Of all the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticism made on the habits of the poor by the well-housed, well-warmed, and well-fed. – Herman Melville
The project is completed. My research and case notes are posted to a site on the Commons, here is the link: https://bartleby.commons.gc.cuny.edu/.
The actual game is posted here: https://bartleby.nfshost.com/.
Thank you for playing.
One of my favorite online games is The Kingdom of Loathing. Published by Asymmetric, it’s a simple, web-based massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that does a comic take on the medieval quest venturing genre. The art is primitive, black line drawings of stick figures and mapping icons. All the fun is in the writing. Also, it’s free, works in any browser, and is low bandwidth. It’s been a long-time companion during airport waits.
Introduction panel from the Kingdom of Loathing
Because this game is mostly text-driven with the player making simple choices like fight or flight, what keeps folks playing is the feedback they get as they wander the various quests. It can get more complex the longer one plays, in terms of weapons and skills acquired, but the story is what makes it fun. Reading the professor’s suggestions revealed a software I didn’t know. Twine is an “open-source tool for telling interactive, nonlinear stories” (About Twine). Poking around its site, I started thinking about how I might have fun with an existing story, and Bartleby, the Scrivener came to mind.
Readers will recall the frustration of the characters in that story when they found they could not mediate any kind of change in Bartleby’s behavior. While much of the action takes place in law offices, mentions are made of what the characters do when they are not in Bartleby’s presence, like Turkey’s time spent in bars drinking, or Ginger Nut’s forays to the market to buy treats for the staff. For this game, we would find the different characters outside the office and follow them as they went about their daily lives. An example follows.
Location: A Local Tavern
History: Information about what dining was like around Wall Street in the 1850s. Include some pictures.
Description: The place is crowded, men standing at the long high bar, others seated at tables with benches.
The Scene: Turkey and Nippers are lunching together and their talk turns to Bartleby.
The Options: Turkey might have choices like ordering another beer or going to see the minister on Bartleby’s behalf. Nippers might have choices like ordering another coffee or changing the subject. Each choice takes the player to a new page that moves that storyline forward.
For me, the fun of the project will be in sharing more about what living and working were like in the New York of the 1850s. And, in mapping some game-play without having to use something really complex, like Unity.
“About the Kingdom.” The Kingdom of Loathing, Asymmetric Publications, LLC, 2020, www.kingdomofloathing.com/static.php?id=whatiskol.
“About Twine.” Twine / An Open-Source Tool for Telling Interactive, Nonlinear Stories, twinery.org/.
Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street by Herman Melville.” Project Gutenberg, 1 Feb. 2004, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11231.
Our group came in equal parts from my earlier group and the other. Our name, the Office Gingers, was a merging of the earlier groups: The Office Crew and The Gingernuts. This new team was myself, Georgette Keane, Maggi Delgado, Kevin Pham and Matt Propper. It was a rather seamless merger, where we decided on a similar framework to the Office Crew’s use of the Exquisite Corpse game: we would choose whatever passages we wanted to research from the Cane text and the results would be a surprise. Our focus would be the pop-culture of the time with special attention paid to using multi-media. At our first break-out session, I created an Office Gingers group on Hypothes.is that our team could use to tag the text we wanted to explore.
Initially, we thought we would use the Manifold platform for our project, in part because it had been suggested by our professor and because some of us were interested in learning how to use it. Georgette and I did the initial research. Georgette shared research notes from an earlier class and I got a test-bed organized.
The Office Gingers admin panel on Manifold
Manifold is an interesting platfrom, it is open-sourced and designed to support scholarly publishing. People can download the software and rack their own servers or work within an existing array. For our project, I approached the CUNY administrators and had editing privileges given to our team. I then downloaded an ePub version of Cane from Project Guttenberg, created a project, and uploaded it. Here’s that link: https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/cane-by-jean-toomer-1923.
