Posts filed under 'literary scholarship'
While reading Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, it occurred to me that the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive should do the same within itself. The first step this Winter will be to complete a major information overhaul, marking up and encoding all passages and images rigorously in XML. Then, dynamic real-time visual tools can be used to illuminate the Recherche, narrative, and the manner in which archive users have been interacting with the novel.
Moretti’s use of graphs to illustrate the publishing data about the novel in different times and locations throughout history shows fascinating patterns about its system of subgenres, its rises and falls, and the relationships it bears with politics and economics. Such models could be applied to the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive, but for purpose of illuminating its internal relationships. Graphs could be used to show various aspects of the church motif and how they are patterned throughout the work. Would, say, the rises and falls of particular associations tell us anything about the novel’s exploration of memory or subjectivity, especially anything that might not be obvious in Proust scholarship hitherto? If so, what do these patterns tell us about narrative itself, and of the motif as an element of narrative?
The mapping techniques that Moretti applies to certain English novels reveal interesting patterns in their plot elements, such as the consistency in which certain types of plots form distinct rings around the geographical center of the action. What would we learn from maps of churches in the Recherche, and how they relate to its exploration of subjective memory, national memory, local memory, memorialization through architecture, archives, and narrative? Would the regions of France, their churches, and how the churches signify within the narrative tell us anything new about the Recherche?
Perhaps even trees dealing with associations, categories, or motifs could tell us a lot about the church motif and its operation within the whole narrative.
As well, these kinds of tools could be used to illuminate the relationships between critical discussion on the blog and the text and images in the archive. Which passages get the most attention? The least? Which associations and image properties are most or least discussed? How do these change over time?
A unified, dynamic, and interactive visualization section of the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive could potentially show so much about the Recherche and narrative that has not yet been seen. It could prove to be a new method of inquiry into the novel, Proust, narrative, literary scholarship, and more.
Here are some basic relationships that a visualization application could explore:
Graphs
- Association by pagination location in the novel.
- Association by chronological location in the narrative.
- Association by chronology of composition (would require extensive textual scholarship).
- Association by church.
- Blog categories by association, and/or by image property, and/or by church.
- Real, fictional, and hybrid churches by location in the novel, in the narrative, by image type, etc.
Maps
- Geographical locations of churches.
- Geographical locations of associations and churches.
- Geographical locations of associations by churches, broken down by real, fictional, and hybrid churches.
- Character by geographical location, church, associations, and image properties.
- Any of the above by critical categories in the blog.
Trees
- Breakdown schema of how real and hybrid churches are used in particular associations (say, romantic love or the subject/object distinction).
- Schema of how blog categories explore certain associations or image properties.
- Schema of an image property and the kinds of associations it tends to appear with.
As a note for a future post, in order to make the data more effective in visual applications, a rigorous categorization of the associations (which are non-categorized) will probably be necessary.
November 17th, 2008
It occurred to me as I lay awake last night that Drupal could actually do much of what came out in our discussions at if:book a year ago. Dan Visel suggested allowing users to add their own images and their own passages (permissions nightmares), or to comment on searches, which is interesting. Drupal wouldn’t be able to do a search comment. However, entering each passage as a page or story would enable:
- More images to be attached to passages.
- Commenting on the passages and, perhaps with a module, the images.
- Integration of Proust passages and commentary with services like del.icio.us, twitter, technorati.
- Use of modules to serendipitously or randomly highlight passages, images, and critical content.
The Drupal search tool would recall all of these. However, the downsides would be:
- Less immediate access to the search results, since they’d show up as headlines and teasers instead of displaying all info in a neat table as at present.
- There would be no way to conduct a pagination search for in-depth study of a particular segment of the novel.
Again, as I wrote in the previous post, the archival structure of this site must be “respectful” of the organicity of the novel genre. A Drupal or Drupal-like integrated search engine and Web 2.0 tool would open up possibilities inherent in the digital archive genre, but might go too far in doing violence to the novel genre.
With Web 2.0 (user-produced content), institutional considerations would have to address the topical specificity of the archive, lest it become an encyclopedic, directionless, Proustian wiki. That could mean instituting an archive staff committed to study of the church motif and narrative, which would require a grant or some other financial backing. At the very least it would mean vetting the readers who are allowed to post content (i.e. students, faculty, researches demonstrably focusing on Proust, etc.). But that too is inseparable from what an archive is — a container of information, whose information is controlled, selected, interpreted, and presented by the archon and both the intra- and inter-institutional politics of its time and place.
December 31st, 2007
Developing another site using Drupal has gotten me thinking about how the sophisticated integration systems of all kinds of content could be put to use in the Proust archive. Image galleries that can be searched by caption or tagged content, or sorted by different categories. Dynamic flash slideshows based on user input or browsing behavior, or that pull images externally based on these. Searches that mix text — say passages, comments, forum topics — with images in unforseen yet meaningful ways (as opposed to the relatively static array currently in place). It would be very easy to do, and like most new technology the impulse is to try it all out to see what happens.
