Iteration 1: Gears and motors

The first design emerged from discussions between Nina Belojevic, Katie McQueston, and me. At this point, we had little more than a handful of images of Trouvé’s “bijoux électriques.” In fact, our focus at the time was on creating a prototype of a Kit that recreated Trouvé’s illuminated jewels. (Nina and I had previously presented a version of the Kit with a prototype of an illuminated hairpin at the Western Humanities Alliance 2013 meeting at the University of California at San Diego, and she and Jentery presented another version of it at HASTAC 2014 in Lima, Peru.)

We originally conceived of a Kit with several jewelry pieces, including the illuminated hairpin and skull stick-pin. Katie first approached the stick-pin mechanism in the context of Trouvé’s watchmaking background. She used Cornell University’s Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library (KMODDL) to design several gear system prototypes for the skull in sketch, digital model, and paper form. She then published her early sketches and ideas on the design. KMODDL’s library of geared systems was a useful resource for considering many different ways to think of how a geared system might work in the piece. It also provided detailed models that we adapted for prototyping purposes. (Below is an example of a paper prototype Katie constructed.)

Building on Katie’s work, Nicole Clouston adapted existing designs in the MLab for use in the skull and made several geared system models using CAD software. For the purposes of historical precision, she also hand-carved a version of the skull in basswood that we then digitized using a structured-light scanner. I adapted this scanned model to make room for the interior mechanisms and later fabricated versions of it using the MLab’s 3D printer, desktop miller, and laser cutter.

Iteration 2: Magnets

Once we printed a handful of gears and tried constructing the mechanism at scale, we realized our approach wasn’t going to work. Given the size of the skull (height: 9.2 cm, width: 1.5 cm, depth: 1.6 cm) on the original pin, the design required a tiny geared motor (comparable in size to the motors used to vibrate pagers or cell phones), which we do not believe was available during Trouvé’s time. We also did not have access to materials allowing us to make parts at that scale, and—perhaps most important—we also considered the assembly of the gear design too complex for the Kit‘s audiences to manage.

After some more research on Trouvé’s life and works, as well as conversations with William J. Turkel, Devon Elliott, and Edward Jones-Imhotep, we shifted our attention to telegraphy, which likely inspired Trouvé’s methods. For this design, I prototyped a simple telegraph sounder and—for comparative purposes—a solenoid switch as well.

The idea was that a small electromagnet could be placed inside the skull, and the jaw could act as the armature with a small hammer that, once attracted to the magnet, causes the action of the jaw to swing upwards towards the eye sockets. The added benefit of this mechanism is that the action of the magnet results in an audible “clack” sound, perfect for a teeth-gnashing motion and in many ways comparable to the sounds of a telegraph. I designed the solenoid circuit as well because it utilized the same amount of current as a telegraph sounder yet resulted in a slightly different behaviour. In the solenoid, a plunger is pulled into a magnetized shaft. With a plunger attached to the jaw, the solenoid allows for greater range of motion, meaning the jaw would be free to swing more, albeit at the cost of some of the clacking sound.

At this point, we used the MLab’s laser cutter and milling machine to rapidly prototype designs across a variety of materials. For the purposes of testing, I milled most of the parts in acrylic and installed a solenoid in the skull. Our first working prototype was complete!

Iteration 3: Interrupter Bell

While the solenoid skull worked, its mechanism was unreliable. (I credit this more to shoddy design on my part than to the feasibility of the actual mechanism.) In the interests of improving the prototype, the team felt compelled to return to the diagrams of Trouvé’s electro-mobile jewelry and consider new approaches. We also contacted the Victoria and Albert Museum, whose collection includes one of the only extant electro-mobile stick-pins. The Museum kindly supplied us with additional information that allowed us to add some nuance to our approach. Here is a sketch of a prototype we developed after our conversations with the Museum.

But later, Devon Elliott, Jentery and I pieced together a third idea: a self-oscillating electromagnet configuration resembling that found in an interrupter bell, which is similar to a telegraph sounder. (See the public domain GIF below for an example.)

