Annotating Jean Toomer’s modernist 1923 novel Cane was a lot of fun—it is a sentence I decided to start with after coming up with dozens of others and deleting them all in the end. The second thing I want to share is that the process of annotating, as many other analyses of literary writing, is a work of art. Toomer’s Cane was a great eye-opening novel for me—it’s been a while since I was so interested in a modernist text from that period. It contained everything I liked in terms of form and style (as an active proponent of Russian formalists, I can’t leave aside the text’s form). 

Our team selected chapters from the novel we all wanted to work on. Before annotating the very novel, I decided it might be a good idea to offer a bibliographical list of journals that published earlier parts and poems of the novel. I, too, compiled a somewhat condensed list of critical reception that appeared in 1923-1925, right after the novel’s publication. Later, I was able to find an issue of the journal The Liberator available online and compare the chapter “Becky” from the journal with the one published in the novel. 

On the one hand, one would say there weren’t that many significant differences—if you don’t count those twenty-some changed that took place—the majority of these changes were concerned punctuation marks and spelling. Although this may, quite reasonably, seem to be insignificant changes, on the other hand, such changes might tell us more than we initially expect. For instance, this is a great starting point for someone interested in how the editorial institute worked in the past—how the language stylists worked at both publishing houses and the editorial offices of literary journals. Whose idea was to implement those changes? Did it come from the press or the journal’s editor? Or, in the end, was this Toomer himself who decided to make those changes in the text in a matter of a year. To figure out who was the one how made those changes, one would need to set out for a search in the archives—the starting point will be archivegrid.com, where one can find out where the Jean Toomer papers are held and if there are any archival collections related to the press and/or the journal. Also, this is quite a telling example that suggests us that a diligent editor of, for example, scholarly edition of Toomer’s Cane should pay special attention to the versions that appear in many journals and study to, among other things, how Toomer’s text changed, developed and came to life. 

If preparing a digital scholarly publication of Toomer’s Cane, the digital tools would be of enormous help to mark and showcase these (and others) significant changes in the novel. Coming up with some user-friendly code that could demonstrate, by clicking just one time, the differences between the journal publication and the novel. (In this respect, I really like the way Lyn Hejinian’s book My Way was edited by Daniel Carter for the Scholarly Editing.)

Our group decided to annotate Cane by focusing on pop culture references during that time period as well as some contemporary references. Our choices for annotation platform were Hypothes.is or Manifold, and since we wanted to include media, our first instinct was to use Manifold. While Lisa was researching Manifold, I wanted to collect some resources for my group on music and art created during that decade. I wanted to focus specifically on African American artists of the Harlem Renaissance, since Toomer was an important figure in this movement. I had a very brief introduction to the Harlem Renaissance and knew of some artists like Aaron Douglas, but wanted to expand my knowledge. I found two articles through the GC Library by Barlow and Francis that were helpful to my group. Barlow’s Literary Ethnomusicology and the Soundscape of Jean Toomer’s Cane explores the musical roots in Cane and Francis’ Painting the South with a Northern Eye provides a background of many northern artists who went back “home” to the South to find inspiration and paint everyday life of African Americans. I found several works by Aaron Douglas and was successful in inserting them into Hypothes.is in case we decided to drop Manifold. 

The team moved away from Manifold due to our time limits as well as the difficulty in inserting media. Lisa uploaded Cane to Manifold and while it looked clean and professional, it would have taken too much time to rework our contributions into an accepted format and we would not be able to edit directly on Manfiold. After we decided on Hypothes.is, we discussed using a cleaner version of Cane. I had some experience creating a site on the Academic Commons, so I created one for the group and uploaded Cane to a new page. I shared the link with the group and we began our annotations, each choosing what part spoke to us. 

Re-reading Cane after looking through art and media reinforced the importance of music and spirituals in the text. In our class annotations, I focused more on the text and imagery and what I knew of the South during the early twentieth century. A Portrait in Georgia still stands out to me. I remember commenting on how lyrical some of the text was, but I didn’t realize how much until my group began annotating. I added a few random annotations to other group member’s work, including Becky, but most of the annotations were in Cotton Song and Box Seat. I really wanted to connect the lyrical part of the text to art and actual spirituals. Aaron Douglas was an inspiration for our group, but his pieces from James Weldon Johnson’s work (most notably Judgement Day) had to be included in Cane. The Art Deco style and his reimagining of spirituals align with Toomer’s writing. I also couldn’t help but include Paul Robeson’s rendition of Go Down Moses (let My People Go). I get chills every time I hear it, and encourage others to listen and learn more about Robeson. 

