The Z-Axis project relies on a modernist sort of remediation, which encodes, fragments, and distorts historical time and space in order to exhibit how cities (e.g., Paris, London, Dublin, and New York) are expressed differently in different modernist texts. In this sense, it sparks a comparative approach to literature and media. How, for instance, is Woolf’s London distinct from Conrad’s? From Bowen’s? And to what effects on our assumptions about modernist geographies? If you are interested in learning more about the core impulses of the Z-Axis initiative, then I recommend reading this post, by Jentery, from back in June.

Building on Jentery’s post, I think the best way to explain our Z-Axis work is to show you the first instantiation of the research thus far.

What you see above is a 1925 map of Dublin that has been scanned and transformed (using 3D modeling software) in order to consider a reader’s ostensible geotemporal experience of Dublin while reading Joyce’s Ulysses. The “mounds” in the map not only point to Joyce’s geospatial biases in the novel; they conjecture about how his version of the city might be read (consciously or not) by his audiences. In other words, they make no claim to isomorphic representations of Dublin. After all, the mounds are transformations of the base map itself, not data layered on top of it.

Above, you can see our data model for the word count per location. We did our best to figure out where, geographically, events were in the 1922 Shakespeare and Co. edition of the text. Then we did a word count to see how many words were spent in particular areas of Dublin. Next we divided the georeferenced counts by the total number of words in the book, giving us ratios for each area. So, for example, Joyce dedicates 30,262 words (or roughly 13%) of Ulysses to 7 Eccles Street. And once we tabulated all of this data, Alex Christie used Mudbox to accentuate areas on the 1925 map accordingly. This technique—which is at once algorithmic and manual—allowed us to create the mounds you see on the map.

Two things became clear during the early stages of this research. First, in Ulysses, the reader gets a very limited view of Dublin. Second, the reader is disproportionately located in just a handful of areas. That is, Joyce’s writing warps the city. It is, in a sense, already an act of transformation.

After we came up with this 3D model that embodies, if you will, a modernist distortion of time and space in Ulysses, Alex took the model one step further and began approaching Joyce’s warped Dublin from the street view (as opposed to the bird’s eye view provided above).

This view on the ground depicts grooves in the streets as well as the fragmented composition of the data mounds—tornado-like in their algorithmic expression, exhibiting a modernist (and even Cubist) aesthetic despite being born-digital. Through a shift in perspective, it also helps us better understand the need for depth in digital expressions, particularly those that are geospatial in character.

To be sure, we still have plenty of work to do along the z-axis of humanities research, especially where refining the model, replicating the method, and rendering print-ready prototypes are concerned. Nevertheless, this experiment has already prompted a number of exciting new research questions, anchored in how cities morph from modernist text to modernist text. Currently, we are replicating our approach through a turn to Paris, considering work by Hemingway, Rhys, Barnes, and Miller. And we plan to then move to London, perhaps with Conrad, Woolf, and Bowen. As we proceed, we are motivated by the claim that modernist cities are not static or objective entities. They are read, written, edited, embodied, and interpreted. Or put differently: Joyce used writing to transform the city, making it a medium for modernist expression. Ultimately, by comparing various versions of modernist cities, we can not only better understand modernist geographies but also bring modernist aesthetics to bear on current data visualization and 3D sculpting techniques, injecting digital scholarly communications with a conjectural take on everyday life.

Post by Katie Tanigawa, attached to the ZAxis Project, with the versioning and fabrication tags. Featured images for this post care of Alex Christie and Katie Tanigawa.

To begin addressing these questions, I’m imagining an article in an online publication like DHQ or NANO that would articulate a particular argument, and—instead of providing static images of data visualizations—it would embed a rich-prospect browsing interface (RPBI) like the Mandala browser into the argument itself. The data used in the article would be loaded into the browser, and audiences would be asked to play with that data, which the journal could also make publicly available (perhaps in various formats). For a first-year PhD student new to digital humanities, this possibility is both exciting and a bit terrifying. Among other things, this model is just begging for people to disprove, or at least rigorously test, your article’s claim and its corresponding data. Who wants a “break” button built into their scholarship?