Animation that demonstrates the mechanism in an electric bell (image in the public domain).

In this version, the armature is replaced by the jaw, with a lever attached to the hinge that also controls the movement of the eyes. As long as the lever attached to the jaw is touching the pin (which is connected to a lead on the battery), the circuit is live, causing the magnet to attract the lever, which in turn forces the jaw closed and the eyes down. This force also breaks the circuit, thereby causing the magnet to stop attracting the lever. Thus there is an oscillation between an on and off or a “jaw-up” and “jaw-down” state. My most recent work on the skull involved making a large model of this electromagnetic mechanism and designing the lever system using CAD software. Images of both are below.

Conclusion

While this aspect of the Kits project is not quite complete, I feel proud of how it has progressed, not only due to the various insights afforded by the designs, but also because of the methodological approaches we developed in order to speculate about the particulars of media history. The work has amounted to a close reading of technology: in the absence of first-hand knowledge, we have taken an historically informed approach to deciphering a mechanism and experimenting with versions of it. Perhaps even more important, the Kits’ collaborative research model has proven both invaluable and absolutely necessary to creating prototypes that balance technical particulars with historical, cultural, creative, and conjectural methods.

Post by Shaun Macpherson, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication and versioning tags. Images, sketches, and videos for this post care of Shaun Macpherson, Nina Belojevic, Katie McQueston, Danielle Morgan, and the Maker Lab, except where otherwise noted.

As I outlined in a previous post, we used examples of jewellery cases (or jewel caskets, as they were often called) from the Victorian period to inspire our design of the kit’s container. Since the content of the kit is electro-mobile jewellery, a jewellery box makes sense not only thematically but also for arranging small parts, intentionally structuring access to elements of the kit, and keeping everything secure. We began this process by sketching cases inspired by various jewel caskets.

Sketches of a Victorian jewel casket care of Nina Belojevic and the MLab

Once we decided what components we wanted to comprise the case, we began working through several iterations of the design in Rhino 3D. While creating the 3D model, we wanted to represent the aesthetic intricacies of a Victorian jewel casket, which could be manufactured using some of the CNC (computer numerical control) equipment we have in our Digital Fabrication Lab. Since such equipment can be difficult to access (e.g., due to costs, training, and matters of infrastructure), we also wanted to make it possible to render a simpler version of the box using hand tools. Although a simpler version may lack the intricacies of Victorian caskets, many details can be added to the base model during post-production. These details include illustrations, engravings, and hardware.

In fact, when designing our base model, we did not include the details for a finished box. As such, that model does not include any decorative elements. Its surfaces are rather minimalist, not Victorian, in their design. To this model we add engravings and other features corresponding with Victorian caskets. These features complement the guides for the early wearable kit, but—with the simple base model—we also want to encourage audiences to create their own variants or editions.

As you can see, the Rhino model comprises the basic elements of the case. It shows the rounded and beveled edges that follow a Victorian aesthetic, and it has been rendered to the size we require for the final kit. Again, details can be added during production and post-production: prior to fabrication, the desired box material can be selected; different types of silk or satin lining can be inserted; surface illustrations can be painted on or engraved; and hinges, ribbons, or knobs can easily be added.

For our first iteration, we decided to laser-cut the jewellery case with an Epilog Helix 40-watt laser. We cut the external components of the case from 6mm baltic birch, and the internal components consist of 3mm baltic birch.

While this prototype is a simpler, flattened version of the 3D model created in Rhino, such simplicity allows us to quickly construct materials that we can user-test with multiple audiences. Since we designed the case to encourage audiences to move through the kit in certain ways, explore it, immediately find some components, and search for other components, this user testing is essential to our research. For instance, we have included two “hidden” compartments in the bottom section of the kit. They hold historical materials and require some digging to locate. One compartment contains schematics and technical articles about the electric jewels from the period; the other compartment contains texts on jewellery etiquette as well as images of some of the women who modelled electro-mobile jewellery. User testing tells us whether these hidden compartments do in fact afford certain arguments about early wearables, or if the kit design should be revised and improved.