Overall I enjoyed my introduction to Cane and Hypothes.is. Hypothes.is was very easy to learn and use, especially considering our time constraints and that we are remote learning. It was very easy to embed an image, video, or link and I like the addition of Public Note. That is a great way to share recommended readings and other information to your private group or the public.

[I apologize, I thought I posted this last week.]

Thinking back on my early years in Catholic school, a few things have stuck with me. I remember how itchy the uniform was as well as some of the bizarre rules we had to follow. One of the rules was that each fall, we had to write our name in our textbook under “Owner” and then look through the books we received and check the covers and title page for any markings made by the children who had it the year before. We had to continue this practice during the year, letting the teacher know of any random scribbles and underlining, or risk demerits. Fast forward to my work in archives, where myself and researchers become almost giddy when finding annotations in books, but only “serious” annotations. Reading Lerer’s article Devotion and Defacement: Reading Children’s Marginalia reminded me of my textbooks and left me self reflecting as a librarian on how I view children’s marginalia and its future. 

I agree with Lerer that many in my profession value the “pristine copy” (p. 128) of a book and will devalue a book filled with scribble or damaged in another way. He argues that librarianship of the late 19th and early 20th centuries “decried the child who messed with books, whether they were on loan or bought” (p. 128) and suppressed children’s imaginations while detaching the book as a personal object. Lerer supports these arguments with numerous examples, including the exhibition Marginalia and Other Crimes, the librarian in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, and the (in)famous Anne Carroll Moore of NYPL. For those who don’t know about children’s librarian Anne Carroll Moore, she was extremely influential at NYPL. For instance, she did not like the book Goodnight Moon so it wasn’t part of the library’s holdings until 1972, almost 30 years after its release. 

As a librarian, I do not condone anyone defacing library books because they do belong to the library and we are borrowing the library’s property. I do support the more recent library programs that center activities around books as a way to connect to the book and its lessons without damaging it. But I had to circle back the “Owner” label in my textbooks. If I am listed as the owner, why can’t I underline, circle, or even write in my book? This could explain why I was so hesitant towards annotation until college, even when I owned the book.

Lerer placed heavy emphasis on what the book is for a child and by marking or annotating it, the child is sharing their private thoughts while changing the book forever. Their marginalia is a mix of “devotion and defacement” (p 146), and a place of magic. Quite literally in Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

I do think that children’s marginalia is not something that should be written off or discouraged (unless it is in a library copy), but I am curious as to how children of this digital age will continue marking up their books. During this pandemic, I know that many parents borrowed/purchased digital books for their children and themselves. Print books are not disappearing anytime soon, but how will scholars in the future study children’s marginalia if more people are buying digital resources for their children?

I went into this project with a large amount of what I suppose I’d call animosity. Ever since grade school, I’ve encountered a number of teachers who tried to make annotation stick with every student who entered their classrooms, and apparently I was lucky – many people I’ve met have mentioned that they would be given graded annotation assignments, where they would be graded on the quality of their annotation as early as 6th grade. Even without accounting for how inflexible I was at that age, I don’t know if I would have been able to complete such an assignment due to a few other problems. When I take notes on a piece, I take them in the traditional, if not sometimes unorthodox manner of recording key information on an external surface, rather than upon the piece itself. I’ve heard people claim that reading back through a text you’ve annotated is “even better the second time,” but whenever I’d look through a hand-annotated book in school, I’d just get distracted by the smudged handwriting in the margins, or the Post-It bits sticking out from pages. Additionally, when I handwrite, I must choose between it being legible, or it being complete within a reasonable amount of time, and furthermore, at least to me, it’s much more expedient, organized, and less reliant on Post-Its to write one’s thoughts outside the book along with an associated page number. Then you could even use that sheet of paper as a bookmark for the very book.

I’m contributing that last paragraph because working with hypothes.is, with all of what I wrote in mind, a tremendous game changer for someone like me. I’m much faster at typing than I am at writing by hand, I don’t have to worry about permanently defacing the text or wasting paper, and depending on the text, I might even prefer to read it on-screen. I’ll say this before going forward: while I’m still not a particularly large fan of annotation in the first place as a form of note taking, using hypothes.is to annotate a text for a supposed audience – such as anyone looking at the Office Gingers’ final product – feels far, far better than painstakingly scribbling in the margins of books for no reason but to appease a short-tempered teacher.

