Applying existing scholarship in media studies to literary criticism, today I will spend a few minutes discussing—to borrow from Bolter and Grusin—the remediation of fiction from 2D to 3D. To do so, I’ll draw examples from “z-axis” research conducted by the INKE-MVP research team at the University of Victoria, where a group of scholars, including Adèle Barclay, Alex Christie, Stephen Ross, Katie Tanigawa, and me, have warped historical maps with georeferenced word counts drawn from 20th-century novels, such as Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) and Jean Rhys’s Quartet (1928) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939).

To make the maps, we began with digitized novels as well as digitized maps—of Paris, for example—from their historical period. The novels were then parsed into geographic zones, based on urban areas prominent in their narratives. Of note, these zones were not identical in size. We did not, for instance, use a grid system. Instead, the organization of geographic space was based on its expression in the novels. With these zones operating collectively as a data model, Adèle, Katie, and Alex then encoded electronic versions of the novels with geographic data, informed in part by how the Map of Early Modern London—developed by our colleague, Janelle Jenstad, and her team at UVic—is encoded. Quite important here is the fact that our placement of geotags in the electronic text was ultimately an editorial decision. Rather than applying a fixed rule to the encoding process—say, systematically tagging each line or each sentence throughout a given novel—we decided to structure a text based on where in geographic space the narrative appeared to be taking place. As one may imagine, this was no easy task, and we frequently discussed the subjective character of this procedural interpretation, premised such as it was on literary (as opposed to literal) geography. Early on, we realized that we couldn’t always argue for the determinacy of our method, either. The results often depended quite heavily on who was doing the encoding when. At the same time, this honesty about encoding (as an editorial practice) was refreshing. It allowed us to unpack the different interpretations that emerged over time.

Once encoded, word counts for each geotag were gathered and used to alter the historical maps in a fashion resonating with McGann and Samuels’s deformance. Using a fixed ratio, this quantitative data was then applied to a 3D deformance technique in the digital sculpting software, Mudbox, where the maps were manipulated by hand. Here’s an example result, based on a geocoded version of Barnes’s Nightwood.

Visually, these maps put forth a claim that McGann and Samuels make in “Deformance and Interpretation,” namely that, through deformance, there is a “dramatic exposure of subjectivity as a live and highly informative option of interpretive commentary, if not indeed one of its essential features.” Based on our experiences thus far, audiences are more likely to wonder at the maps—at this exposure, at this subjectivity—instead of mobilizing them as instruments or guides for literary interpretation.

One might argue that the maps’ aesthetic is rather modernist, too. Like Dada, it resists utility and legibility, foregrounding noise or variation in a text. Against isomorphism, it reacts almost dogmatically to any rationalist treatment of space or language as objective and immediate. Comparable to numerous Futurisms, the maps also freeze social relations, expressing dynamics artificially. Here, Giacomo Balla’s “Plastic Construction of Noise and Speed” may be a precedent. In the z-axis maps, space is biased, value-laden, and even material. Warped, it is where—as Anthony Vidler suggests of art, architecture, and anxiety in modern culture—psychology and society collectively permeate form. The effect is a visualization that does not correspond neatly with any actual place, with any longitudinal or latitudinal coordinate.

This resonance with modernist aesthetics was in fact one of the aims of the z-axis project. That is, as a research team, we were interested in the degree to which digital or computational methods could rehearse creative procedures that were historically appropriate. In short, we wanted to use modernist aesthetics to interpret modernist aesthetics and, by extension, we speculated about whether, say, Victorian or Early Modern articulations of literary geography with computers may very well differ from ours, operating under distinct sets of assumptions about how space was constructed during specific moments in time. In this sense, making as method—or making the city in the work—was about giving historical texture to digital humanities methods and acknowledging that different texts call for different computational approaches, which may not be persuasive if applied uniformly across literary space and time.

However, making as method was not without its complications. First, the encoding process—again, using tags to mark geographic space in the text—often risked being too mechanistic, too literal a treatment of how literary geography actually operates. What’s more, the z-axis method could not consistently account for spaces off the maps at hand. These spaces include not only imaginary spaces but also peripheral urban areas or rural landscapes. They are the stuff of miscellaneous data that’s either excluded from graphical expression or assimilated too neatly into it. Consequently, while the encoding procedure afforded a focused surface reading, it did not lend itself well to ambivalence. And while the maps themselves are curious and quite evocative, we frequently wondered about the degree to which they could be used—if they should be used—by others for analytic purposes. Taken together, these points lead me to two important questions about making as method: first, to what degree should the scholarly output be instrumental? Where should it fall on the spectrum of, say, art and tool? From my experiences thus far, the z-axis project is curious in this regard because its data is computationally tractable while the 3D expression is not. Of course, this does not imply that neither is constructed. To be clear, both the data and its expression are quite cooked.