After cutting all the pieces, we stain them to give them a richer colour. Although we used baltic birch, which can be cut very easily with a laser, we wanted to follow the look of the Victorian jewel caskets we found, which mostly consisted of darker materials (often of lavish woods, such as mahogany and rosewood). To achieve a similar look, we chose a walnut wood stain. We then assembled the boxes using wood glue, clamps, and hinges.

We are currently finalizing all of the kit’s various parts, such as the guide, the milled skull, jewellery pin components, and an electromagnetic mechanism for moving the skull’s eyes and jaw.

Image of an early wearable kit care of Danielle Morgan and the MLab

While we plan to manufacture physical kits that can be mailed, we will—as I suggested earlier in this post—also make available digital files for all components of the kit, including the case. We are eager to see not only how our audiences will engage the complete kit, but also how they might modify, realize, and construct the kit using the digital models, descriptions, and historical media we provide. After all, our goal is not to tell people how early wearables were built. It is to prompt them to prototype versions of history through today’s materials and technologies.

Image of an early wearable kit care of Danielle Morgan and the MLab

Post by Nina Belojevic, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication and versioning tags. Images for this post care of Danielle Morgan. Sketches and videos created by Nina Belojevic.

Image Quality: When visually expressing a process, the quality of the image is as significant as the image’s content. It is important to pay attention to the resolution, exposure, colour, focus, and framing of images. These qualities play a significant role in the persuasiveness of the photograph. For instance, a high-quality image may hold people’s attention, allowing them to appreciate both the appearance of the image and the evidence it is presenting. The intent and attention paid by the photographer translates to the photograph and therefore to audiences. Intent and attention also influence a person’s trust in images. At the same time, experiments with quality (e.g., low-fidelity images) are opportunities for researchers to comment on visual documentation as a form of mediation or construction. Post-production especially accentuates the construction of images. During post-production, many aspects of a photograph can be altered using an editing tool such as Photoshop. These tools modify colour, reframe through cropping, remove dust, and also brighten. “Curves” and “Selective Colour” are two Photoshop tools I use often. “Curves” allows you to brighten or darken an image by dragging anchor points up or down the “Curve” line. “Selective Colour” lets you modify images that have a colour cast (i.e., an often unwanted tint affecting the entire image).

Image care of Nicole Clouston and the MLab

Surroundings: While documenting a process such as prototyping (something we do often in the MLab), try to be aware of everything in the frame. Audiences will consider any object in the image—even objects in the background—a part of the content. Also keep in mind that some contextual objects can be helpful. A prototype beside the tool used to create it, or all composite parts of a prototype laid beside the assembled finished object, can help audiences better understand process. If you are documenting an interactive piece, then a photograph of someone engaging it can provide necessary contextual information about its scale and function.

Image care of Danielle Morgan and the MLab

Design: Image placement shapes the arguments you make with visual media. The design may complement the actual process, or it may represent an ideal process. Scale creates a hierarchy, with larger images typically viewed as more significant. Their position within the design also alters how they are interpreted. For example, a design that depicts a process in a linear grid, with each image the same size, may convey a procedure or chronology while also arguing that each step is equally important. In contrast, a design with the finished prototype in the center, and process images radiating from it, may suggest that the product is more important than the process.

Image care of Nicole Clouston and the MLab

Image care of Nicole Clouston and the MLab

Text: What text is included, not to mention how, are other important considerations. Unless it is an HTML “img alt” attribute describing images for people who listen to the web with screen readers, an in-depth textual explanation of an image is often superfluous. Too much description may stop audiences from investing time trying to understand images for themselves. An alternative strategy is the use of captions (under individual images or under the entire design). Captions provide a concise amount of contextual information to audiences, aiding their understanding of what is being depicted while still encouraging their own investigation (see example below). Your choice of typeface or font also influences the audience’s interpretation. The most convincing font choices allow audiences to focus on the message being communicated rather than the typeface used. The choice of font can be driven by the content of the medium, such as the use of a Victorian-inspired typeface for Victorian era content. This approach can be employed persuasively, but it often distracts audiences from the actual content of the text. In my own experience, I have found that the most effective approach is to choose a simple font that is easily read at the scale the image is being shown. Also, keep in mind that serif fonts are generally easier to read in print, and sans serif can be a better choice for online reading.