Regarding the project itself and the way it unfolded, we originally were going to use CUNY’s own Manifold for our annotation of Jean Toomer’s Cane. However, we found quickly that for the time allotted and the nature of the project, it just wasn’t too great a fit. It was a multi-day ordeal to even get everyone properly situated as members of the Manifold project, and Manifold’s method of adding media didn’t fit too well with what we were trying to do. For a longer-term, more formal project, I think the group was in agreement that Manifold could be great to revisit. Thus, we turned our sights towards the likes of WordPress and hypothes.is, as well as simple email for communication.

On the subject of adding media, perhaps my favorite part of hypothes.is is the fact that its media embedding functionality is straightforward, yet robust and flexible. In fact, my only complaint is that one is unable to upload content directly from one’s computer, but the only way this impacted the project was when I was still getting my bearings, and I saved a few images I wanted to include in the annotation to my drive (I quickly realized my mistake). Hypothes.is also lent itself well to improving communication; a group member could mark a passage to call “dibs” on it, and then they could come back later and elaborate on the significance of that passage, or add images, or so one and so forth.

Most of my own contributions were pieces by Aaron Douglas, an artist who’s popped up a few times throughout my educational career and who I thus have some familiarity with. My process was to go through the piece, cross-reference pieces of text with the titles and content of Douglas’ work, and in the case of a particularly noteworthy connection, I would add in the appropriate painting. It wasn’t too hard to find his art online, so I didn’t have to spend too much time searching, leaving me more time to contemplate what I should put where. Admittedly, my criteria were a bit restrictive and I probably could have contributed more if I was more flexible with where I added the images in. Furthermore, I didn’t want to put the same image more than once, but there was definitely cases where one image could fit multiple parts of the text.

We were originally going to stay very close to the original prompt and use only content from around or before the time of writing of Cane. However, I think the general consensus in this regard was that it was needlessly restrictive and shut out some sorts of relevant and genuinely interesting associations and analysis. Douglas isn’t too far after Toomer chronologically, but a lot of his work came well over a decade after Cane. At first, I worried about the exact year of the Douglas pieces I used, which in turn caused me to worry about the size of my library of usable work, but after this change, it greatly expanded what content I could use.

In all honesty, while this project wasn’t my cup of tea, it could have been far, far worse. I’m sitting here wondering how it would have gone if, for instance, we were made to purchase physical copies of the text, physically annotate them, then photograph our annotations and send them over the web to one another for further processing. My best guess is that it wouldn’t have gone well at all. In any case though, I think the project went just fine, and while I might not use it for note taking, hypothes.is is a useful enough tool that I might use it for another project someday.

For the annotation project, the Office Gingers group decided annotate Jean Toomer’s Cane with pop culture references from around the time the piece was written (the 1920’s), as well as contemporary times. With this prompt, wee annotated the piece using with a flurry of various forms of media: paintings, photographs, videos, music, etc., turning the annotations section into a visually-appealing and lively space. Creating this digital space allowed our group to not only provide our perspectives and make connections, but also extend and contextualize Cane in its historical context and index continuities across time periods.

From a technical and logistical standpoint, we had initially planned to use Manifold, as it a recommended platform and seemed to hold a lot more capabilities than hypothes.is. Additionally, we wanted a platform where we could input Cane in its original format and clean it up a little bit. After playing around with it, however, we found that it was quite complex and difficult to use: We were unable to easily add people to the manifold, and we also couldn’t embed images/videos into the annotations themselves. Thus, in order to make our lives a little easier, we went ahead with hypothes.is, since it allowed for embeddable YouTube videos, images, etc., and could be easily shared to others in the class.

In regards to the annotations themselves, I focused on providing music references of the time, and connecting them to specific pieces in Cane. My exploration began from a theoretical standpoint, taking inspiration from my past readings of Black Studies scholars such as Alexander Weheliye, Fred Moten, and Saidiya Hartman, and corroborating their work with a piece that Georgette recommended called “Literary Ethnomusicology and the SoundScape of Jean Toomer’s Cane” by Daniel Barlow. The last piece, in particular, provided a foundation for me to think more critically about the tropes and historical context from which Toomer was writing, and to consider how African-American ways of being can be teased out in the piece. Thus, I was most drawn to “Blood-Burning Moon” and “Beehive” in Cane. For me, the use and repetition of song and singing in the former is representative of the larger history of what has Weheliye has dubbed “sonic afro-modernity.” The latter (“Beehive”) on the other hand, reminds me of the ways Black artists and writers have both criticized the the colonial, scientific-epistemological structures that index Black people as animal-human hybrids, yet use these tropes as a mode of challenging the Human order and redefine ideas of freedom and agency outside that very order (see: Becoming Human by Zakiyyah I. Jackson).

