Posts filed under 'developing the archive'
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
While considering a taxonomic versus a folksonomic labeling of passages in the archive, it occurred to me that there are benefits to having both in the search engine and search results.
The taxonomic approach would be a codified and rigorous — and therefore arbitrarily limited — categorization of narrative elements a priori. As a search functionality it would constrain the method in such a way that the selection of narrative elements would form a cohesive set of criteria on which to assess the passages. As a results parameter it would allow the researcher to view the other narrative elements with which a given one coincides and, using analytical tools, to articulate the large- and small-scale patterns in which the church motif operates.
In that respect the archive would function like a moving S/Z, staking the narrative grounds on which to assess the operation of the narrative and following them to their fullest conclusion.
However, what is valuable in the Associations as they currently stand is their haphazard, a posteriori formulation, generated during the act of reading. The richness of threads that continually and unexpectedly enter the mind during reading should definitely be archived as part of the critical response to the text, as an adjunct to the blog and forum.
The folksonomic approach, therefore, would incorporate a tool that enables readers of the archive to annotate passages with their own Associations, contributing another dimension to the architecture of the search engine, the richness of results, and the quality of critical discourse. The folksonomic approach would hybridize the narratological method with a sort of reader-response mechanism, allowing a comparison of both as part of the long-term evolution of the study of the Recherche.
Ideally the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive would become a micro institution, functioning like a cross between an academic periodical and a book with multiple contributors. What form(s) will the full-length study(ies) ultimately take?
September 20th, 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
This archive is the culmination of work begun in three seminars during my first year in the English Ph.D. Program at the CUNY Graduate Center. At the beginning of Prof. Eve Sedgwick’s year-long Proust seminar in 2002-03 I found that the passages having to do with churches were electric to me. I’ve always had a profound fascination with Gothic cathedrals, but beyond that and my being a lapsed Catholic I couldn’t say exactly why I was having such an intense experience. What was happening in these particular narrative and textual situations, what was consistent within and accross them, that was resonating so strongly within me? Since the main goal of the course was to read the Recherche closely, I decided my term papers would constitute an extended meditation on the church motif with an eye toward writing a book-length study in the future.
When I began working on the paper near the end of the first semester I had an impulse to document each occurrence of the motif along with some interpretive information. Spreadsheet applications were not able to handle the formatting that I needed, so I devised in OpenOffice.org for Linux a horizontally oriented document with a table. Across the page, from left to right, I included the pagination information (volume, part, chapter, page numbers); the passage itself; what I thought were themes, concepts, motifs, or other structural features of the passage (together, what I call Associations); plus a note on the narrative context in order to keep in mind the larger picture. The idea was that this document would help me recall passages for whatever I ended up writing about. Aside from some general impressions on the motif and a statement of purpose, that was about all I completed during that semester.
During the January intersession I took the Program’s required course in research and critical methodology with Prof. David Greetham. Our readings on textual theory and criticism piqued my interest in the Proust project even more. When we got to the readings on archives I realized that I had been putting one together all this time. What did it mean textuallyâ€â€and therefore in terms of readingâ€â€that I was containing and documenting this particular category of experience? What would happen if I turned this spreadsheet into a searchable document whose content could be displayed and rearranged according to particular words or the abstractions I was teasing out of the passages? I raised these issues with Prof. Greetham and asked whether I could make a database as part of my final project for the course. He agreed and went one step further by suggesting that I add images or other multimedia elements. So I took his advice and began searching the Web for pictures of the churches mentioned in Proust’s novel.
I quickly realized that the database skills needed to make such a thing were well beyond what I already possessed and had time to acquire, so I asked my friend Jonathan for help. He very generously designed a database in Microsoft Access that allowed me to record all of the information and generate reports. I put all this together with the information already garnered from the novel and the images from the Web, wrote a rationale (which forms the basis of the Rationale page of this site), and submitted it to Prof. Greetham as my term project.
After the January course I worked on the archive intermittently. One productive stint came during a trip to France and Switzerland in July 2004 for my friend Anthony’s wedding. Before leaving for France I had it in mind that I would try to make it out to Illiers-Combray, the town in Eure-et-Loire that was the original of Combray in the Recherche (the name was hyphenated in 1970 in honor of Proust), and packed two cameras for the occasion, one for color film, the other for black and white. I managed to get some photos of Notre Dame and other parts of Paris. During a day trip to Chartres, where I took many photos of the exterior and interior, I learned that Illiers-Combray was an easy 30-minute train ride from there. I decided to go the next day and, when morning came, persisted in this despite having just finished a very late night out in Paris. I made it to Illiers-Combray barely awake and in desperate need of coffee, headed toward the center of town, wandered into a café and, while sitting at the counter, realized that what I was staring at across the street was the little porch I had seen in so many pictures before. I had walked right past the church without even noticing it.