The skull model for the Trouvé pin, carved by Nicole Clouston, resting on the servo-driven turntable. The HDI 120 3D scanner uses structured-light, blue-LED technology to take high resolution images of the object as the turntable spins. Image care of the MLab.

Attribution: When presenting images it is important to include attribution. Who made it? Who is pictured? How is it licensed (e.g., Creative Commons license)? You should also get signed releases or permissions for images, where applicable. One strategy for presenting attributions in a manner that works with, rather than against, the design is to incorporate them in a manner similar to the rest of the textual information. In the poster below, information was given in text blocks with headings. Following this design, attributions fall seamlessly under the heading, “Team.” When presenting images individually, a caption is often an effective way to give attribution. If the image is circulated via a website or repository, then the domain itself may have licensing and attribution information that applies to all content.

Image Care of Nina Belojevic, Shaun Macpherson, and the MLab

Medium: Among many options, visual documentation can be posted on a website, published in a booklet, and printed on a poster. Each of these media has particular strengths and connotations. Of course, people often combine approaches. Consider how you want audiences to experience the images and ultimately how your images function in relation to the process, product, and project. Odds are you will want your choice of media to complement the process depicted as well as the context in which the materials are displayed. Below are more details for using the web, posters, and booklets as visual media.

Online: Presenting images online via a blog or open repository may give viewers insight into your process as you are working on it. This form of documentation and circulation allows people to follow what is happening over time. Images online may also be accessible to a large audience who may not see the work in person. Online circulation may also increase the odds of people serendipitously discovering your work. If you publish your images online, consider whether you want to publish high-resolution versions. The resolution of your images may correspond with not only how you want others to use them but also what you are saying about the current status and applications of your research. Depending on the project, you may also want to consider restricting online access to your images, or keeping (some of) them offline altogether.

Poster: In tactile form, a poster brings digital images off the screen, allowing them to be presented alongside exhibited work. Showing audiences how the piece came to be, together with information about the decision-making process, will shape how they encounter your research. The way the poster is displayed may also complement the work. Here, you might want to construct relationships between the poster, the scale of the piece, its shape, and how the various elements came together. For example, a poster for a modular piece could be composed of articulated print elements, mimicking the way that piece became a cohesive whole. Also, if you are making a poster for a specific space, then—where possible—visit that space prior to mounting or installing the poster. This way you can get a sense of the space’s layout, acoustics, lighting, and capacity, all of which may affect how people interpret the poster.

Booklet: For many audiences, a booklet presented with a piece may be the most intimate and accessible experience of images. This approach may be especially appropriate if you are hoping to include sections of text or research alongside the images. In contrast to reading a poster (which can be awkward), a booklet is an approachable format to read. Audiences may also spend more time with it, and it may be placed with the piece, making it something people will likely experience after the piece itself. Booklets are often printed in multiples. Presenting more than one booklet with the piece allows several audience members to experience the documentation at once. The booklets can also be take-away items, or they could be mailed out, allowing for broader dissemination. The number of booklets that should be printed will depend on how you plan on using them. In my experience, when presenting in an exhibition context it is ideal to print fifty booklets if they are being given away and ten if they are not. Having extra copies to archive or replace damaged booklets is also useful, but I would caution against over-printing. Having a large stack of copies may prompt the audience to treat the booklet as disposable or insignificant.

Image care of Danielle Morgan and the MLab

By being attentive to decisions made along the way, visual media can be a very persuasive approach to expressing your research, giving audiences a rich understanding of the composition process and supporting the argument you are making.