My second question about making as method is: What are the interpretive risks of re-enacting aesthetics of the past, no matter how aware or distanced we are from them? I raise this question because, even though the z-axis project was invested in highlighting the biases of authorial constructions as well as the subjective, affective, and embodied experiences of geographical space, the 3D visualization’s aesthetic corresponds with certain forms of the modernist avant-garde—namely Futurism—that make me (at least) rather nervous or apprehensive. That is, an investment in interpreting modernism through what we might call modernist computational methods made me feel too close to what Benjamin compellingly identified as aestheticizing politics. True, the z-axis research team can use the maps to demonstrate how, in Barnes’s 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. Or we can use to them to suggest that, while Barnes’s Paris is social and shared, Jean Rhys’s Paris in Quartet is a marginal Paris, a fragmentary and fugitive experience. However, these interpretations may not always be legible to others in the form of geotags, quantitative data, or 3D expressions. And the aesthetics of the visualizations may ultimately trump all the critical work that goes into them.

All of which suggests a wonderful irony about this particular experience: when using making as a method to actually construct the city in the work, I am left wanting to share my interpretations in the form of an essay, not data or a visualization. Perhaps this conclusion says more about my own biases and training than anything else. Still, with those of you in the room today I would like to discuss these implications of making as method, including the implications of humanities practitioners circulating non-textual objects for interpretation and even use. To what degree are non-textual objects a persuasive, standalone form of scholarly communication for literary studies? To what degree, and with what effects, are these objects enveloped by whiz-bang and wonder? And finally, how do we argue for immersion, rehearsal, or—if you will—“remaking” as a method resonate with (but not hostile to) critical awareness and reflexivity about our own procedures and positions?

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the ZAxis project, with the fabrication tag. Featured image for this post care of the INKE-MVP team and Djuna Barnes.

3. Critical DH (Digital Humanities) Interventions in Scholarly Communications and Publishing

Thursday, 8 January, 8:30–11:30 a.m., 220, VCC West
A special session
Presiding: Raymond G. Siemens, Univ. of Victoria
Speakers: Juan Pablo Alperin, Simon Fraser Univ.; Alyssa Arbuckle, Univ. of Victoria; Nina Belojevic, Univ. of Victoria; Matthew Hiebert, Univ. of Victoria; Shaun MacPherson, Univ. of Victoria; Alec Smecher, Simon Fraser Univ.

This workshop considers innovative ways DH engages scholarly communication and publishing. Contents (theoretical and hands-on): social knowledge construction and critical making; digital cooperatives and scholarly editions; user interface and experience; peer-review personas; Scalar; Git and GitHub; Open Monograph Press; social academic community development. Preregistration required.

490. Making Writing in Third Spaces

Saturday, 10 January, 10:15–11:30 a.m., 112, VCC West
Program arranged by the Division on the Teaching of Writing
Presiding: Bonnie Lenore Kyburz, Lewis Univ.
1. “Fairey’s ‘Obama’: Data Visualization for Transformative Rhetorical Studies,” Laurie Gries, Univ. of Florida
2. “Making Documentary as Multimodal Research Method,” Brian Harmon, Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia; Byron Hawk, Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia
3. “Transduction Literacies,” Jentery Sayers, Univ. of Victoria

671. Making as Method

Sunday, 11 January, 8:30–9:45 a.m., 210, VCC West
Program arranged by the Division on Methods of Literary Research
Presiding: Lauren Klein, Georgia Inst. of Tech.
1. “Warped Modernisms: Making the City in the Work,” Jentery Sayers, Univ. of Victoria
2. “Printing Fictions: Notes toward a Method,” Kari M. Kraus, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
3. “Bots Are Machines for Words,” Mark Sample, Davidson Coll.

Below are the abstracts for this session. They were originally published on Mark’s website. Thanks, Mark!

“Warped Modernisms: Making the City in the Work”
Jentery Sayers (speaking), Alexander Christie, Stephen Ross, Kathryn Tanigawa, Adèle Barclay, and the INKE-MVP Research Team

