This title is taken from William Gaddis’ book The Recognitions which reminds me of a quote by Max Read in a recent issue of Book Forum where he reviewed Richard Seymour’s The Twittering Machine: “the social industry wants us to keep writing—and writing, and writing, and writing, rendering legible, analyzable, and profitable nearly all our basic social interaction. And while massive Facebook server farms whirring away in Scandinavia might be able to make some vague sense of all that data, the rest of us can barely hear over the noise. Each new byte of information adds confusion and entropy, and takes us further away from meaning and consequence.” Where do annotations and online criticism fall alongside the host of other online interactions? My impression is that literary criticism is one of the most defensible sorts of writing one can do on the internet, but the canvas matters. A website like Genius differentiates itself from personal blogs, open letters, or comment systems, because it allows the writer to pinpoint exactly the section of a text they are referring to. Without this guiding finger, online writing ends up being solipsistic and circular. How could Vannevar Bush not have foreseen that his imaginary devices would leave us unprepared to contend with them appropriately? The point Seymour’s text makes is that our devices don’t have control over us grounded in their built-in social or biological “incentives”. But rather, we have a death drive towards using them in order to escape the weight of time. Edmund Tyone at the end of Eugene O’Neil’s Long Day’s journey Into Night knows this feeling well when he quotes Baudelaire: ”Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.”

The reasons for using Genius to annotate a story from Cane are many. It is intuitive, playful (essential to DH studies), and part of the contemporary conversation about a whole range of texts. I have no doubt that in the future a high school student will search for Jean Toomer and the Genius entries will pop up allowing them to see scholarly work performed using a platform they are familiar with. Job well done team! Now if only the remainder of online writing followed suit. In my mind every “comments” system should be done away with in favor of an annotation system. It would potentially solve two problems plaguing the online world: It would give meaning to our writing, which in its current state is merely an opportunity to demonstrate personality and signal one’s affiliation. The other point is that it would allow commentators to think like students of Literature or Philosophy and come to terms with specific parts of a text. Honing in on phrases or sentences that strike them as useful or problematic. In this way people would judge others by the content of their words and ideas, not feeling like they were at war with other personalities. To turn online writing into the study of language and force of thought would be a milestone in returning meaning back into our interactions with each other. The canvas is corrupt, and the free-for-all that has been the comments system is in need of a revolution.

We tend to have such high hopes for the future. The Vannevar Bush piece is a good example of “exponential future-thinking” where the present status is just extended into the future. We don’t do these kinds of thought experiments anymore, unless you work in a Graphics Cards or are trying to predict the size of the next iphone, which for all of Bush’s talk of things getting smaller and more company, could he have predicted the demands for larger iPhones? 

The Professor mentioned that for all our general hopes for the future, it’s difficult to think beyond 2020. That’s because future-talk tends to cover the topics that Bush selects as essential talking-points: 1. Ways of getting beyond automation and 2. Speeding up our selection process. The first point was one which dominated discussions about the role of AI in the workforce, but with record levels of unemployment, people aren’t so worried about “robots taking over their” jobs, as having one in the first place. As to the second, well, this problem is always by our side: it has merely changed form. How do we now select truth from falsity, how do we keep our social lives and select the correct object of attention when we are being tugged at every which way by technology, finally how do we select our “notes” of thought when our digital selves are spread between so many platforms?

2 Comments from the class got me thinking about “Associative” knowledge that is mentioned in the Bush piece: “The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain.”

The first is Matt’s note in the chat about not having recognizable handwriting when writing notes. Matt continued that it wasn’t so important that they be readable, but recognizable. I feel the same way about my own handwriting, it is a series of symbols which I can’t make out, but rather they bring me back to a point in time in which I wrote them. It’s more visual than linguistic, very interesting.

The second was Maggi’s comment about relying on a range of notepads in all shapes and sizes. It acted as a mnemonic device I believe she mentioned. The Blair pieces mentions mnemonics as well: “Medieval notes are best preserved in the margins of manuscripts, whether made by thereader directly or by a professional reader to aid the reading of another.They served primarily as mnemonic or meditative aids or to enhance the ordinatio of the text, but occasionally they also took a self-reflexive or potentially dissenting tone.” In Maggi’s case, she has formal elements of note-taking which act as mnemonics, I wonder if there have been any studies of historical note-taking practices which emphasis the structure of the practice beyond the materials used? Essentially is there any emphasis on difference in writing the notes which depended on the subject of the note, rather than simply tossing everything in a Quarto or tablet? I think I may have an answer. If visual elements are the key to a successful mnemonic in writing then perhaps the ornate calligraphy that I’ve seen on decorated bibles would go far in helping people remember elements of a story from the Testament. What kind of equivalent is there for note-taking? I tend to think of them in stodgy terms, but maybe that’s not generous enough.

