leaving Proust’s incomplete experiment at the edges of narrative fulfillment, in which the continuities of time, character, and narrative itself exist in a state of perpetual rupture.

These are the materials that were handed from Mme. Gérard Mante-Proust to Bernard de Fallois, a doctoral student who, together with André Maurois, edited the first edition of Proust’s book, published in 1952. In order to bring Proust’s book to a state of editorial completion, Maurois and de Fallois stitched together the narrative ruptures that pervade in the original manuscript, silently correcting pronoun slips, editing and arranging contradictory fragments, and ordering the episodes such that they track the growth and maturation of Proust’s main protagonist. The published editions of Proust’s novel are named after the protagonist: Jean Santeuil.

The first edition of the novel, informed by editorial principles invested in finishing the composition that Proust abandoned in 1899, creates what is in many ways a nineteenth century novel. The first published edition of Jean Santeuil tracks the maturation of its protagonist from infancy to young adulthood. Rather than ending where it begins, or by deploying a telescoping first-person narrative to multiply the identities and epistemologies of its narrator/protagonist, this version of Proust’s early novel tracks the linear gestalt of Jean. In so doing, it elides the fractures and fissures that are essential to the formation of Proust’s modernist technique, deployed so masterfully in À La Recherche du Temps Perdu.

The task of faithfully representing the unfinished status of Proust’s manuscript was taken up by the editors of the second edition of the novel, Pierre Clarac and André Ferré, whose scholarly edition of Jean Santeuil first appeared in 1971. Rather than tracking the linear maturation of Jean, this edition represents the constant splitting and shifting of its protagonist, as Proust confuses him with his friend Henri, as the narrative frame in which his story is encapsulated constantly shifts and cracks, and as the events of his life are fragmented across contradictory versions of the same narrative episodes. Rather than concluding with the knowledge and experience of Jean’s early adulthood, this edition of the novel ends in pages of unsettled narrative fragments, disconnected shards of Jean’s life that shift between memories of his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, memories which never resolve into a complete chronology.

The difference between the 1952 and 1971 editions of Jean Santeuil is more than the difference between two editorial principles. Each edition represents a different image of Proust’s early engagement with the techniques of modernism. The tension between rupture and continuity, between linear gestalt and between unresolved fragments of memory, situate Proust’s book at the edges of modernity. Reading the difference between the two editorial efforts to bring Proust’s modernist experiment to light offers an opportunity for working through Proust’s place as a modernist, as it engages with his concepts of temporal and individual development.

Versioning these two instantiations of Jean Santeuil represents Proust’s modernist experiment on the cusp of nineteenth century realism, as it negotiates between linear and fragmented notions of chronology, as it wrestles with the stability of its protagonist’s identity, and as it embodies the tension between continuous and shattered constructions of narrative. The project of versioning Jean Santeuil does not simply invite the reader to view the genesis of Proust’s modernist technique, but to actively work through the genesis of that technique as it is reconstructed through an electronic interface. The process of reading and representing Proust’s modernist experiment online therefore reactivates the editorial process of constructing Proust’s modernism, inviting the reader to participate. More details on how the computational processes used to version Proust activate Proust’s complicated understanding of temporality will follow in my next post.

Post by Alex Christie, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured images for this post care of Alex Christie and his use of the MVP’s modVers tool.

What methods exist for using play to productively game the systems of labor into which scholarly and collaborative work figure? I’ve recently been trying to think through such methodologies here in the Maker Lab. Can gamification function non-exploitatively if it is deployed not to elide processes of digital labor, but rather to purposefully expose the methodologies and mechanics of the project to which one contributes? Such a deployment begins to transform digital labor into an emergent model for economies of contribution, in which gamified labor works precisely to make the contributor aware of the structures in which her work is implicated, therefore building a body of critical experience to draw from in future work.

In the world of gaming, a model for this critical play already exists in the form of speedruns, or orchestrated performances in which the player attempts to complete the game as quickly as possible. Such performances, whether achieved manually or tool-assisted, often expose and exploit the constraints of the game itself in order to creatively overcome the obstacles it imposes upon the player. These performances often use gameplay to make creative arguments about the actual structure of the game.

As a game-related practice, speedruns are all about exposing the algorithms that underlie the game world and then productively exploiting them. This process is, to my mind, what allows the speedrun to function as a potential alternative model to deploying gamification as a form of digital labor. The word “gaming” in this context does not suggest a process of making these methodologies game-like, but rather cultivating a critical practice of play that is meant to render transparent the economic and disciplinary structures upon which such work is based and—by extension—increase the effectiveness of one’s work.

In the Lab, we plan to test the speedrun as a model for producing versions and graphical expressions. By deploying a methodology that asks researchers to game the processes by which we determine and represent differences between witnesses of modernist texts, I hope we’ll expose ways in which such labor can be ethically transparent and methodologically sound. Our work, much like the speedrun as performance, will not only perform arguments about the different texts we examine. It will also allow us to critically think through the process of labor used to generate those arguments. If successful, this is a model that I hope will be useful for rethinking digital methodologies for scholarly research and communication. For instance, how can we game the social production of electronic editions? How can we game the course syllabus? I look forward to seeing what we discover.

Post by Alex Christie, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured image for this post care of Einhänder (PSX) in 31:29.93 by sparky, at youtube.com.

In the Maker Lab, I’ve recently completed my contributions to a collaborative survey of projects using RDF and Linked Data. RDF (or the Resource Description Framework) produces subject-object-predicate expressions (known as triples) to define relationships between different entities. By linking metadata used to catalogue cultural heritage objects, RDF can generate digital catalogues and visualizations that allow users to postulate new relationships between archival materials. Bringing my interest in textual materiality to bear on implementations of RDF has raised a number of interesting questions. For instance, while researching Linked Jazz, a cultural heritage project that allows users to explore connections between historical jazz figures, I began considering the relationship between the project’s visualization output and its archival dataset.

How can visualization tools not simply be used as dynamic indexes but also as a way to postulate new connections between materials? What exactly does the visualization represent? Similar questions arose while researching Europeana, a catalogue that aggregates metadata from heritage institutions across Europe.

My question this time was not about the representational dynamics of visualization tools, but rather digital records. How do we avoid conflating the digitized representation of an object from the material object it catalogues, while still using metadata to make meaningful arguments about archival material? What possibilities exist for authoring digital records of material objects?

The last question is one I believe the Maker Lab is uniquely positioned to address, since our projects in modernism and maker culture occupy the uneasy terrain in which materiality and information converge in the space of the digital archive. Querying the representational dynamics of digital archives allows us to view them not as objective windows into archival material, but rather as phenomenologies that actively mediate our experience of their datasets. Approaching digital archives not as tools, but as phenomenologies, allows us to work through the role they play in mediating our interactions with archival materials online.

Post by Alex Christie, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured images for this post care of Linked Jazz, at linkedjazz.org; and Europeana, at europeana.eu.