Applying existing scholarship in film and game studies to literary criticism, this talk explores the remediation (Bolter and Grusin 1999) of modernist fiction from 2D to 3D. It draws examples from “z-axis” research conducted by the INKE-MVP research team at the University of Victoria, where a group of scholars is warping historical maps with georeferenced word counts drawn from 20th-century novels, such as James Baldwin’s Another Country (1962), Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), and Jean Rhys’s Quartet (1928) and Good Morning, Midnight (1939). Presented as 3D models, these warped maps can be interpreted as rehearsals of the modernist avant-garde. Against isomorphism, they react almost dogmatically to any rationalist treatment of space as objective, immediate, or stable by expressing the deeply subjective, cartographic imaginations of novels. Here, space is biased, value-laden, and even material. Warped, it is where psychology and society permeate form (Vidler 2000). But another interpretation of the maps renders them neither subjective nor objective, neither street level nor bird’s eye. Instead, they are views from nowhere, emerging through post-cinematic aesthetics whereby all space is treated digitally, quantification becomes a compositional (not a representational) technique, and spatial continuity is eclipsed by morphing, layering, compression, and dilation (Deleuze 1986; Shaviro 2010). Put differently, post-cinematic vision flattens cities, novels, and screens into actionable spaces (Galloway 2006). While these two interpretations read against the grain of standardized vision, the avant-garde rejection of rational space entails a humanist dialectic (subjective-objective, real-imaginary), not to mention an investment in autonomous literature, where any visualization of a novel is relegated to secondary status, a mere re-presentation of the original. Meanwhile, post-cinematic aesthetics imply a posthumanist blending of human and machine vision, along with a radical intermediation of cultural forms that complicates the primacy of originals. With such a distinction in mind, this talk concludes with two key points. First, it suggests that both interpretations at hand involve making as method, which, for better or worse, may be understood broadly as experimental media studies doing literary studies: arguing about the literary city through its actual production (McPherson 2009). Second, the talk details how the z-axis approach is at once appealing and limited, looking specifically at its reduction of scholarly artifacts to a base layer of digital encoding (Manovich 2001), its surface readings of literary geography (Markus and Best 2009), its articulation of elliptical visualizations, and its investment in fabricating 3D maps for tactile apprehension. (Special thanks to Arthur Hain for giving the z-axis project its name.)

“Printing Fictions: Notes Toward a Method”
Kari Kraus, University of Maryland

This talk posits that the mocking up and fabrication of notional objects in fictional narratives can potentially enrich and expand our literary interpretations. Using Philip K. Dick’s “Pay for the Printer” (1956) as a test case, I explore how 3D models, prints, and diagrams of the defective objects described in the story’s post-apocalyptic world open up new avenues of inquiry. Offering a bleak foreshadowing of 3D printing technologies, “Pay for the Printer” is stocked with melted, “puddinged,” and otherwise deformed watches, mugs, buildings, vehicles, and other artifacts. As such, it provides an object lesson in what Steven Jackson calls broken world thinking. I’ll draw on research I recently conducted at UMD investigating how individuals identify the constituent parts of objects—including broken, obsolete, and semantically ambiguous objects—to distill a set of design principles and interpretive frameworks for approaching Dick’s work. The talk will close with a set of questions this type of exercise opens up when applied to literature more broadly.

“Bots are Machines for Words”
Mark Sample, Davidson College

William Carlos Williams famously defined a poem as a “machine made out of words.” In this talk I propose that bots—small autonomous programs that generate text, images, or data—are similarly machines made out of words and that these machines can provide new insights into literature and culture. Operating at the intersection of what Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels call “deformance” and what Nick Montfort calls “exploratory programming,” bots revitalize texts even as they break them. After examining several computer-generated variations of Modernist poems as case studies, I shift towards a mode of humanistic inquiry that Steven Jackson calls “broken world thinking.” I show how one bot in particular thematizes breakdown, maintenance, and disrepair—all states of being we must necessarily grapple with if we truly want to understand the way the world works, and the way it doesn’t.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace and ZAxis projects, with the news tag. Featured image for this post care of the Modern Language Association.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

On Tuesday, 10th September, from 12 until 1 p.m. (David Strong Building C112), Jentery Sayers (Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Maker Lab at the University of Victoria) will be presenting a talk entitled, “Stitching Together Speculations along the Z-Axis of Algorithmic Culture.” Details are below. Please share this announcement with anyone who might be interested in attending.

“Stitching Together Speculations along the Z-Axis of Algorithmic Culture” | Tuesday, September 10th | 12-1 p.m.
Room C112, David Strong Building | University of Victoria

Abstract: Algorithms routinely make decisions for people with access to them, including decisions about how texts, bodies, and environments should be read. With these routine and often ignored decisions in mind, this talk unpacks how computer vision can be approached critically by scholars of materiality and culture, with an emphasis on “z-axis” methods, which privilege speculation, conjecture, and subjectivity through 3D modelling and prototyping techniques.

Jentery Sayers is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria.

Bring your lunch and join us to discuss digital technologies and research in our community! The ETCL’s Brown Bag Speaker Series is organized and facilitated by Aaron Mauro.

Post by Laura Dosky, attached to the ZAxis project, with the news tag. Image and poster care of Aaron Mauro.

