Kat Piecing Together Our Guide (photo by Maasa Lebus)

Research Leads, Contributors, and Support

Since August 2016, the following researchers have contributed to An Illustrated Guide to Prototyping the Past: Teddie Brock, Tiffany Chan, Katherine Goertz, Maasa Lebus, Evan Locke, Danielle Morgan, and Jentery Sayers, based on research by Nina Belojevic, Nicole Clouston, Laura Dosky, Devon Elliott, Jonathan O. Johnson, Shaun Macpherson, Kaitlynn McQueston, Victoria Murawski, William J. Turkel, and Zaqir Virani. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund supported this research.

Early Sketch for the Guide (by Danielle)

Project Status

This project is ongoing, and completion is expected in 2017. An Illustrated Guide to Prototyping the Past will be available in print and also electronically (open access). To follow the project as it progresses, see the stream of posts below.

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication, physcomp, and projects tags. Featured image for this post, of Kat, Tiffany, Teddie, and Jentery working on Chapter 1 of our Illustrated Guide, also by Danielle.

In 2013, Devon, Jentery, and Bill’s class experimented with different microcontrollers, and they collaboratively built a 3D printer. In 2014, Devon, Jentery, and Bill worked with students to emulate early videogames in original arcade cabinets, build another printer, and experiment with MaxMSP for interactive exhibits. In 2015, Nina, Shaun, Devon, and Jentery’s class built their own “metaphors in a box” using laser cut materials and microcontrollers. They also explored 3D modelling with SketchUp and photo-stitching with Agisoft Photoscan. (The 2015 syllabus is available on GitHub.) Finally, in 2016, Tiffany, Danielle, Jentery, and I (Kat) conducted workshops on Arduino, Agisoft Photoscan, 3D structured-light scanning, 123D Design, and 123D Make. Near the end of the week, students explored how they could use these tools to develop their own projects. (The 2016 syllabus is available on Github.)

DHSI student, Padmini Ray Murray, working on #box, a light-emitting heart corresponding with Twitter hashtags

Research Leads, Contributors, and Support

Since 2013, the following researchers have contributed to the Physical Computing and Fabrication course at DHSI: Nina Belojevic, Tiffany Chan, Devon Elliott, Katherine Goertz, Shaun Macpherson, Danielle Morgan, Jentery Sayers, and Bill Turkel. The course was first taught by Devon and Bill in 2012. The Digital Humanities Summer Institute, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund supported this research.

A 3D printer built by students during DHSI 2013

Project Status

This project was completed in June 2016. The most recent version of our syllabus is available for download and reuse.

Post by Katherine Goertz, attached to the Makerspace project, with the fabrication, physcomp, and projects tags. Featured image of Seamus and me scanning a spacecraft care of Danielle Morgan.

The “Optophone” (ca. 1921): a reading device for the blind. Credit: Matthew Rubery, Heather Tilley, Wellcome Library, London, and Wellcome Images.

Today, optophones are interpreted as precursors to optical character recognition (OCR), or the automated conversion of images into machine-readable text (e.g., Google uses OCR to make large amounts of digitized print material searchable on the web). Many origin stories about the optophone stress its invention without attending to key figures and contributions involved in using, maintaining, and developing the reading optophone over time.

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

For example, Mary Jameson was one of the optophone’s earliest and longstanding users and demonstrators. But as Victoria, Jentery, and I have argued elsewhere, existing descriptions of Jameson’s work diminish her contributions to the reading optophone’s development. Prototyping the optophone highlights Jameson’s unrecognized labour and that of other optophone users in ways that archival materials, current scholarship, and popular accounts do not. For more on the prototyping process and its implications, see my talks at HASTAC 2016 and Digital Humanities 2016. We have also created a repository for the Reading Optophone Kit.

Research Leads, Contributors, and Support

Since 2015, the following researchers have contributed to the Reading Optophone Kit: Tiffany Chan, Katherine Goertz, Evan Locke, Danielle Morgan, Victoria Murawski, and Jentery Sayers. Many thanks to Robert Baker (Blind Veterans UK), Mara Mills (NYU), and Matthew Rubery (Queen Mary University London) for their support and feedback. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund have supported this research.