In response to this question and its impulse, I think there’s another way to frame the integration of RPBIs into scholarly communication, and that is to think about the degree to which embedded browsers and other such tools for expression could help render our scholarship more persuasive and our data more transparent. This possibility would ask scholars to come together not just to break an argument, but to improve it. Such a model offers the research up to some playful and tacit hypothesis-testing that could afford new and unexpected insights in the humanities.

Of course, several questions emerge, including: How do you cite a source inside an RPBI? How reliable is the data in the first place? Where necessary, how could that data be made more reliable, or more persuasive? How much access do you give to audiences? And who is ultimately the author of an article that asks for audience engagement and creation? To be honest, I’m not entirely sure how to address these questions without actually enacting this mode of publication, so perhaps that is the next step. Write an article in which you share your data, outline the rationale for how the data was produced, and embed an RBPI so that users can play with your argument. More soon!

Post by Katie Tanigawa, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured image for this post care of Katie Tanigawa’s use of the Mandala browser.

Work for this course frequently took me away from the screen, away from markup and visualizations, and into the archives. I flipped through the un-digitized pages of the Graphic, the Illustrated London News, and the Yellow Book, reading without a search function or the ability to run the text through an XSLT that spits out aggregate data (or capta) about the contents/contexts of the periodical. My hands were occasionally ink-stained, and my eyes watered in the semi-public setting of UVic’s Special Collections when I read the serial conclusion to Tess of the D’Urbervilles. But what was most important for me was that I began to reconsider serial fiction in its material context. One of the questions the class explored was how the surrounding contents of the periodical affect a reading of the text being examined.

The work that I do with Nostromo currently separates the serial text from its periodical context. Cedric Watts and Xavier Brice have already explored this avenue. Sites like Conrad First even archive entire issues of T.P.’s Weekly in order to show the periodical context of Nostromo. My other ongoing assumption has been that considering the periodical context was separate from my work in versioning the text. After Dr. Surridge’s course, I’ve changed my mind. How can I afford not to consider the periodical context of Nostromo? How can the serial Nostromo be re-envisioned as a text that does not simply lack what is present in the volume edition? How can the serial be re-envisioned as a text that contains what the volume edition cannot because of the periodical context in which the serial publication is necessarily embedded?

As I’m thinking about new directions for my research, in part by moving from the 1904 Harper volume edition to the more historically and contextually distant 1918 Dent volume edition, I also have to return to T.P.’s Weekly. I have to merge digital versioning practices with analogue periodical studies practices. Needless to say, I am looking forward to this merger of critical practice.

Post by Katie Tanigawa, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured image for this post care of Conrad First’s Joseph Conrad Periodical Archive. 

As someone who still has much to learn about text encoding, this realization transformed the tagging process for me from the documentation of content to a critical assertion about specific content, in particular the nature of epithets, in two editions of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. Beginning with the questions “what are people called and how does this vary from edition to edition?” I immediately set to work tagging the text using, what seemed to me at the time, the obvious element: persName.

One of the problems I ran into while tagging names in the text was determining what constituted a person name. When I began coding, I used the persName tag. Because tags have semantic meaning, I initially felt constrained by the limits of the tag as opposed to the scope of my research interests. The TEI guidelines defines the persName as a tag that “contains a proper noun or proper-noun phrase referring to a person, possibly including any or all of the person’s forenames, surnames, honorifics, added names, etc” (TEI, PersName). This definition worked for epithets such as Nostromo, Captain Mitchell, and even Señor. The persName tag could not cover epithets such as “the man” for Nostromo or “the old Garibaldino” for Giorgio Viola. The tag also seemed questionable when including possessives in the epithets such as his capataz and his men and adjectives such as magnificent capataz and old seaman. The frequency with which the characters are referred to in ways that extend beyond the scope of the persName tag meant that the information captured by the persName tag would not be sufficient in an analysis of character epithets.

