For my final project, I would like to compile and rethink DH projects done on James Joyce and specifically on his 1923 modernist novel Ulysses. Known for being filled with hundreds, if not thousands, of textual riddles, this novel is a great example of, and a perfect candidate for digital humanities projects which try to help with decoding of these hidden meanings. (James Joyce famously said that it would take scholars all their lives to find answers to the questions left throughout the novel.)

Challenged and inspired by Elyse Graham’s piece “Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires,” I would like to delve into a realm of digital projects dedicated to decoding the Joyce novel. I will be looking for the earliest existing DH platforms related to the novel—if they’re gone for good, I will attempt to find information related to the goals of these projects. (It’s also interesting to see what survived on the web from the early 2000s). I will also prepare a list of platforms related to the novel that were created and maintained recently. This comparative approach will help us, among other things, to observe the trajectory of how researchers and DH people treated online world and online platforms so they could use those to better explain the novel. 

I will link the projects I found to my platform (I hope I will be able, in the end, to come up with one; this is the largest obstacle for him at this point). I will be doing screenshots highlighting what these projects concentrated on. Information regarding the approaches these projects took will be added. In my introductory piece, I am thinking of telling a brief history of DH projects related to Joyce’s Ulysses and showcasing the main similarities and differences the selected projects have and share. Also, I will pay attention to the fact what happened to those first DH-related projects initiated in the early 2000s and why exactly they did not succeed and/or were lost. 

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.)

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).

I did not do much with audiobooks in the past, not speaking about working on one. Thus, I was looking forward to this assignment. To produce an audiobook, we worked in a group of five people. Maggi was our editor, Kevin was our presenter, while Lisa, montage, and I were three readers. At first, Lisa worked with the text, using Google Docs, and edited Melville’s novella to have an abridged version of his work.

As one of the readers, I started thinking about the parts to select. Although, as I mentioned, we had an abridged version of the work is was still acceptable to choose a piece Lisa removed in a Google Docs file. Also, it was possible to select a part which the other reader decided to read. I wanted to read the beginning of Melville’s novella and part of the text, where the author introduces other characters of this story. The end of this novella was still available. I decided to read it, too, so the whole audiobook has some cyclical form–i.e., starting with one voice and ending up with the same.

As someone who has an accent in English and has a long record of mispronouncing words, I am especially concerned about how Melville’s text will sound in English. And even though I am very excited and enjoy reading aloud, reading in English may be tricky sometimes. Therefore, I decided to lower my reading speed, and this way, I could pay extra attention to my pronunciation’s clearness. (In the end, it should be pointed out: no matter how hard I tried, there are cases which require additional attention.) However, Maggi did a terrific job with editing the sound. In particular, she added a variety of city sounds that attract the lister’s attention and make the reader’s way of reading sound more smooth. While speaking about the adventurousness of the whole process of working on an audiobook, the critical thing is that by having three readers, the consumer has three distinct attitudes to this text, three private and close readings, in their ways, of Melville’s book. Since all three of the readers opted to read several parts of the text, our audiobook is a palette of readers’ approaches to the text without any specific order.

All three readings were beneficial; I read these essays before our group began working on the project–and then I had one sense of them. But, in the end, after we completed the assignment, I then had a different grasp of these texts. Having your own practical experience is essential to understand these articles better. 

It is not an easy thing–to pick a novel. In the end, I decided to go on with Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. The novel was published, as a book, in 1866–it was translated into English multiple times by a diverse cohort of translators. While choosing this book, I also wanted to which translated will be available online, and naturally, what happened to the text and how it was presented? 

When I searched on LibriVox, it turned out that an audiobook is available on this resource in Constance Garnett’s translation–this is a translation that has been actively used for many decades by scholars and researchers as well as students in the field of Slavic studies.