Tracing letters and punctuation marks to create a Python script for the Reading Optophone Kit

Project Status

This project is ongoing, with plans for completion and exhibition in 2017. For more on the project as it develops, see the stream of posts below. You may also visit our reading optophone repository, which contains code and other associated files.

Post by Tiffany Chan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the projects, fabrication, and physcomp tags.

Iron filings reveal impressions of sound on piano wire (image by Danielle Morgan)

Research Leads, Contributors, and Support

Since 2013, the following researchers have contributed to the Early Wire Recording Kit: Teddie Brock, Tiffany Chan, Laura Dosky, Katherine Goertz, Danielle Morgan, Victoria Murawski, Jentery Sayers, Zaqir Virani, and William J. Turkel. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund, and the University of Michigan Press supported this research.

“Jacob: Recording on Wire” exhibit at UVic’s Audain Gallery (image by Danielle Morgan)

Project Status

This project was completed in June 2016 with an exhibit, “Jacob: Recording on Wire,” at UVic’s Audain Gallery, based on existing research published in American Literature. The lab also published a public repository containing files related to the experiment. To learn more about the kit, see the stream of posts below. Please do not hesitate to either comment on a post or email maker@uvic.ca with feedback.

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication, exhibits, physcomp, and projects tags. Featured image for this post, of Katherine Goertz with the lab’s recording trolley and mechanism, care of Danielle Morgan.

Model and Manufacture of the Electro-Mobile Skull Stick Pin (image care of Nina Belojevic, Shaun Macpherson, and Danielle Morgan)

Research Leads, Contributors, and Support

Since 2013, the following researchers have contributed to the Early Wearables Kit: Nina Belojevic, Tiffany Chan, Nicole Clouston, Devon Elliott, Katherine Goertz, Shaun Macpherson, Kaitlynn McQueston, Danielle Morgan, Victoria Murawski, Jentery Sayers, and William J. Turkel. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, and the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund supported this research.

The Kit Exhibited at Rutgers (image care of Danielle Morgan)

Project Status

This project was completed in October 2015 and exhibited at Rutgers University, with publications in Hyperrhiz and Visible Language and a CBC Radio interview that same year. The lab also created a public repository containing all files related to the kit. To learn more about the kit, see the stream of posts below. Please do not hesitate to either comment on a post or email maker@uvic.ca with feedback.

Post by Katherine Goertz, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication and projects tags.

Photograph of the Early Wearables Kit, care of Danielle Morgan

Research Leads, Contributors, Support, and Partnerships

Kits for Cultural History is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Jentery Sayers and William J. Turkel are the project’s principal investigators. With Sayers and Turkel, Nina Belojevic, Nicole Clouston, Shaun Macpherson, and Katie McQueston, together with Teddie Brock, Tiffany Chan, Alex Christie, Laura Dosky, Devon Elliott, Katherine Goertz, Jon Johnson, Danielle Morgan, Victoria Murawski, and Zaqir Virani, have contributed to the project. The research is being conducted in the MLab in partnership with the Lab for Humanistic Fabrication at Western University. The researchers are based in departments of English, history, and visual arts, as well as the Cultural, Social, and Political Thought program at UVic.

Project Status

This project is ongoing, with substantial support through at least April 2017. During the 2013-14 academic year, early prototypes were developed for three different kits: an early wearables kit (on late 19th-century electric jewellery by Gustave Trouvé), an early video games kit (on William Higinbotham’s Tennis for Two), and an early wire recorder kit. During 2014-15, the team expanded development of the early wearables kit, producing replicas of Trouvé’s electric jewellery, modelling and manufacturing cases for the kit, gathering contextual materials, and articulating the kit’s scholarly apparatus. In 2015-16, the team completed and exhibited its early magnetic recording kit and also began developing its early optophonics kit. By 2018, the MLab will circulate a number of these open-source kits, which will be archived, peer-reviewed, and distributed online and by post. Several publications, including “Prototyping the Past” (Visible Language), “Kits for Cultural History, or Fluxkits for Scholarly Communication” (Hyperrhiz),  and “Why Fabricate?” (SRC), have already emerged from the project.