Public view from our Cane Manifold project
As I taught myself the application, it became clear it would not be an easy choice to use for this particular annotation project. I spent time on the Manifold Slack channel, where I learned that real-time editing of a text was not possible. Instead, digital assets can be uploaded to the project and reinjested to create a new text. It was suggested that a Google document could be used as a source file that multiple people editing and then uploaded into the platform.
Excerpt the Newbies group on the Manifold Slack channel
Also, the group annotation function in Manifold did not allow multi-media. Since our project was going to be multi-media heavy, using the platform’s native group function to annotate would not serve our needs.
Example of the editing panel from a Manifold group
When our team next met, we discussed our options and decided that the Hypothes.is platform would be a better fit, since it already supported multimedia and we could invite people into our existing group when it was time to present. However, we needed a version of the text that was formatted more closely to the original manuscript. We did not have the permissions to embed the Hypothes.is code into our Manifold project, but Georgette did have the ability to do that to her share on the CUNY Commons. She was able to create a properly formatted version of Cane at https://caneprojectf20.commons.gc.cuny.edu/cane/ and embed the Hypothes.is widget into the page. Now we were able to use our group to record our work.
My scholarly focus was on how Jean Toomey used classical literature and mythology throughout Cane. In the foreword, Waldo Frank described Toomey’s style as “Æschylean” and some of the vinyettes in Cane reminded me of Greek tragedy, where the poems that open the story are like a chorus setting the scene. I was also very interested in how Toomey incorporated new technologies like electricity and billboards into their narrative, so I researched that history and incorporated it into my annotations.
Example of annotation using Hypothes.is
When I was in high school and later college, choosing which book to take from the pile or buy from the book store was driven by a desire to find the tome with the most marginalia. If reading is the truest form of telepathy, then marginalia is the deepest form of shared thought. I loved seeing what others thought important, cribbing their notes on occasion, and generally feeling like this was not a journey I was taking on my own.
Perhaps one of the most famous examples of marginalia in pop-culture is Severus Snape’s book of Advanced Potion Making from the Harry Potter book The Half-Blood Prince. It’s instructive that this book causes the hero no end of trouble when he used its cribbed knowledge without a full understanding from whence it came.
[Pinterest, Diane Robertsen]
In the present day, so much of our reading is hosted on devices: the web-browser, the smartphone, or discrete platforms like the Kindle. Until this class, I was not much interested in electronic marginalia. What I was aware of was mostly the comments sections of posted content. Rarely do I venture into YouTube comments or Reddit threads, since they are often full of thoughts I would prefer not to share or weighted down by bots writing nonsense.
However, now that I am going down into the proverbial rabbit-hole that is academic writing, the idea of shared electronic marginalia has a real appeal. I very much enjoyed Johanna Drucker’s The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space, in part because they encourage us to “consider extending the ways a book works as we shift into digital instruments” (217). That the book as a physical instrument dominates our conception of what the book-as-data could be rings true to me. Are dynamic websites really books by another name? As Drucker reminds us, “The data file of an electronic document can be continually reconfigured. And an intervening act brings a work into being in each instance, operating on the field of potentialities” (228).
Returning to marginalia, when a group attaches a Hypothis.is reading group to an ePub, do they transform that static content? If the publisher of the ebook updates that site and breaks those notes, is it a form of virtual “book-burning”? What, if any, rights to creators of virtual marginalia have to their copy? Or, is the act of “storing, sorting, summarizing, and selecting” (Blair 85) merely a note-taking function for our consumption and we must mourn the loss, if we even remember it.
For myself, I can see the use of electronic marginalia as very helpful in group work. Writers working together on a piece might find it very helpful to read thoughts from other members of their team. I can certainly see the application in the business world, where marketing and legal might be privy to the work prior to publication. Electronic marginalia offers the promise of a hive-mind.
Blair, Ann. “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission.” Critical Inquiry (2004): 85-107. eJournal. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/427303>.
Drucker, Johanna. “The Virtual Codex from Page Space to E-space.” A Companion to Digital Literary Studies. Ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman. Wiley Online Library, 2013. eBook.