But what new ways of understanding “Proust” or narrative or “church” or motif would emerge from that? In what ways does the Machine’s reading of the archive’s content intersect with my own? Where does the Machine end and the archive begin?
While questions like these can be asked of the new media without blinking, it’s important to remember that this digital resource is a supplement to a book, a novel. Without an archival methodology that makes its end in the understanding of the novel’s properties, it will spin into a form more germane to contemporary media. Therefore, one major area of the study of the Recherche will have to consider the question of genre. To what extent is this archive really a reading of a book? Even in its current relatively static form, this archive is probably “about” itself more than anything else, though Proust’s novel is ultimately the generating influence. The trick is to figure out how.
November 29th, 2007
For the last session of the conference, on Saturday 17 March, I attended the Pedagogy and Textual Studies Roundtable. This was a very lively session with smart advice and anecdotes from both the panelists and the audience. It was chaired by Maura Ives of Texas A&M.
- Dan O’Sullivan (U of Mississippi): “Teaching Pre-print Textuality to Post-print Students” — Took a group of honors students to the Bibliothèque Nationale, in Paris, after a seminar on medieval material textuality. Recruitment for the seminar and the trip was difficult, but he ended up taking a handful of students to see the manuscripts they had studied during the seminar.
- Katherine Harris (San Jose State U): “Sneaking it In: Teaching Textual Studies without Teaching Textual Studies” — Devised a few lessons to teach differences and similarities between authorship and editorial practice. In an introduction to literary criticism course, she addressed copyright law and the concepts of authorship and editorial practices by having her students read Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and then Kathy Acker’s essay “Plagiarism,” which lifts the first paragraph of Dickens’ novel. They also get into the lawsuit over The Wind Done Gone, a retelling of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. She also had her students look at the source code of an online version of Great Expectations, which allowed them to realize that it’s a version of a material text and to discuss the role of technology in literature–including print culture. At that point, she brings out her 19th Century cigarette cards of Dickens’ characters, making sure her students are able to “touch the stuff” and realize the importance of material culture.
- John K. Young (Marshall U): “Textual Instability and Undergraduates” — Assigned different editions of Richard Wright’s Native Son and had his students do a comparative activity. It conveyed the notion of authorship as a social process and showed that the author’s true intentions are unrecoverable. The uncertainty of the material text reinforces the ways students receive textuality in the rest of their lives.
- Martha Nell Smith (U of Maryland): “Back to the Future: Teaching Manuscripts to Undergraduates” — One of her primary teaching questions is ‘how did the poem on your page get there?’ She then guides them through the processes of the author, editor, and so on, and allows her students to see different states of finished and unfinished works — both digital and print artifacts.
- Archie Burnett (Boston U): “Boston University’s Editorial Institute, and one of its Courses” — Related the prehistory, founding, and evolution of Boston University’s Editorial Institute and discussed the topics covered by its degree program.
May 28th, 2007
The Institute for the Future of the Book was generous enough to let me write a post on their blog, which can be found here:
http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2007/02/ecclesiastical_proust_archive.html
The post was picked up by RSS feeds all over the world. Thanks!
In addition, Dave Davison, who has a blog called Thoughts-Illustrated, posted a comment comparing this archive to his project of “editorially segmenting and tagging encapsulations of longer serial archives such as recorded speeches, audiovisual/video content, and finally ‘Networked Books’”. Admittedly, I haven’t had time yet to read his blog in depth, but what I’ve seen so far is a series of very interesting posts on annotating visual media for better reading and reducing Constant Partial Attention, a term he picks up from Linda Stone.
With the explosion of technologies like RSS and Web 2.0, it’s very important that educators help students think critically about managing information. That might include using technology to tag longer pieces used in courses — whatever media might be used — and evaluating research sources.
I’ve seen a demonstration of courseware that takes this into account at Columbia’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CNMTL). One of CNMTL’s applications, VITAL (Video Interactions for Teaching and Learning), is an environment that allows students to play digitized movies and music, select segments, annotate those segments with as much text as they like, and file the segments with annotations for when they write their integrative multimedia essays — all in the courseware. Granted, this type of activity occurs in controlled learning environments where the media are pre-selected by the professor. I wonder if the courseware allows students to import, segment, and annotate media they’ve garnered through research — or even digitize it. Applications like VITAL (but with the ability to act upon any media the reader might import, including text) ought to be readily available to students as stand-alone tools, especially now that much of their research will involve multimedia.
I could see using such a technology to teach novels. It would enable students to archive, tag, and illustrate passages, connect them to articles and other sources they’ve researched and imported into the environment, and so on. This might spark a radical (and possibly unfortunate) change in the English major. One of the unquantifiable skills that the English major has been touted to impart is the ability to see the Big Picture in a complex, hazy jumble of information and ideas. At the center of that is a highly flexible memory that is both detail-oriented and conceptually driven.
It’s important, as technology is increasingly appropriated to our intellectual pursuits, not to become too dependent on it. But if it’s used in such a way that it enhances those personal skills, then so much the better.