I finished my coffee and began photographing the porch and façade of the church, first in black and white. Unfortunately, on the fifth or sixth shot my camera, a Canon FTb manufactured in 1974, decided to stop cooperating and the shutter froze. From then on I could only use my Olympus Zoom2000 snapshot camera. I went round the outside of the church and found the apse to be exactly as described in Volume 1 of the Recherche:
It was so crude, so devoid of artistic beauty, even of religious feeling. From the outside, since the street crossing which it commanded was on a lower level, its great wall was thrust upwards from a basement of unfaced ashlar, jagged with flints, in which there was nothing particularly ecclesiastical, the windows seemed to have been pierced at an abnormal height, and its whole appearance was that of a prison wall rather than of a church. (1 1 1 84)
I then went inside to photograph the chapel, altar, windows, and other objects, and was delighted to find so much color. The walls of the nave were deep red with a golden diamond pattern, the ceiling of the chapel a vibrant royal blue, the arch leading into it painted with religious scenes, and the beams below the boat-hull ceiling painted with multi-colored patterns and coats of arms. Each panel of the ceiling had a nearly life-sized portrait of a saint, which can be seen at this page on the website of ASEPIC (Association Pour la Sauvegarde de l’Église et du Patrimoine d’Illiers-Combray).
The stained-glass windows, too, were beautiful, and I was surprised to find one with women in yellow, much like the window in the Recherche depicting St Hilaire, “a lady in a yellow robe” (1 1 1 145). My overall impression of the church was that it felt like a well-worn and well-loved home.
After taking pictures of the interior I went out to the parking lot to get some distance shots and then headed into the tourism office. I spoke there with a very nice woman about the various books they had concerning Proust and came away with several. A book on the history of the Parish, written in the 19th Century by the Abbey J. Marquis and the original of the one written by the Curé of Combray, is a fount of information with great photographsâ€â€very easy to become immersed in. I also picked up a cartoon book by Stéphane Heuet, which is an adaptation of the Combray portions of the Recherche, and two books by P.-L. Larcher on the relation of Illiers to Proust’s Combray, Le Parfum de Combray and Le Temps Retrouvé d’Illiers.
As our conversation caused me to miss the noon train back to Chartres, I now had nearly two hours to spare before the next one. So I began heading back toward an inn I had noticed near the station and was just past the church when it began to pour. Wearing all linen, I ran to the inn as fast as I could in flip-flops, burst through the door, shook the water off my glasses, and asked to be seated for lunch. My hope was to have a sandwich and maybe fix my camera but I instead found myself seated with five men who worked together and under the obligation to order a four course meal. It was a cozy, turn-of-the-century dining room with beautiful wainscoting and patterned wallpaper. Since I was very tiredâ€â€which the sausage plate, cuisse de canard, rich mashed potatoes, cheese and wine did not alleviateâ€â€I found it difficult to hold up my end of the conversation. But my companions were gracious enough and we had an interesting talk about family names in the region. I left Illiers-Combray thinking I would return under better weather in order to explore the town and its environs a little more.
Development of the archive really didn’t pick up again until December 2004 when it came time to complete the independent study for the Certificate in Instructional Technology and Pedagogy (ITP). The ITP program requires an independent study of a teaching activity involving interactive technologyâ€â€in a real classroomâ€â€followed by a written assessment of its success. Since I had already committed to building the Proust archive, I decided to write a proposal incorporating it into a lesson. It was unlikely, however, that an undergraduate literature course would contain enough of Proust to make the archive a viable tool. I therefore decided to conduct the activity in our graduate research and methodology course, the very same in which I began to develope it. If few people in the course had read Proust, at least they would have been reading the theory on which the archive was based and the activity could have a variety of approaches. Prof. Greetham agreed to let me conduct the study in his January section of the course.
Now I had to make the archive available on the web in time for the independent study activity. This had been a goal since the beginning, but though I had some web development skills they were not up to the task of integrating a site with a database. So I asked my friend John, a professional web developer, for help in this. I made a page showing how I wanted the search results to look, and he wrote the ASP pages that implemented the text search. With that working, I had to transcribe the rest of the church passages into the OpenOffice document and then enter them in the database. This was a very intense week, during which my girlfriendâ€â€now my fiancéeâ€â€helped by transcribing passages I had marked in two whole volumes (how could I not marry her after that?). The initial site was finally finished and uploaded to our web server for private use by the class.
At the time of the independent studyâ€â€January 2005â€â€I put in a request with Random House to use the text in a public, fully developed version of the site. This process took about a year and three months in which there were many questions and answers given back and forth, and in which I was referred also to Éditions Gallimard.
With the text usage permission finally granted in March 2006, I put off work on my dissertation prospectus to finish the archive. My friend John worked very hard to implement four more search functions and made them integratable. In the meantime, I scanned all the negatives I had taken at Paris, Chartres, and Illiers-Combray, optimized them for the website, and did much more specialized image research to enhance the variety and accuracy of the pictures.
With much of that finished, the final step was to get permission to use the many hundreds of images in the archive that are not my own. This started as an epic, multi-lingual nightmare that ended up putting me in touch with some of the strangest, nicest, and most generous people I’ve ever had fun with. Be sure to find them in the image credits and Links pages.
I hope you enjoy this archive and find it helpful for your studies, whatever they might be. There are many people who contributed to this resource, so please do read the Contributors page and the Copyright section of the About page.
November 30th, 2006
This is a site for researching and discussing Proust. It provides a searchable database of all church-related passages in the Recherche along with related images. Many of the images depict the original churches described in the novel or a scene that otherwise evokes something in the passage to which it is attached.
The site also features image galleries of the churches included in the search engine, and more. While only the blogging staff may post to the homepage, there is a discussion forum that anyone may register for and use.
Please be sure to read the about and rationale pages for more information about this site’s purpose and uses.
November 29th, 2006