One of the most interesting problems that the persName tag posed arose when the text pointed to a character using a racial epithet as opposed to a proper name. At least two cases arose that flagged one problematic use of the persName tag:  Hirsch, who is referred to by Sotillo as the “Jew,” among other epithets, and the men on the lancha who the narrator refers to as the “four negroes.” Neither the “Jew” nor the “negroes” are names, and to tag them as such seemed to replicate the text’s move to essentialize the characters’ identities as an editorial/markup practice. However, if I avoided tagging these epithets, the ography would show no traces of the characters’ presence in the instances they were referred to through such terms. It would also mean ignoring the important uses of referents that speak to the reduction of individuals to their racially marginalized statuses by a character asserting his power over his detractors (Sotillo) and the narrator.

As a result of this complication among others, persName  was replaced with the “rs,” or referencing string. The TEI defines a referencing string as “a phrase which refers to some person, place, object, etc.” (TEI, Referencing String, 3.5.1). The broad definition of the referencing string allowed me to include any type of reference to a character in the ography, thereby 1) reducing the chances that characters would be excluded from the data and 2) avoiding the repetition of some of the novel’s essentializing gestures. These problems, however, highlight the need for continued reflection on my own tagging practices. How does this new way of tagging change the nature of my research? What does this new method suggest about my critical approach to the text? And how do markup practices engage histories of racism and oppression?

Post by Katie Tanigawa, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured images for this post care of Google Images, at images.google.ca; and the Joseph Conrad Society of America, at cenacle.com.au.

On Thursday, 10 January, from 12 until 1 p.m., the University of Victoria’s own HASTAC Scholars (a group of graduate students in the humanities working on the digital humanities and affiliated with HASTAC) will be delivering a panel presentation on their research and their experiences as graduate students working in the digital humanities. Details are below. Please share this announcement with anyone who might be interested in attending.

HASTAC Scholars Panel

Thursday, January 10th, 12 – 1 p.m. | Clearihue C109

The University of Victoria’s own graduate student HASTAC Scholars will deliver several short presentations about their research and their experiences as graduate students working in the digital humanities. Featuring Trish Baer, Alex Christie (@axchristie), Cameron Butt (@CamButt), Daniel Powell (@djp2025), and Jana Millar Usiskin (@Jana_Mu), the panel will be organized as a Pecha Kucha style event. The panel will be moderated by Jentery Sayers (Assistant Professor at UVic, Director of the Maker Lab, and current Member of HASTAC’s Steering Committee, @jenterysayers). Conversation and questions will follow. Bring your lunch and join us to discuss digital technologies and research in our community! This 2012-13 Brown Bag Speaker Series is facilitated by Aaron Mauro.

Post by Katie Tanigawa, attached to the HASTAC project, with the news tag. Featured images for this post care of Twitter.

Nostromo arose as a prime text to work with because of the detailed but progressive changes in names, places, and speech, and the quantitatively substantial additions and omissions between the texts (including a 20,000 word addition that appears at the end of the Harper’s edition of the text). Cedric Watts and Xavier Brice write extensively about these changes between Nostromo editions. The project will build upon the scholarship of Watts and Brice with the aim of revealing relationships with each text and between both texts hitherto difficult to record and analyse without the use of versioning and visualization tools.

Below is an image, generated by inputting the TEI-marked-up text into the Mandala Browser, a visualization tool that utilizes algorithms to determine relationships within both plain text documents and TEI encoded texts. What the Mandala Browser does that standalone markup does not is show the relationships between the marked-up content in a meaningful and easy-to-view manner. The example below is a visualization that processes the following data from the markup of Part III of the Harper edition: the number of instances wherein Emilia Gould, Charles Gould, and Nostromo are mentioned in the same paragraph as the San Tomé mine. By visualizing the relationships between characters and places, questions such as whether there is a progressive difference in Nostromo’s, Charles’, and Emilia’s relations to the San Tomé mine (across the two editions) can be explored much more readily than without these tools.

Another one of the of the aims of this project is to make my methods and interpretations as transparent as possible. This includes documenting my editorial decisions (e.g. what is tagged and why), my mistakes, and changes made throughout the project. I hope that through such transparency I am able to engage with digital humanities and textual studies communities in discussions about best practices for both versioning and computationally driven interpretations of texts. As the year progresses, I look forward to learning from the ever-expanding community of digital humanities scholars.

Post by Katie Tanigawa, attached to the ModVers project, with the versioning tag. Featured images for this post care of the Mandala browser, at mandala.humviz.org.

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