Thus, starting with this theoretical foundation, my methodology was quite brutal: My primary mode of investigation was just doing simple Google searches. For example, when I wanted to find pieces that I tried to connect to “Beehive,” I would just type “African American folk music bee” into the search. From just that, I was able to find Memphis Minnie’s “Bumble Bee Blues,” and from there I attempted to draw connections between the two. In other cases, I would just type “African American folk music 1920s” and just scour for what I could find and draw to my chosen pieces. From there, I was able to find Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” Henry T. Burleigh’s “A Balm in Giliad.” Lastly, knowing from Barlow’s piece that Toomer was highly influenced nby African-American spirituals in his writing of Cane, I found a video from 1929 of an African-American spiritual choir.

Overall, I had a fun time making these connections, which gave me the space to place Toomer’s Cane in its historical context via an exploration of pop culture and media. I think its interesting to see my other groups members’ annotations and draw similarities between our respective analyses, and drawing a larger picture of Cane together.

As promised, but much later than I’d hoped, here are some ideas for our “play” unit group exercise, in which we’ll assume roles and “play” in and around a slim novel of our collective choice. Please use the link below to enter your preferences. But first, here are the finalists. All four are fairly slim, fast reads, which was Priority One:

The Awakening:

turn-of-the-century novel by Kate Chopin, a pioneer of women’s fiction in the US. The plot relates the story of Edna Pontellier, a genteel married woman in South Lousiana, who breaks free of her conventional social role in all sorts of ways. It doesn’t end well for her.
Why it would be fun: scandalous at the time, revived in the 70s in “second wave” of feminism, lively plot/characters/setting. And it’s in public domain, so cheap/fast to get.

The Bluest Eye:

Toni Morrison’s first novel, published in 1970s and set in 1940 or so. Traces the story of the Black community in a small industrial town in OH, focusing on the travails of Pecola, a vulnerable poor Black girl who yearns for “blue eyes” and thus is subjected to the era’s tacit elevation of “white beauty.”
Why it would be fun: well, not exactly fun in term of the content, but Morrison was a young mother when she wrote the novel, which would be fun to explore. In addition to the panoply of vivid characters, one could play a “second wave” feminist reviewer, a member of the Black Arts movement, or perhaps secondary-school teacher or ordinary school-age reader of the text. Not pub domain, but very cheap and widely available.

Benito Cereno:

Melville’s masterful novella whose protagonist, the cheerful-yet-clueless Amasa Delano, happens upon a strange ship people with mostly enslaved people and a skeleton crew of whites. Sloooowly he comes to realize that the enslaved people have taken over the ship. The drama is in the amazingly distorted vision Delano possesses, which makes him blind to the Black agency that’s in front of his nose.
Why it would be fun: hugely influential text with lots of great characters to play. Melville has a fascinating biography himself, and he based it on a real incident, so one could play the “real” Amasa Delano. Rich reception history, so one could play a critic or editor or teacher. Pub domain: lots of free options, including one on CUNY’s Manifold instance.

The Great Gatsby:

you probably know it, but it’s Nick Carraway’s narrative of Jay Gatz/Gatsby’s stunning rise and fall amid the backdrop of Jazz Age NYC.
Why it would be fun: Bathtub gin, gangsters, racism, and flappers: what’s not to like? One could play Fitzgerald, one of many characters, one of the many significant critics or adapters of the text (Baz Luhrman, director of a recent film version, or the Elevator Repair Service’s production of GATZ, a nearly verbatim adaptation for the stage).

To get a sense of how the game looks, you can see a prior DH 720s crack at two Nella Larsen novellas here. And here’s some honors English students at Hunter “playing” a collection of stories from the African-American writer Charles Chesnutt. From the splash pages, click on GAMES to access the actual play for both projects. It’s a bit hard to “read” someone else’s game, since it’s in backwards order and really is more process- than product-oriented. But at least you can check out the interface and get a feel.

Tonight, we’ll finalize what texts and how many groups, and we’ll also try to quickly rough in roles as much as possible. Then you’ll create your character page (here’s an example) and make your first move for next week, which will require some background reading. I’ll hack together some resources for research once I know what text/s we’re playing.

Here’s the Google Form to help us rough in the project: takes one minute only!