Post by Nicole Clouston, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication, physcomp, exhibits, and versioning tags.

Inspired by grangerizing as well as Visconti’s notion of book hacking, we used Georges Barral’s biography of Trouvé, Histoire d’un Inventeur, as the base text for our early wearable guide. Since we could not work from a hardcopy of the biography, we instead printed a public domain PDF. We then used Victorian illustration styles to create something between a grangerized book and a zine. Zines usually represent subcultures or ideas that are not generally acknowledged in popular publications. Thus it seemed fitting to use the zine format to represent an inventor who, despite his numerous inventions and contributions to Victorian culture, remains minimally referenced in scholarly work. Some of our design influences include riot grrl weekly zines, various punk zines from the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, and Anna Anthropy’s videogame work, all of which combine forms of cultural criticism with experimental media.

During the process of making the guide, we designed three rough prototypes: the first could be read like a regular zine but also unfolded into a map-like series of instructions for building early wearables, the second intertwined instruction and information in a vertical format, and our final design contained a removable mini-booklet of instructions inserted into the grangerized text. By using manual and digital methods to mix contemporary and Victorian aesthetics, we wanted these physical guides to look and feel collaged. We also wanted them to exist as middle states, somewhere between distinct moments in history.

Early in 2015, we made mock-ups of how we thought we might integrate historical newspaper clippings, annotations, illustrations, and Barral’s biography through collage and drawings. Here’s one instance of those mock-ups:

As the guide progressed, we developed the collaged aesthetic:

For the inserted instruction booklet, we modified a photograph of Trouvé and turned him into a narrator, who playfully conveys instructions for building the stick-pin in multiple ways. Should audiences trust their narrator? Is he reliable? What is his bias? His pedagogy?

Since we are foregrounding the role that prototyping, revision, and decision-making play in the construction of technologies, we wanted Trouvé’s narration to give the sense that the reader/builder is meant to explore tangible possibilities alongside him instead of somehow replicating his procedures, which—to be clear—we cannot fully recover or even mimic in 2015. The instruction booklet can be read in context with the rest of the guide, but it can also be removed and used during the assembly process. Because the instructions can be held in hand, audiences don’t need to stare at a screen while they are unpacking a kit or making a wearable.

In order to situate early wearables in the context of Victorian culture, we explored six aspects or “keywords” (in the tradition of Raymond Williams’s work) that may have contributed either to the skull’s design or to the way early wearables such as the skull stick-pin were received. The sections on clocks and telegraphs briefly touch on the way those technologies may have influenced Trouvé’s design choices, while the segments on class and gender give some context for cultural etiquette around jewellery during the period. The mourning section addresses mourning jewellery traditions in Victorian culture, where skulls were significant symbols central to what Susan Elizabeth Ryan calls “dress acts.” Additionally, the section about performance describes instances where Trouvé’s jewellery was worn publicly. As often as possible, we drew this information from books and newspaper articles from the period. Below is a photo of the gender section. In the future, we’ll be adding more sections, including sections on the role race, positivism, and electromagnetic worldviews played in early wearables.

To bind the guide, we used a pamphlet stitch and nested the instruction booklet inside the guide with leather string:

Finally, the guide was ready to be placed inside the kit:

Together with a calling card, of course:

Post by Danielle Morgan, attached to the KitsForCulture project, with the fabrication and versioning tags. Images for this post care of Danielle Morgan and the Maker Lab. Thanks again to Amanda Visconti for her history of grangerizing: https://drc.usask.ca/projects/archbook/grangerizing.php.

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.

Topic modelling assumes authors create documents using collocated clusters of words. By working “backward,” computer algorithms sort the words from a set of pre-processed documents and generate lists of words that comprise these clusters. In our work, we are using the LDA (Latent Dirichlet Allocation) probabilistic model. This rather popular model operates on the Bayesian method of inference, a mathematical concept that works backward from an observed set of data to calculate the probability of certain conditions being in place in order to produce that set of data. In other words, it depends on a notion of causality and asks what circumstances need to be in place in order for certain results to occur.