To stay in the loop with the Kits for Cultural History, follow the stream of posts below. We do our best to regularly publish logs of our work, and we are currently presenting this research at universities and conferences. Please do not hesitate to either comment on a log or email maker@uvic.ca with suggestions.

Post by Nina Belojevic, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the projects tag. Images in this post care of Nina Belojevic, Shaun Macpherson, and Jentery Sayers. (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)

As hoped, proposals were submitted from across the world and from a wide array of disciplines. After peer review, seven articles were accepted for publication. Each of these articles was then edited by an MLab researcher, with Alex Christie, Jana Millar Usiskin, Jentery, and Katie Tanigawa ultimately co-authoring the issue’s introduction. Among the published articles was Nina Belojevic’s essay, “Circuit Bending Videogame Consoles as a Form of Applied Media Studies.” In September 2014, Nina became one of the MLab’s assistant directors.

A screengrab from Nina’s NANO publication (image courtesy of NANO)

Research Leads, Contributors, and Support

The guest editors for the issue were MLab members, Adèle Barclay, Alex Christie, Jentery Sayers, Jana Millar Usiskin, and Katie Tanigawa, with feedback from Stephen Ross. NANO founding editor, Sean Scanlan, along with Assistant Editors, Rebecca Devers and Ruth Garcia, also contributed to the issue. Alex, Jana, Jentery, and Katie wrote the introduction to the issue. Other contributors to the issue were Rachel Arteaga, Karl Baumann, Benjamin Stokes, François Bar, Ben Caldwell, Nina Belojevic, Sam Byrd, Jimmy Ghaphery, Elise Chenier, Michelle Habell-Pallán, Sonnet Retman, Angelica Macklin, and Elizabeth Alice Honig. NANO is supported by the New York City College of Technology.

Project Status

This project was officially completed in August 2014. The NANO issue was published in July 2014, complete with an introduction co-written by the guest editorial team. In an announcement of the issue’s publication, writers for CUNY (which supports NANO) called Nina’s essay a “highlight” of the issue, noting that she “hacks into Nintendo Entertainment Systems to try to reconfigure play potential.”

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the Makerspace project, with the projects tag. Feature image for this post care of NANO. (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)

Topics for the workshops include problem-based modelling, speaking for/with community partners, building and sharing process narratives, producing interoperable data and documentation, social justice action planning, and project management. Importantly, the construction and delivery of the workshops relies on a broad range of expertise and a wide array of investments that allow the inter-professional series to draw from generative differences across perspectives and practices.

Research Leads, Contributors, Support, and Partnerships

“Building Public Humanities” was organized by Nina Belojevic and Jentery Sayers, both of whom are also the project’s research leads, with contributions from Miriam Bartha (UW Simpson Center), Jon Johnson (UVic English), Lynne Siemens (UVic School of Public Administration), and Katie Tanigawa (UVic English). It was made possible by support from the ETCL, with events and outreach facilitated by the MLab.

Project Status

This project began in 2013-14 and continued through 2014-15. During 2013-14, several “Building Public Humanities” workshops took place on the UVic campus, and information about each was published here at maker.uvic.ca. In 2014, the MLab published “Digital Humanities, Public Humanities,” a special issue of NANO. Additional workshops occurred during the 2014-15 academic year. See details below, and please do not hesitate to either comment on a log or email maker@uvic.ca with feedback.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the BuildingPH project, with the projects tag. Featured image for this post, of Shaun Macpherson (left) at HASTAC 2013, care of Jentery Sayers. (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)