The Team With No Name members decided from the beginning of this project to focus on a particular section of the text. Coming from vastly different backgrounds and perspectives, this helped us engage with the assignment in our own individual way, although we continued to work together throughout the process. We met several times (on Zoom) and shared a Google Doc to discuss our work. Most of our interactions focused on sharing sources and sharpening our focus. Our interests ranged from the publications themselves, to a purely analytical view of the specific text, the tools of annotation, and the historical context for each audience. I chose to focus on annotating Fern and Beehive and drafting a brief introduction to our project. It was important for this project that our findings and perspectives thread together, and the remarkable and nuanced body of work about Cane in the early 1970s provided the focus of our research. 

This cornucopia of academic interests made this assignment more interesting, but we were probably too ambitious with our very academic research-focused approach, and this project feels decidedly unfinished. However, contextualizing Fern and Beehive across its different audiences clearly illustrates that an open annotation project like this one can never be finished. There can be limitations of the platform itself as we discussed in class, but a project like this, much like Cane itself, can be continually reinvented. There will always be a new reader bringing her own evolving perspective to Cane. As the next step to this project we envisioned annotating and expanding across other selections. I would have liked to include more multimedia to all the “songs”, similar to the lone newspaper find on Seventh Street, and include more primary sources from the 1920s. 

Looking through the history of responses to the novel, and considering its ‘evolving’ audience in the context of our readings (especially Iser’s The Implied Reader), exposed an interesting development in recent years. As more contemporary readers and literary critics framed Cane in the context of their own social and historical moment, there was a consistent effort to centralize the author’s own experience to speak about race in a new and nuanced way. This was consistently done by highlighting Toomer’s own words about his racial identity and experience. While this kind of engagement may appear to place the author ahead of the text, I think this focus on Toomer is accidental. His words happen to reveal what the audience already understands about the social context that Cane came out of; Jean Toomer’s own experience conveniently places Cane in a historical context to highlight the readers’ interests. 

Annotation is arguably a piece of art, so it has to be approached respectively. From other readings we covered in the past, it was also fascinating to learn that, although annotation is a genre that has been around for a while, we still do not have a clear definition or set of definitions for what is annotation. This even makes the whole situation even more intriguing and keeps us in suspense. 

Elysa Graham’s article, written stylishly, offers a panorama of projects related to the attempts of annotating James Joyce’s celebrated work, Ulysses. A masterpiece of modernism, this 1922 novel, is somewhat problematic in terms of its form and the way we know the novel now. A number of generations of scholars working in textual studies made efforts to produce what could be defined as an ideal, or ideally accurate, Ulysses. Therefore, it is somewhat surprising to me that Graham mentions (albeit in passing) Hans Walter Gabler, a German literary scholar responsible for producing what is currently being considered as the complete variant of a critical edition of Joyce’s novel, and barely mentions John Kidd, another scholar of Joyce who once was supposed to prepare “not merely a perfect text, ‘as Joyce wrote it,’ but also a marriage of modern technology and literary genius.” Moreover, the “manifold connections and allusions” would be “instantly visible via hyperlinks, and the common reader would be able to appreciate the infinite recesses of Joyce brilliance.” [1] Kidd never finished the project, needless to say. It would have been interesting to see if Graham’s piece would say more about which versions of the novels the scholars involved in digital projects typically rely on and if any of them try to do something else than Gabler and Kidd did. 

By reading the Graham article, I found out more about Amanda Visconti’s project Infinite Ulysses which key idea was, as I understand, to make the novel available and be annotated by the ordinary users who can create an account, log in and leave their ideas, comments. This is a strikingly great idea, but then I start thinking about scholarly the existing parameters of annotations that are left by the users (if such parameters existed at all). And, in general, would need to have regulations in projects like that? Nonetheless, in a novel as problematic and complicated as Ulysses, having a set of some shared visions towards the annotation process might be a good idea. 

Also, I have a general comment regarding the usage of online annotated projects. I wonder if the people working on these projects think about their target audience as they construct sites, divide responsibilities, start work on the texts. If these annotated projects are aimed at undergraduate and graduate students, would those projects help a different audience—say, scholars, working on Joyce professionally. For instance, are these versions going to have new and fresh for scholars and researching working with these texts? And vice versa, of course. What kind of digitally created, hyperlinked platform produced by scholars and researchers would benefit students of different types.

Finally, as I read the Graham piece, I started to think about the possibility (and necessity, why not) of some emuseum devoted entirely to lost digital projects involving annotations. Interestingly enough, in the past, we were thinking of books like vanishing objects, but now we also can start thinking of these online projects, which might end up delve into the abyss without leaving any footprints behind. Some of the projects mentioned by Graham can illustrate this idea.

[1] Jack Hitt, “The Strange Case of the Missing Joyce Scholar,” New York Times (June 12, 2018).