Using the MALLET package (an open source application developed primarily by Andrew McCallum at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst) allows for the implementation of Gibbs sampling, parameter optimization, and tools for inferring topics from trained models. These affordances let the researcher alter the distribution of topics across documents, and the distribution of words across topics. That is, we can adjust our model to achieve more interesting results. We are interested in a model that is, as Julia Flanders describes it, a “strategic representation,” which might “distort the scale so that we can work with the parts that matter to us” (“The Productive Unease of 21st-century Digital Scholarship”).

For the purposes of our very preliminary study, we are examining word trends across a corpus but also, at least to some extent, narrative tendencies. In so doing, we employed MALLET’s stop words list, which allows the algorithm to ignore common “function words” (i.e., adverbs, conjunctions, pronouns, and propositions). The idea is to eliminate words that carry little thematic weight. Following a method outlined by Matthew Jockers and advocated by Belaid Moa, we also removed character names where possible. While it would likely be interesting to look at the ways MALLET reads texts without any intervention, for our purposes character names made it harder to express tendencies across the novels. However, we did not employ Jockers’s method in its entirety. In some cases, he uses a noun-based approach, eliminating all parts of speech except for nouns. But we felt that, at least for now, including verbs and adjectives was important for revealing aspects of narrative. Jockers also advocates chunking texts, but we were interested in the ways the algorithm would read entire novels as documents.

While our repository of modernist texts has been growing, we limited this preliminary study to a corpus of thirty-two early twentieth-century texts, formatted as TXT files, to come up with a profile of the most prominent topics identified by LDA. The algorithm is interested in finding the topics that can be used to correlate all the texts as well as the topics that can be used to distinguish between individual texts. The top three topics that are evenly distributed throughout the corpus—here showing the first nine words—are:

time, felt, day, looked, knew, work, face, hand, night
eyes, face, life, time, white, dark, round, hand, head
men, people, began, room, house, talk, suddenly, end, years

When reading these topics, we might want to consider that, according to the algorithm, these words are not only more frequent within the corpus, but have a greater chance of appearing near each other. As well, the top three or four words are considerably more heavily weighted than later words. Unsurprisingly, time seems to play a significant role in all the categories. Thus we might ask how categories each tell us something unique about time and temporality. In the first topic, the verbs are all in the past tense. Notably, the second topic arguably contains no verbs, with “face,” “hand”, “eyes,” and “head” possibly being exceptions. The fragmented body parts also reveal an interesting slippage between time embodied in humans and time embodied in objects. For instance, as Stephen Ross notes, the results do not distinguish between the face or hand of a clock and the face or hand of a human character. The third category suggests that critics might want to consider how the durations of events (especially their beginnings and endings) are situated, and how spatiotemporal concepts shift across texts. For instance, when and where do people become men? Or do houses and rooms become years?

MALLET also shows us the relative weight of these word collocations across the novels.

Temporality Past

Temporality Embodied

The Temporality of Place

The third category, labelled “The Temporality of Place,” appears more prominently in Howard’s End, Mrs. Dalloway, A Passage to India, The Great Gatsby, and Heart of Darkness. We might ask how these texts in particular focus on the temporality of particular physical environments. On the other hand, I wonder why The Waves, Ulysses, and Women in Love do not seem to engage as fully with the first category, labelled “Temporality Past.” We might also ask how the novels of D. H. Lawrence seem to best exemplify the second category, labelled “Temporality Embodied.” Through LDA, do we get any sense of overlap between the ways people and objects embody time?

Building on MALLET’s algorithms, Belaid Moa has also written scripts that allow us to cluster texts according to perceived similarities and differences. Many readers will notice that Howard’s End and Mrs. Dalloway are similar when it comes to “The Temporality of Place,” but that topic 12 (people street feel leaves trees window room green door) is considerably more prevalent in Mrs. Dalloway than in Howard’s End. Moa’s script projects all these differences and similarities and allows us to see the texts clustered according to MALLET’s assigned topics.