Cadavre Exquis, Valentine Hugo, A Landscape c. 1933
This assignment was fun: more play than work for me. By way of full disclosure, I use to do voice-over work for a living, so I came to the project with that lens. However, since Maggi Delgado (our producer) and I were the only folks on our team who admitted to having production experience, our Bartleby, The Scrivener audiobook, was not actually created the way a professional production might have been. Had this been that kind of endeavor, the workflow might have been something like this: the producer hires a writer to cut the script, hires talent to do the voices, maybe hires a sound designer for the music and special effects, and finally works with an editor to assemble the final product. There would have been rehearsals, and likely at least three voice-actors gathered to lay down their tracks. Also, possible that the dialog scenes would have been voiced by the actors together. Our process was nothing like that.
At our first meeting, we decided on a simple workflow:
I did a rough cut of the shared Google document, cutting about half of the content. I did this in part because the script is the most important asset for me as a producer, and I could not decide on what to voice until I had a semblance of a working script. However, I did those edits via strike-through text, not as actual deletion of the material. That way, my teammates could see my ideas for form but were free to ignore them for their process.
Once I had the script, I used a Yeti Blue Streamer mic and Audacity to lay down the track. Maggi had asked for a single audio file using the *.wav format. It took me about four hours to lay down the 40 minutes of audio. It was mostly a single take. I had to re-record a couple of sections where I could hear I’d mispronounced words on playback. Still, since I was not going for perfection for the most part but rather for energy and when appropriate humor (Melville is funny!), it not being perfect seemed in keeping with the assignment.
We had a meeting after Maggi had shared their rough-cut, and it was great! Here is where we, as the makers, got to experience the Exquisite Corpse process in practice. Maggi had edited our work down considerably, but still kept the core of the story. She’d created interesting effects with my voice when I said Bartleby’s lines, so he sounded robotic. montage had found an audio filtering platform that allowed her to type copy into the engine and have it voice the speaker as a posh-sounding English gentleman. However, those files’ quality was not great because she had to use her cellphone’s mic to capture them, so when Maggi raised their volume, they became distorted. As a listener, not understanding all of the words was very frustrating … precisely the way the narrator felt when dealing with his scrivener! So that was really fun. Finally, Ostap did a great job with his pieces. His delivery had an individual pensive self-awareness that was an excellent match for the text.
Additional changes were minimal; our last meeting was about talking about the process and learning what we’d done. The final piece of the puzzle was Kevin’s presentation. We didn’t see that until class. Wow, it was impeccable too! He gave an excellent summation of our process, explained the framework, and pulled it all back to the readings.
Again, this was an enjoyable project. Thank you, Maggi, for doing such a fantastic job as our producer. Thank you, montage, for helping us to find our intellectual framework. Thank you, Ostap, for bringing such humanity to the voice of the narrator. And thank you, Kevin, for representing our team so brilliantly in class. I hope all my collaborations this semester go so well.
For this post, I chose to focus on one of the Aesop fables because they are in the public domain and have been translated and reinterpreted many times. I was interested to learn what that would mean in terms of how audiobook producers might treat them. Also, as a child, I had a collection of recordings by Boris Karloff, and one of them had the actor reading the fables. The Oak and the Reeds was always one of my favorites.
For those not familiar with them, “Aesop’s Fables—also called the Aesopica—are a collection of stories designed to teach moral lessons [they are] credited to Aesop, a Greek slave and story-teller thought to have lived between 620 and 560 BCE …aphorisms such as ‘sour grapes’ and ‘a bird in the hand’ can be traced back to these cautionary tales” (Aesop). In the traditional telling of these fables, the last sentence is always reserved for the moral of the story.
Using LibriVox as my source, a simple key-word search for “Aesop” yielded ten results, and “Æsop” found one. I listened to all of them and chose three for this post. However, before we examine that audio, here is the complete text of The Oak & the Reeds from The Aesop for Children: with Pictures by Milo Winter.