As the poster suggests, the Z-Axis initiative underscores the relevance of subjective encounters with data, with an emphasis on 3D modeling, prototyping, and desktop fabrication techniques. If, as humanities practitioners, we want to express our texts, media, and other cultural artifacts as data, then how are they felt? How are they experienced? What gives them texture? How are they welded or connected to embodied practices like reading and interpretation? Building upon research by Johanna Drucker, Kari Kraus, Mei-Po Kwan, Jerome McGann, Lev Manovich, Franco Moretti, Bethany Nowviskie, Stephen Ramsay, and Lisa Samuels (among others), the project explores speculative articulations of data with context, pushing methods like cultural analytics, programmatic ruination, and algorithmic criticism along the z-axis of data expression—through that third “variable” we in the humanities often use to stress the bodies, perspectives, and technologies that frame or situate otherwise abstract understandings of time and space.

To be sure, the Z-Axis initiative falls quite clearly on the “interpretive” end of the digital humanities spectrum. In other words, the maps, models, and 3D fabrications we are proposing will not—even superficially—present themselves as naturalized documentations or isomorphic replicas of actuality. They are not re-presentations or re-sources. Instead, they inject lived social reality into the workflows of data expression in order to assert the various ways in which the stuff of history is culturally embedded. For example, our initial prototype asks how readers might (consciously or unknowingly) experience Joyce’s Ulysses as a profoundly geospatial text. Which parts of Dublin does Joyce privilege over others? What are the geospatial biases of the novel? If readers interpret the novel as a map of Dublin, then what impressions does it leave? These questions are not particularly interested in the geospatial accuracy of Ulysses or its placed-based references. Instead, they are curious about how Ulysses transduces actual Dublin into fictitious Dublin, under what assumptions, and to what effects. You might say the Z-Axis project blends cartographic imaginations with cinematic impulses, or views from above with views on the ground. And this blend is anchored in the examination of how people (are at least intended to) interface with things like novels, maps, screens, and 3D prototypes.

Wondering how exactly the Ulysses prototype was made? Check out “Workflow for the 3D Map,” published by Maker Lab and MVP team member, Katie Tanigawa. As Katie acknowledges on her site and elsewhere, the workflow needs to be revised and improved through some additional research. However, at this juncture I will highlight how it brings print materials from the University of Victoria’s Special Collections into conversation with emerging digital methods, to then output an argument (i.e., a map) off the screen, in 3D. Not only does the workflow involve digitizing maps and encoding electronic versions of Ulysses with geospatial tags. It also systematically displaces and warps those maps using 3D sculpting software. Once they are watertight models, these maps can be printed using desktop fabrication software and hardware. Above, the poster only gives an elliptical sense of what a printed map would look like, by providing multiple bird’s eye views (in the “Z-Axis Methods” and “Initial Prototype” sections) and one worm’s eye view in the footer. Importantly, these images are born-digital; they are not photographs of an actual, printed prototype. Still, through the use of the z-axis (to express reading-time, for instance), the combination of these views would, in practice, foster attention to both pattern and texture. Yes, we still have some work to do. Nevertheless, we believe the prototype prompts a number of worthwhile research trajectories, especially where critical making meets modernist studies.

At this early stage in the project, we are wrangling with a number of important and difficult questions, including: How do the affordances of screen-based visualizations differ from printed models, and with what implications for literary and cultural criticism? Through what other forms or media (e.g., timelines) might z-axis methods be mobilized? Echoing Ramsay and Rockwell, how can these built media act as forms of scholarship? As standalones without essays that explain or rationalize them? How can z-axis methods be developed for comparative approaches to “versions” of modernism? To, say, the geospatial tendencies of modernist novels about either particular places (e.g., London, Paris, or New York) or travel/migration (e.g., Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy)? When novels are still covered by copyright, how can data visualization and desktop fabrication spark “non-consumptive” interpretations (where maps, and not primary texts, are released online by research groups like the MVP)? How can fields like modernist studies actively generate new data about or from literary history (e.g., geodata related to reading-time)? And finally, how does data related to word count correspond with reading experience? When georeferencing a novel, what inferences (if any) can be drawn about the time spent attending to “difficult” text (and parts of a text)? What’s lost at scale, especially when we compare novels or chapters? In short, is word count a reliable indicator of time spent reading, or at least a persuasive way of getting at how novels are experienced over time?

During 2013-14, we’ll publish our responses here. For now,  I want to thank everyone who has already contributed to the Z-Axis initiative: Alex Christie and Katie Tanigawa (two of our primary researchers), Stephen Ross (director of the MVP), Arthur Hain (for initially framing the research through the z-axis concept), and English 507 (who provided feedback during the Spring 2013 semester). Also, thanks to Nina Belojevic, Alex Christie, and Jon Johnson for working with me to make the “Humanities Fall on the Z-Axis” poster for CSDH/SCHN 2013.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the ModVers and ZAxis projects, with the fabrication and versioning tags. Featured image for this post care of Nina Belojevic, Jon Johnson, and Jentery Sayers.