As frequently as participants (mis)communicate with one another, they also ask questions that go unanswered (e.g., “Could Penelope be Bloom’s dream?”), joke, and generally fail to achieve consensus, let alone a conclusion. However, I want to suggest that this ephemerality and lack of argumentative closure, far from being a hindrance, is in fact to YoU’s credit. All too often within Joycean studies, one begins to feel the infallible allure of “God-Joyce,” where all the encyclopedic weight of superfluity and the sheer mass of ephemera within Ulysses are lost or cast aside, so much chaff to the critical mill, in order to give Ulysses meaning. For me, rather than teach us something conclusive and novel about Ulysses, the value of YoU resides precisely in its failure to enclose any identifiable meaning, conclusion, or telos. The Twitter discussion is, as Gabler declares about “Wandering Rocks” and Ulysses as a whole, centrifugal. Precisely in “taking the novel of the everyday back to the everyday,” Twitter forcefully highlights the importance of (mis)communication, loose ends, superfluity, and humour for Ulysses, or as this apt arrangement of tweets suggest, if it feels a bit like loose ends, maybe that’s the point:

Such ephemerality, along with the synchronicity, complexity, and fragmentation that I discussed in my previous post, is something I am hoping to capture. One could rightly raise a concern here: it is all well and good to highlight ambiguity and synchronicity, but it is something else entirely to convey these elements in a legible, readable, and aesthetic product. Certainly, the final product will be necessarily constrained by my practical skills as much as, if not more than, my theoretical concerns. Not only are such concerns valid; they are only reinforced by my limited expertise in design. I have spent the last month attempting to address them by simultaneously outlining possible designs and scaling Adobe InDesign’s rather daunting learning curve. At first, I attempted to (unimaginatively) marry the two primary elements of YoU—namely, Twitter and Ulysses. However, replacing the Twitter bird with the snot-green cover of the Shakespeare edition proved garish (to say nothing of the copyright ugliness that could ensure), and the rest of my attempts at splicing looked like something concocted by Dr. Moreau. Since then, I have abandoned this crossbreeding, and instead took Joyce’s own schema’s for Ulysses as a starting point:

Taking Joyce’s organ-episode correlation, I appropriated illustrations from Gray’s Anatomy to function as the table of contents. (In the future, I will likely add page/chapter numbers for the print edition.) In the e-book version of YoU, each organ will hyperlink to the corresponding chapter, which will feature a line drawing from John Flaxman’s 1835 illustrated Odyssey, while the rest of the pages focusing on that episode will be framed by the same image:

By continually referring to Joyce’s own schemas, I am hoping that when I begin to populate the book with content, such a schema will provide enough of a framework that will maintain legibility while also amalgamating the breadth of YoU. I will be working towards striking this balance as I continue to familiarize myself with InDesign over the coming months.

Post by Stefan Krecsy, in to the YearOfUly category, with the versioning tag. Images for this post care of Stefan Krecsy and John Flaxman.

Book Nerds in a Lab: Making Things in the Humanities
Presented by the Department of English at the University of Victoria
Thursday, March 6th (3:30pm – 5:00pm), Hickman (HHB) 116

What does it mean to make things in the humanities? To conduct applied humanities research? To weld artistic practice with the study of literature and history? Join us to chat with over 15 student and faculty researchers about the collaborative projects they are building in UVic’s Maker Lab. This event will begin with a brief presentation by Stephen Ross (Director, Modernist Versions Project) and Jentery Sayers (Director, Maker Lab in the Humanities) on the role of making things in the humanities. We will then transition into two rounds of four concurrent demonstrations:

“Hello World! Building an LED Circuit” (with Nina Belojevic and Katie McQueston): Work with researchers from the Kits for Cultural History project to not only build a simple LED circuit but also learn more about the legacies of “wearable technologies.” During this demonstration, we’ll provide participants with the materials they need to make a simple circuit and explore wearables.

“Warping Historical Maps” (with Adèle Barclay, Alex Christie, and Katie Tanigawa): With researchers from the MVP and INKE teams, learn more about how historical maps can be digitally manipulated to express literary representations of early 20th-century cities (including Dublin and Paris). Also learn more about how 3D modelling software is being integrated into humanities research.

“Making Analog Audio” (with Laura Dosky, Jon Johnson, and Zaqir Virani): Ever wonder how sound was recorded before the emergence of digital technologies? With members of the Kits for Cultural History team, see how early magnetic recording and sound transduction worked by constructing a low-tech recording device using everyday materials.

“Remaking Ulysses with Twitter” (with Stefan Krecsy and Jentery Sayers): For scholars of literature and language, Twitter is increasingly becoming a research tool. During this demonstration, learn more about the MVP’s “Year of Ulysses” project, its use of Twitter to facilitate public discussions of the novel, and several ways to gather and express Twitter data.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the KitsForCulture, YearOfUly, and ZAxis categories, with the news tag. Poster for the event care of the University of Victoria.

However, as I’ve suggested above, it is simply not feasible to replicate the entirety of #YoU while simultaneously providing an accessible entry into #YoU as a whole. This tension between #YoU and its print representation necessitates significant editorial engagement on my part, and I’ve been struggling to formulate a framework that simultaneously justifies my editorial decisions while addressing my concerns about the representations of Twitter conversations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’ve turned to the good book of Ulysses to inform my methodology (as any Joycean worth their salt would). In short, I plan on editing and structuring the #YoU data according to the very same formal techniques that Joyce foregrounded within Ulysses. In my explicit use of such techniques, I seek to demonstrate the ongoing relevance of Joycean techniques in conceptualizing contemporary social media.