The materials provided are drawn from a graduate seminar in the Department of English at the University of Victoria: “Digital Literary Studies: History and Principles” (Spring 2012). Intended audiences for the piece include writing studies instructors, literary critics, cultural studies scholars, digital studies practitioners, transmedia artists, and anyone who supports and facilitates university curricula and related infrastructures. Ultimately, the authors argue that the work of multimodal scholarly communications is anchored largely in tacit knowledge, and platforms such as Scalar allow students and instructors to attend to that knowledge, document it, share it, revise it, and analyze it in ways arguably novel to the history of humanities research. One effect of the Scalar platform is that, especially in collaborative contexts, the work of humanities practitioners is linked in very material ways, particularly because of Scalar’s ability to facilitate iterative communication, complex documentation, versioning, and the strategic duplication of content.

Read the IJLM abstract for the project. Or visit the project.

Project Structure and Content

“Teaching and Learning Multimodal Communications” is organized into five sections: “Welcome,” “Prompts,” “Analysis,” “Authors,” and “Commentary.” The article contains 188 pages, 282 media files, 11 paths/chapters, 23 comments, and over 35,000 words. To the MLab’s knowledge, it is the first peer-reviewed, open-access Scalar piece about hybrid pedagogy, and—even in the broad field of digital humanities—it is one of few publications exhibiting the processes, products, and particulars of graduate student learning.

Written by the project’s editor, Jentery Sayers, the “Welcome” section offers readers a context for how the project came about, with details about English 507 as well as references to recent scholarship (e.g., by Tara McPherson) supporting the use of Scalar in the classroom. The section also outlines how the project is designed, and it underscores the role that graduate students played in the project’s creation, revision, and publication. Here, audiences should note that “Teaching and Learning Multimodal Communications” began as a collaboratively authored book created for the purposes of a seminar and was then dramatically refined, internally reviewed, and submitted for peer review to the International Journal of Learning and Media. Offering access to its Scalar build, the MLab assisted English 507 students in the publication procedure, through which—for instance—597 pages of the original text were revised down to 188 pages in the published piece.

The “Prompts” section provides readers with the assignments (or prompts) from English 507 together with example student responses. Seven total prompts are published in the article: “Workflow,” “Metadata,” “Granulation,” “Map,” “Review,” “Proposal,” and “Roundtable.” The section is a thorough resource for instructors interested in Scalar (in particular) and scholarly communication (in general), and the example student work helps audiences better understand the “middle state” of student learning—in this case, short exercises that guided all involved in English 507 toward their final projects.

The “Analysis” section was written by three graduate students from English 507: Alyssa McLeod, Jana Millar Usiskin, and Emily Smith. As the name of the section suggests, McLeod, Millar Usiskin, and Smith critically examine the use of Scalar throughout the seminar. In so doing, they draw upon content from “Teaching and Learning Multimodal Communications” for evidence and articulate Scalar with ongoing debates about the role of multimodal scholarly communications in the humanities. This section is best understood as a scholarly essay published alongside (or perhaps embedded in) the middle state of English 507. It steps back from the research and writing produced during the seminar, reflects on it, and puts it into conversation with larger issues in comparative media studies, digital humanities, writing studies, and literary and cultural studies. Some highlights of the section include “Digital Objects as Objects: The Illusion of Immateriality,” “Building as Writing: Writing as Building,” “Designerly Engagement: Shifting Modes of Scholarship,” and “Workflow as Tacit Knowledge: Perpetually in Beta?”

Research Lead, Contributors, Support, and Partnerships

The research lead for “Teaching and Learning Multimodal Communications” was Jentery Sayers. English 507, “Digital Literary Studies: History and Principles” (Spring 2012), was supported by the Department of English at the University of Victoria and taught by Jentery Sayers. During and beyond the seminar, the Scalar development team—including Craig Dietrich, Erik Loyer, and Tara McPherson—provided feedback on what ultimately became “Teaching and Learning Multimodal Communications.” For the purposes of publication with the IJLM and The MIT Press, Sayers acted as the lead editor and designer, with Alyssa Arbuckle, Alison Hedley, Shaun Macpherson, Alyssa McLeod, Jana Millar Usiskin, Daniel Powell, Emily Smith, and Michael Stevens contributing content. Alyssa McLeod, Jana Millar Usiskin, and Emily Smith authored the essay found in the “Analysis” section of the piece, and the MLab provided infrastructure and other forms of ongoing support for the project’s design, review, circulation, and publication.