Crime and Punishment available on LibriVox is almost twenty-hours long. A large number of narrators contributed to this work; to be more exact, I counted fourteen narrators who read six parts of the book and its epilogue. The parts are then divided into chapters, and narrators usually read chapters—not following any order at all. Sometime, a contributor would read just one chapter, whereas the other would read a big chunk of the book. What I found particularly interesting is that some narrators provided their real names and some, just nicknames. Some of these narrators, it turned out after looking up their profiles, are very active contributors to LibriVox. They narrate not only literature in translation but also literary works composed originally in English. As it seems from their profile, one narrator has been a professional “voice actor,” using the definition from Matthew Rubery’s illuminating article.

Since we have a very vibrant and diverse number of narrators, each one did their job differently. Since we have here fourteen narrators, it is tough to generalize how their approach the reading of their part. I would say that some felt more natural and relaxed, and therefore it was easier for them to go through the text and change voices when appropriate, while the others were not that convincing. Such a diverse and large number of voices made me think of the following question: how, and more importantly, why did they end up having so many narrators? One of my hypotheses is, of course, the length of this novel—it is relatively uneasy to find a person who has resources and energy to narrate 

After reading Rubery’s essay, I came up with several other questions that might be tackled and explored in a longer piece. For example, how did this 19th-century novel was read by Dostoevsky himself—do we have any information on this topic? Could we trace any continuities between how Dostoevsky’s novel is read now and how it was read during the author’s life? Was it ever read by the translator, Constance Garnett, and if we have a recording of her reading? Do we have a different sense of the novel when we hear in someone else’s narration? Also, are we going to have a different experience of the novel when we listen to an audiobook of other translations? (Garnett’s translation is not used nowadays as actively as it was before the 1990s?

In his article, Alan Liu outlines social writing, publishing, reading, and interpreting. When talking about books, especially rare books, which researchers and scholars of the book often regard and compare to museum objects, of particular interest is a history of those copies that survived and became part of libraries. Such publications are the transmitters of history not only of a particular copy, or of an owner’s library it used to be part of, but of an intellectual history of several decades, if not centuries, that could be traced back by examining one particular copy. Therefore, searching for and studying such copies is an enriching and gratifying endeavor because it helps us–by researching marginalia, book provenance, library stamps–to understand and restore a path this book took to get from one place to another. These little, trifling as someone might think details of the book, might lead to a greater understanding of a particular era–the then reading habits, the nuances of book collecting, the palette (or its lack) of book publishing.

Of distinct interest and challenge is to trace down books published in eighteen or nineteen centuries, their print-run was traditionally pretty modest. Typically, we would already know of several existing copies of such publication–and often the copies we are aware of, which are part of libraries, had mysterious stories before they ended up in a climate-control section of special collections.

One such example is a collection of Ukrainian fairy tales published in 1835; it is one of the first collections of fairy tales in general, making this book extra valuable. Back in the day, the book like that would have a relatively modest print run, and therefore it is not surprising that only several copies are available at the libraries. According to the OCLC catalog, the book that captured attention was available just in two academic libraries.

Although there was another copy–not included in the OCLC catalog–as part of the collection at a research institution that I used to work at. That copy was truly intriguing because of several stamps it had: one by the former owner of the book and one a library it used to be part of; in addition to that, the copy had marginalia notes. The stamp of a former owner was from the second part of the nineteenth century. Another significant copy component was an inscription by a prominent Ukrainian linguist, literary scholar, and a writer who probably bought the book from its previous owner and then donated to a library the book was part of. Finally, the copy contained a call number assigned to this copy sometime at the beginning of the twentieth century. Last but not least, the copy has marginal notes which, I tend to believe, might have been left by someone who prepared the second edition of this anthology at the beginning of the twentieth century.

If trying to decipher these coded messages of the book, which are not that obscure and illegible as one might think, the readers might get an image of cultural, intellectual, geographical movement and usage of this particular copy in Eastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth century. There are other vital questions still unanswered: what was this book’s path to the United States and did it happen–this could be figured out while doing comprehensive research of this copy.