Counterpoint is an important musical composition style which involves playing two or more melodies alongside each other in related keys, and it was especially popular in the Baroque period. While we don’t have the ability to read two texts at the same time, it is possible to listen to two texts at once. What does his kind of experience reveal? To hear two narrators speak at the same time would be nonsensical, so an experiment involving playing two audio books at once would be a miserable failure. But I argue that the sometimes caustic recording that I put together which plays the Dickens short story narrated by our Reader interspersed with sound clips from News related to current events, achieves a kind of polyphony of sounds and contrapuntal elegance. 

The intent here is to force inspiration. When we read we are alone with the author. No thoughts can emerge which are not a product of the two. Once we include a third stream of ideas the ability to inspire is increased exponentially. We may interact with the sound sample in relation to a word from the spoken text, or we may instead focus our attention on the narrative of the text picking up a phrase or two of the sound samples as our attention to it wavers. Why don’t these stacked sounds simply melt into a mess of unknowability? In the same way that a viola and violin, piano and voice, or mandolin and bassoon carry explicitly different tones, the introduction of a lead aesthetic sample of Narration which runs through the recording acclimates us to its conditions. The sound samples are different enough in kind for our brain to separate the two. 

The Presidential debate of September 29 was a great example of how two voices talking over each other results in a distracted miasma of sound. The case was that it was two elderly male voices. When the Narrator of Bartleby mentioned “respect” and “decency”, at that moment I played the clip of AOC berating Rep Ted Yoho for his crude comments toward her. The two audio clips play alongside each other, and I would put forth that because of significant differences in their aesthetics qualities (male vs female, close vs reverby sound, moderate vs impassioned speech) the brain is able to compartmentalize them and make sense of the two at the same time. The aesthetics of our audio project are more closely aligned with collage art, which are meant to force an inspiration out of the viewer and their relation between two or more artistic elements. Again, this is less a relationship between the reader and the author and instead places the reader (listener) in the position of a conduit or channel through which novelty is found in the juxtaposition of presented ideas.

In the below picture, the visual layout of the clips can be seen. An outline of where the clips lay is as follows: Channels 1, 2, and 4 are News Clips which play at intervals and have about 2 minutes between them. Channel 3 is a 3 minutes audio sample of an office environment which plays almost the entire duration of the recording. Channel 5 is the stitched together narration of the book.

The communal workplace ceased to exist in March of this year, and for those of us who have had to commute to a 9-5 office, we probably won’t be returning until next year. In this sense, the workplace is now an imagined world existing only as we remember it. There are a number of noise machines or atmospheric sound generators on the internet that replicate this environment, and allow us to relive the audial elements. They pose an interesting Philosophical puzzle to me and https://imisstheoffice.eu/ in particular is representative of a great work in digital humanities which brings this shared experience to life. MIT Technology Review also recently ran an article on this phenomenon which goes to show its contemporary relevance in technology circles.

If we were told today would be the last day in an office, we might bring home objects that were dear to us, or take photos of our desks. Few of us would think to take a field recording as a snapshot in time. Even then, a sample of sound wouldn’t be able to encompass the whole of experience. Let’s imagine we took a recording for one minute. We might miss the squeaky wheel of our neighbor we were used to hearing around lunch, or the clattering of keys as a late email comes in. These noise machines attempt to unify the standard elements and its success can be gauged on how precisely they meet our expectations. 

Sound effects are used in audiobooks in order to transport the reader, so these elements are nothing new. An audiobook on war might include machine gun fire, or a children’s book set in a zoo might include bioacoustics animal noises. These are transportive and secondary to the reading, but nonetheless important to an overall immersive quality.