Project Status

This project was completed in August 2013. “Teaching and Learning Multimodal Communications” was published by the International Journal of Learning and Media (a journal of The MIT Press) in July 2013, in Volume 4, Issue 1. Read the IJLM abstract for the project or go directly to the project.

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the Makerspace project, with the projects tag. Featured images for this post care of “Teaching and Learning Multimodal Communications,” the International Journal of Learning and Media, and The MIT Press. (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)

Exhibit Design

The Long Now of Ulysses is organized into seventeen panels covering the eighteen episodes that make up Ulysses, together with snapshots of student projects devoted to the novel’s various afterlives. The excerpts were chosen by applying an algorithm to the first edition of Ulysses as follows: given that the novel is set on June 16 and was published in 1922, we have taken 6, 16, and 22 as significant numbers. Starting with the first page of each episode, we counted six pages in and sixteen lines down from the top of the page and then excerpted twenty-two lines of text. This generative constraint forced students to branch out from the text into both its immediate contexts and the “long now” of modernity.

Why Ulysses?

A screengrab of an excerpt of “Telemachus,” which is featured in the exhibit

Joyce’s Ulysses is one of the most influential novels of all time. When it was first published on 2 February 1922, Joyce’s 40th birthday, it heralded a radically new understanding of aesthetics. Ulysses is a virtual compendium of the 20th (and now 21st) century’s most pressing concerns. Equally, it is a deeply moving account of a married couple still struggling to connect eleven years after the infant death of their only son, coping with infidelity, routine, and complacency. The novel transforms everyday aspects of life into a modern epic and grants dignity to the sordid. Stretching otherwise short and routine nows into intricate moments that endure, it deepens time to help us see ourselves as others see us.

What Is the Long Now?

Image by Arthur Hain

Emerging from work by Brian Eno (among others), the notion of the long now situates cultural products in contexts that are at once broad and deep. The long now of a novel such as Ulysses pertains not only to how the novel is steeped in culture but also how it persists over time. By extension, it forces us into speculative modes, letting us treat Ulysses as a launching pad for conjecture, digging into the particulars of history while carving spaces for creative interpretation in the future. If, in our digital economy, attention is constantly pushed and pulled in multiple directions, then an investment in both speculation and persistence seems all the more pressing. A foot in the long now sparks precisely that investment.

Ulysses after the Internet

Image by Nina Belojevic and Jon Johnson

In this exhibit, various projects devoted to Ulysses’ unanticipated afterlives accompany the seventeen panels dedicated to excerpts of the novel. Largely digital in their composition, the projects take up Ulysses and its contexts in ways Joyce himself could not have foreseen: artistic appropriations, data visualisations, remediations, interactives, encodings, social networks, and so on. When interpreted as a collection of digital/material convergences, these projects give us a sense of how literature can and is being interpreted after the Internet, with curious consequences for interpretation, expression, and circulation.

Research Leads, Contributors, Support, and Partnerships

The research leads for The Long Now of Ulysses were Stephen Ross and Jentery Sayers. With support from the MLab, the Modernist Versions Project, University of Victoria Library, and University of Victoria Art Collections, graduate students from Stephen Ross’s English 560 seminar on the modernist novel and Jentery Sayers’s English 507 seminar on digital literary studies developed the exhibit, produced and selected content, and articulated rationales for their work. Ross and Sayers provided guidance in methodologies, assigned relevant readings, facilitated workshops, handled logistics, and offered routine feedback on work in progress. MA and PhD students at the University of Victoria did a bulk of the work required to make the exhibit happen.