Obviously, one task accomplished by the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive is to serve as the memory for the vast amount of material I want to study but couldn’t physically remember in its entirety. Sure, my unaided memory will recall the most important material: the early descriptions of the Église St-Hilaire at Combray, of Marcel’s epiphany with the twin steeples of Martinville, and sundry short passages that made impressions on me while reading the Recherche. And I’ll remember where to find them when I need to write about them. The usefulness of this archive, however, is a virtue of its “narrow” focus that keeps the field of information from assimilating and ballooning endlessly, like The Blob. (I say narrow, but really — this archive comprises 336 passages, 184,181 words, over 700 associations, and roughly 500 images.) The focus on churches keeps the project thematically and conceptually unified.
I’m starting to think, as a result of writing this post, that opening this archive to the inclusion of passages and paratextual information not related to churches is probably not the way to go. (Read this post and this post for more on that topic.) There’s enough that could be done under the church rubric — say, a variorum of different translations and editions — to make it textually and scholarly interesting. The vast jumbled archive of editions, translations, articles, books, pamphlets, websites, films … … is already there. One could simply use a wiki, perhaps with customized search tools, to make sense of all of them, which would be great. But this archive is really a tool for narrative and textual analysis.
February 14th, 2007
About two weeks ago I met with a few folks from the Institute for the Future of the Book to talk about starting collaborative communities. Right before our meeting I had a couple of ideas about creating commentary space within the archive search results and making the whole thing more editable by readers. So I went to the Institute’s place in Williamsburg thinking we’d have two “separate” discussions about community and interactive functionality. But once the brainstorming session got going I was struck by how intimately the two were bound together.
One of the recurring points was that this archive, as currently constructed around the church motif, is “my reading” of Proust. I began to see that it would probably be difficult to interest others in participating when their readings of the Recherche — re: gender, airplanes, phenomenology or whatever — would have little impact on the archive itself. There was also a sense that it would be difficult to form a community around a project that an individual has already brought to a fair level of completion.
Most literary digital archives provide scholars with material but go no further. The value here would lie in taking the next step of providing commentary space within the search results themselves — not just in the blog and discussion board spaces. The ability of readers to add images, tag passages, or even add new passages would take that principle even further and make the archive itself a collaborative reading of the Recherche. And of course making the commentary searchable would add yet another dimension.
But why bother? What purpose(s) does this archive serve? What would it contribute to the field of literary scholarship?
Put plainly, The Archive has changed. The traditional model of humanities research commonly identified as ‘the lone scholar in the archive’ has been opened by digital networks and social software. This has been the case for years, especially since blogs and wikis became popular. Yet scholarly blogs tend overwhelmingly to be individuals’ personal web journals, which means that the model of the lone writer — despite post comments — still persists. That’s not a bad thing, and I’m not saying it should go away, but neither is it an effective use of the advantages offered by the technology.
The distributed, long-term conversation that has been happening in articles, books, conferences, and classrooms over the years will continue, of course, and it should. But social software allows us to publish at will, to communicate with similarly interested scholars wherever they are, whenever we like, and thereby to generate and hone ideas collaboratively as they are being developed.
A couple of interesting experiments along this line have been tried by Mitchell Stephens, a journalism professor at NYU who has been collaborating with the Institute for the Future of the Book. He put up a blog where his book on the history of atheism, Without Gods, was discussed, challenged, corrected, and questioned by readers during the composition process. Similarly, he put up a paper designed as a discussion: The Holy of Holies features a more effective commentary space, developed by the Institute, that ties comments to specific paragraphs. I could see working something like that into the search results of this archive. There was word, too, of making that comment functionality a WordPress plugin, which would be very useful for a number of projects.
This archive could take some lessons from the collaboration of Mitchell, his readers, and the Institute. I envision the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive as a more open-ended work of collaborative literary criticism, one that has the purpose of thinking and writing about Proust for its own sake, of developing ideas in conversation, but also as a space for spawning other projects. That is to say, blog members need not write about Proust and churches, but as long as there’s some focus on Proust or other related topics such as technology, media, publishing, theory, and so on, it could have that eclectic interest but guided by a common thread. And one of the possibilities could be that people working on books or articles might develop them collaboratively at the archive.
That suggests to me that the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive could instead become something with a broader focus, where people can enter and tag passages, images, and other media to influence the structure of the archive with their own readings. The issue of copyright (I had to pay for the use of the text featured here) is a can of worms I don’t have space to address in this post. Regardless, the amount of development required to expand this archive as mentioned would likely necessitate substantial funding. So probably a preliminary group would need to figure out what needs to be done in order to apply for a grant and then take it from there.
But the point is that if this is to become a useful resource where people think and also learn by doing, it will have to become editable by readers in some form or other, and by that very admission I can’t determine it all by myself.
So, this is a preliminary step to see what kind of feedback is out there. I would greatly appreciate any thoughts, suggestions or criticisms. And I would especially like to thank Ben Vershbow, Jesse Wilbur, Eddie Tejeda, and Dan Visel for taking the time to meet with me. If anyone is interested in participating somehow, please don’t hesitate to contact me at jdrouin@gc.cuny.edu.
January 29th, 2007