The “arranger” is the first Joycean technique I plan on appropriating in my collation of #YoU. David Hayman’s defines the “arranger” as “a figure or a presence that can be identified neither with the author nor with his narrators, but that exercises an increasing degree of overt control over increasingly challenging materials” and the “sum of the narrative process rather than a component of it” (Somer, “The Self-Reflexive Arranger,” 1994). I can’t help but feel that this loosely defines my position vis–à–vis the #YoU material. Now, no doubt one could insist in the fundamental difference between Joyce as arranger of his own writing and my function as editor (to say nothing of the skill of the respective arrangers), but I want to suggest that such strict distinction may not be appropriate. After all, more often than not Joyce’s own practice of composition seems indistinguishable from editing—not for nothing did Joyce claim he would be “quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description.” Furthermore, much like my own relationship to the #YoU information, Joyce tended to archive countless numbers of small excerpts from a number of sources, as his journal makes clear:

While I lack the space to explicate Joyce’s notebook as represented above, each highlight signifies a phrase, word, or passage that Joyce transferred from his notebook into his manuscript, while each colour accords to a different draft. Importantly, what is represented here is not a linear narrative, but fragments that Joyce wrote down for (possible) future use in Ulysses. As such, Joyce’s notebooks contained a sort of bolus of textual material that would be arranged into a unified narrative. In conceiving of myself as another “scissors and paste man,” and my editorial relationship with #YoU in the same way, it goes without saying I do not claim equality in either authorial or textual skill, only that I justify my editorial engagement on an aesthetic, Joycean level as well as a pragmatic one.

While the notion of the arranger provides a Joycean justification for my editorializing, it does not provide a structural framework for the #YoU publication. In attempting to conceive of such a structure, I found myself drawn to Joyce’s own schemas for Ulysses. Recognizing the necessity for such schemas to navigate the “enormous complexity of [his] monster-novel,” Joyce produced two such frameworks/skeleton keys—the earlier Lineta and the later Gilbert:

While such an episodic approach to the #YoU data may appear peculiar given the apparent chaos of the data visualization, arranging the #YoU by date clearly demonstrates the episodic nature of the conversation:

Each layer of density corresponds to a Twitter chat, which in turn examined or discussed a specific episode. Therefore, not only can #YoU be understood as thematically episodic; it demands to be schematized as temporally episodic as well. As such, the #YoU data can be made to correspond with Joyce’s own schemas—down to such “design” concerns as colour and form—a coincidence that I seek to exploit in constraining the “enormous complexity” of #YoU.

Finally, in addressing the difficulty of “porting” a Twitter conversation to print medium, I want to suggest Ulysses—and the “Wandering Rocks” episode in particular—can be of considerable help. As an episode concerned with representing simultaneous occurrences throughout Dublin, Joyce conceived this episode as a formal labyrinth and utilized a technique centred around repetition to express the synchronicity of Dublin. @CFoster (Chris Forster), one of the participants #YoU, created a valuable outline of the simultaneity represented within “Wandering Rocks” on his blog:

And like Forster, I plan on applying Joyce’s techniques to the print edition of #YoU in an attempt to represent Twitter’s hairball complexity.

By applying the Joycean notion of the arranger, schemas, and labyrinthian simultaneity, I hope to demonstrate the continued relevance of Ulysses to contemporary social networks. While I look forward to testing the applicability of these techniques, such an approach inverts my original intention to interrogate the ways which contemporary social media help us understand Ulysses. Instead, it gestures towards the way Ulysses helps us understand, or at least conceptualize, contemporary social media.

Post by Stefan Krecsy, in the YearOfUly category, with the versioning tag. Twitter visualization produced using TAGS. Images for this post care of Stefan Krecsy, Philip Maltman, The Rowley Gallery, Chris Forster, and the collection of Harriet Shaw Weaver (1922). See also, James Joyce, Selected Letters. Ed. Richard Ellman. London: Faber and Faber, 1975.

Research Leads, Contributors, Support, and Partnerships

The research leads for this project were Stefan Krecsy, Stephen Ross, and Jentery Sayers. Organized largely by the Modernist Versions Project (MVP) and its director, Stephen Ross, Year of Ulysses (YoU) involved well over fifty contributors, all of whom are listed on the MVP’s website, which was originally designed by Clea Cosmann with support from the MLab. During the initiative, the MLab maintained and visualized data gathered from YoU-related communications, and it provided the MVP with basic infrastructure support. In and beyond the MLab, Amanda Hansen facilitated all lectures, Twitter chats, communications, and research related to the initiative. YoU would not have been possible without support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the University of Victoria’s Work Study Program, and the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Library.

Project Status

Year of Ulysses (YoU) was completed in August 2014. It began in June 2012, and regular activities continued through June 2013, after which Stefan Krecsy aggregated materials emerging from the initiative, contextualized them, interpreted them, and bundled them together—in a single publication—for public use and remixing.

Screen grab of the archive of tweets published during the #yearofulysses. Image care of the MLab.

Post by Stephen Ross and Jentery Sayers, attached to the YearOfUly project, with the projects and versioning tags. Featured image for this post from mvp.uvic.ca, care of the Modernist Versions Project. (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)