Project Status

This project was completed in August 2013. On Tuesday, May 21, 2013, The Long Now of Ulysses launched online and at the Maltwood Gallery (in McPherson Library). Development of the exhibit began during the Fall 2012 term at the University of Victoria, with concentrated development occurring during Spring 2013. While the exhibit’s digital materials will persist online, the exhibit’s Maltwood component ran from 21 May 2013 until 12 August 2013.

Digital Components of the Exhibit

Below are snapshots of each digital component of The Long Now of Ulysses. To learn more about these projects, follow the URLs provided or click the images.

HyperLit | Nina Belojevic and Jon Johnson

HyperLit prototypes a social reading environment that encourages deep attention to literature while also drawing critical attention to structures and habits generated in gamified, digital economies. In the environment, Joyce becomes a “bot,” which satirizes incentive- and attention-driven culture. [Nina’s website for HyperLit] [Jon’s website for HyperLit]

The Longer Now of Ulysses: Digital Life after Analogue Death | David Carlton

A project about preservation, access, and interoperability, the “Longer Now” is, at its core, an online edition of the Ulysses excerpts on display in this exhibit. The excerpts were encoded in XML and expressed in a web-readable format using CSS. [website]

Dislocating Ulysses | Alex Christie and Katie Tanigawa

This project dislocates content from Ulysses in both time and space by digitising archival material in multiple forms. The first part of the project uses archival maps of Dublin (layered in Google Earth) to locate objects from the exhibit within the context of both the novel and historical Dublin. The second aspect of the project uses word counts of Ulysses to map the geospecifities of reading it onto a tactile, 3D map of Dublin (1925). [website]

Making It New Again: Crowdsourced Readings of Ulysses | Laura Dosky

This project crowdsourced close readings of algorithmically-selected excerpts of Ulysses. It expands the intertextual possibilities of the novel and arrives at ways of contextualising it by both supplementing the historical context of the novel and departing from it. Contributors were invited to draw connections between the excerpts and their everyday lives using the media of their choice to inspire and accent their interpretations. [website]

How This Became That: The Long Now of Ulysses Exhibit Guide and Process Manual | Telka Duxbury

This exhibit guide and process manual document the methodological frameworks used to prototype, test, implement, and publish each exhibit component developed by graduate students from English 507: Digital Literary Studies at the University of Victoria. [website]

Bloom Vision | Arthur Hain

“Flat I see, then think distance, near, far, flat I see, east, back. Ah, see now: Falls back suddenly, frozen in stereoscope. Click does the trick.” (from the “Proteus” episode of Ulysses) [website]

ulyssesAfterlives | Amanda Hansen

ulyssesAfterlives seeks to visualise the Ulysses macrotext—that is, Ulysses and its translations and adaptations—over time by presenting the various versions of the text on both a timeline and a geographical map. By mapping the afterlives of Ulysses over time, this project analyses the novel’s spatial and temporal reach. [website]

Browsing Ulysses | Mikka Jacobsen

This project maps web-based reading practices onto the codex, with cut-out words acting as links and the strikethrough representing everything ignored by “bouncing.” The remaining text tells a story of what Ulysses becomes when read as a collection of webpages. [website]

Networked Ulysses | Tim Personn

Based on the assumption that it takes a network of collaborators to write a novel, Networked Ulysses explores Joyce’s connection to his contemporary social world. The project is zoned into four different networks, with the first three each corresponding to one of the three places of composition indicated by Joyce’s final entry in the novel: “Trieste – Zürich – Paris. 1914-1922.” A fourth network maps a network of contributors in Joyce’s hometown Dublin. [website]

Demisemiquavers: The Long Notes of Ulysses | Zaqir Virani

Demisemiquavers is an audio repository for this exhibit. The 51 audio files contextualise the novel and the exhibit with sound, and have been attributed with extensive geospatial and descriptive metadata (using the Dublin Core ontology). [website]

Post by Jentery Sayers, attached to the LongNowOfUly project, with the projects, versioning, and exhibits tags. Featured image for this post from the Gisèle Freund Collection, University of Victoria Special Collections, McPherson Library. (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)