I’d like to lay out one necessary and one sufficient condition of audiobooks, but leave the rest I leave to Philosophers of Aesthetics:

A necessary condition of an audio book is that it is an oralization of a text. I would argue that the office experience is one which has an agreed upon script because it is uniquely banal and practiced ad infinitum. If we allow that this script is not written down, but ingrained in us as and handed down as we spend time in a particular role, and a script is a kind of text, we may allow that it is also a candidate for adaptation. Audiobooks of “texts” from purely oral traditions also are considered audiobooks without much opposition.

We can also with a degree of accuracy ascertain what and what are not office sounds. That explains the limited scope of the office script. Street sounds, loud chatter about very personal matters, and restaurant sounds would not be counted among those we hear in the office. Opening and closing doors, low chatter, the hum of printers and copiers, count among those we would expect instead. I would argue there is a limited set and perhaps no more than 10 audial elements we might identify as essential to the office script. 

A sufficient condition of audio books is that the speaker is playing roles, or acting parts. A person is not their occupation. And in an office space they are acting out certain lines of dialogue and behavior according to their position. Whatever language used in the office must then be considered performative. A conversation for another time would be: if people are working from are they then relegated to an always-on work personality? This condition is sufficient because we must make room for the Author of a text reading of their autobiography in which case they would not be acting out anything: they are dictating lived experience.

Our relation to a cloud-based approach to unify data sources depends on how difficult the task is to compile a set of our thoughts when reading Ebooks spread across many devices. Far from the idyllic cumulus set against a patch of baby blue drifting overhead, my cloud has rendered sopping my highlights and notes, raining on any attempt to facilitate distributed reading. 

Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books presence grew in embodied size and complexity as the Mobi file was passed from Kindle app on my iPhone, to Amazon Fire tablet, and finally the Kindle software for Windows over the period of a week. I’ll leave it for Ebook historians to gauge how my conclusion Marginalia is opposed to the format of an e-text holds up; but as the “reverse bell drive” of Price’s estimation that will see books “bear witness to the mental and emotional lives of their readers” and drive readers’ annotations back to the fore, the problem of HCI has to be dealt with first. It may have to do with the legal limitations set when we “borrow” or “license” a text from Amazon. That each device, with their unique manufacturers, has built-in limitations regarding how a text can be modified. DRM and strict EULAs could also be culprits. But don’t highlights sit on top of a text, whereas notes and annotations sit alongside, and from this perspective there is hardly any modification of the original text going on?

Price notes that in East Asia the phone is the preferred method of reading ebooks, in France its laptops, and in Britain “e-readers have begun losing ground to phones”. But what about a peripatetic American who will read a text on three different devices before getting through it? Price writes that a company called Rebook allows users to generate “association copies” and “give away ebooks that they’ve underlined or annotated”. We really hold our own thoughts on texts in such damn high esteem, and still are relegated to the Sidebar! It’s a shame there isn’t a universal design system that emulates the notation capabilities of hypothes.is, Manifold, and Markdown.

Yellow announces its return Zelig-like from far-flung devices in shades of pale, mellow, and stark. I now have three sets of yellow tints to mark highlights, and their varying shades are refocusing my attention where they ought to have been uniform. I’m naturally led to believe that the stark yellow lines of text are of more importance than the mellow ones, and following the hierarchy down, pale yellow lines should be considered an afterthought. Accounting for differences in screen resolution, color calibration, and refresh rate, my laptop ought to be seen as the source of truth, but I fear that it has exacerbated differences due to its position as a Gaming laptop that supports sRGB colors. 

With my highlights proving unreliable, I move on to the notes section which has imported properly from my devices, but sits puerile. Alan Liu takes this up in “From Reading to Social Computing’: that scribbling in the margin is “a whole zone of literary activity that is undecidably readerly and writerly”. But he equates historical margins with the commentary sidebar on a blog, and the two don’t square. True marginalia allows you to get in the guts of the system and attack head on, or defend upfront a point that you found worthy. The etymology of the word might mean off to the side, but the historical development of a term should never be seen to offer teleological guidance. The sidebar is a skeuomorph, pandering to polite and perceived notions of where our own thoughts should sit in relation to the author’s.

Here’s a hope for the future of commentary on the internet. Blog commentary applications like Disqus won’t be relegated to the bottom of an article or post, but rather allow for literary zones that are messy, moving in the intestinal tract of the text where real work and digestion happens. I call for a mainstream rollout of the niche products that researchers have been using to do deep research on articles.