The Multiple Dimensions of Topics in Modernism

Given our current data set, these are the clusters we identified with LDA, with the exemplar being the text most central to that particular cluster:

Cluster 1, exemplar Tender is the Night:
The Awakening (Chopin), Heart of Darkness (Conrad), Lord Jim (Conrad), The Secret Agent (Conrad), The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), Tender is the Night (Fitzgerald), The Trial (Kafka), Babbitt (S. Lewis), Tarr (W. Lewis), 1984 (Orwell), Burmese Days (Orwell), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (Stein), Twilight Sleep (Wharton)

Cluster 2, exemplar Ulysses:
Nightwood (Barnes), A Passage to India (Forster), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Hardy), The Dubliners (Joyce), Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce), Ulysses (Joyce)

Cluster 3, exemplar Seven Pillars of Wisdom:
Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Lawrence)

Cluster 4, exemplar Time Regained:
The Ambassadors (James), The Captive (Proust), Time Regained (Proust)

Cluster 5, exemplar Mrs. Dalloway:
The Good Soldier (Ford), Howard’s End (Forster), Sons and Lovers (Lawrence), Women in Love (Lawrence), Of Human Bondage (Maugham), Three Lives (Stein), The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf), The Waves (Woolf)

What subcategories of early twentieth-century modernism do these clusters suggest? How do we define these clusters for modernist literary criticism? Do they actually suggest anything, including temporal, geographic, or stylistic tendencies? How might these clusters compare with models constructed for, say, Victorian novels? These are questions we are also experimenting with, and we look forward to exploring further as we continue this work.

Post by Jana Millar-Usiskin in the ModVers category with the versioning tag. Images for this post care of Jana Millar-Usiskin.

Using the texts of Virginia Woolf, Belaid and I are focused on a rather basic computational practice: counting. The computer excels at counting what it reads. Our computer—with the help of Python, Beautiful Soup (a machine parser), and a few regular expressions—can now count the highest frequency of words from The Voyage Out to Between the Acts, or the number of questions in each (805 in The Voyage Out, 473 in Between the Acts). It can find the frequencies of first words in each sentence of The Waves, or the last words. It can find the frequencies of words per HTML-encoded paragraph in Mrs. Dalloway (she, 6; she, 3; the, 10; a, 2; said, 3; etc.). The computer is eager to quantify, and this is great if we find value in knowing the numbers. But to what extent are the numbers important to human readers? Counting the word “war” in Virginia Woolf will not give us much insight into, say, the ways war and gender intersect in Mrs. Dalloway. At least for humans, counting indeed plays a small part in the usual sitting-down-with-a-book reading experience. While we might unconsciously register a repeated word or phrase, it is highly unlikely that anyone will count them as they go.

Still, there is something eerily fascinating about the high-frequency, small words that now captivate our learning computer. These are the words that will likely be most common for any text written in English. It would probably be hard to distinguish between modernist texts, or indeed any group of texts, based on these kinds of results. When thinking about machine learning, these filler words are important because they are usually the easiest to predict. Consider this beginning: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy…” Even if you (the human reader) weren’t familiar with the first line, there is a much higher chance you could predict the word that immediately follows (“the”) than the one that comes after that (“flowers”). Predictability is a key part of reading. However, knowing what to predict, a good reader can focus on the parts that are surprising and unpredictable. These small words might signal a kind of architectural structure around which the distinguishing features of literary edifices are often built. Thus, it might be productive to explore not only the ways modernist writers break this edifice apart but also how they reinforce familiar or predictable forms of language.

Question Frequencies in Woolf Novels

Going forward we are planning to use Python and other programming languages to further explore (un)predictability, with hopes of teaching our computer to recognize the giddy, exhilarating “plunge” of modernist language.

Post by Jana Millar-Usiskin in the ModVers category, with the versioning tag. Images for this post care of Jana Millar-Usiskin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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