The Aesop for Children: with Pictures by Milo Winter
A Giant Oak stood near a brook in which grew some slender Reeds. When the wind blew, the great Oak stood proudly upright with its hundred arms uplifted to the sky. But the Reeds bowed low in the wind and sang a sad and mournful song.
“You have reason to complain,” said the Oak. “The slightest breeze that ruffles the surface of the water makes you bow your heads, while I, the mighty Oak, stand upright and firm before the howling tempest.”
“Do not worry about us,” replied the Reeds. “The winds do not harm us. We bow before them and so we do not break. You, in all your pride and strength, have so far resisted their blows. But the end is coming.”
As the Reeds spoke a great hurricane rushed out of the north. The Oak stood proudly and fought against the storm, while the yielding Reeds bowed low. The wind redoubled in fury, and all at once the great tree fell, torn up by the roots, and lay among the pitying Reeds.
Better to yield when it is folly to resist, than to resist stubbornly and be destroyed. (Aesop)
Our first audio passage uses the text of The Oak & the Reeds from The Aesop for Children: with Pictures by Milo Winter but interestingly, does not credit that book. However, it does point the reader to this link http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19994 which is a Project Gutenberg asset. There we find that Project Gutenberg does cite Milo Winter.
The reader for this recording is Claire Schreuder. Ms. Schreuder does an able job with the text, but she sounds a bit tired toward the end. She tries to make character voices for the oak and the reeds but doesn’t follow through on it. What is interesting here is that she does a 6:15 minute recording without a break, and in it, she reads four different stories, with The Oak and the Reeds coming last.
Click to listen (fast forward to 4:54) (Schreuder)
Figure 2 Cover Art (LibriVox)
Reading for six minutes straight may not seem like a long time, but it is! I did voiceover work for a living and use to volunteer to read newsprint to the hearing impaired. One of the things I learned was five minutes is about as much as you want to do in a single stretch in order to keep your voice flexible. In other words, it is good to take frequent breaks when you need to read long passages.
This next recording is taken from the book Aesop in Rhyme and was written in 1820 by Jefferys Taylor. An engraver by trade, Taylor wrote several children’s books, including these interpretations of the fables. I found a digital copy of the text on the Internet Archive site. The images below were captured from that source. The first thing to note is that Taylor’s version of the fable is almost twice as long as the Winter’s one. And he wrote it in a rhyming verse, which can be very tricky to recite and not have it sound sing-songy.
In this LibriVox audio recording, Noel Badrian reads. Mister Badrian has a beautiful English accent, and there is a reediness to his tone, which is an asset as it helps to even the rhyme. The quality of the audio is excellent, and Badrian does not embroider his delivery by making distinct character voices for the oak or the reeds; instead, he makes good use of pauses both to break up the rhyme and to allow for the character’s voices to translate naturally. A visit to Badrian’s page reveals that he has recorded 833 selections for LibriVox, so while they might not refer to him as a professional voiceover artist, I would. He has put in the bench time!
 Engraving from Aesop in Rhyme, with some originals. |
Click to listen. (Badrian) |
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 Digital copy from the first edition of Aesop in rhyme, with some originals (Taylor and Aesop) |
 Digital copy from Aesop in rhyme, with some originals (Taylor and Aesop) |
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This last selection is a fascinating recording, in part, because the text has been transformed. It runs 2.28 minutes; with the first fifteen seconds being the standard LibriVox disclaimer, the fable itself runs 45 seconds, and the rest is moral commentary.
In the previous iterations, the oak and the reeds live together, and it is only when the storm approaches that their survival strategies are revealed. However, in this tale, the oak has already been struck down and is floating in a stream. When it passes a reed that is unhurt, they strike up a conversation. The reed admonishes the fallen oak, advising, “I secure myself with a conduct the reverse of yours, instead of being stubborn and stiff, and confiding in my strength, I yield and bend to the blast and let it go over me, knowing how vain and fruitless it would be to resist” (Fables of Aesop and Others).
Click to listen. (Seaquill)
Cover art from Fables of Aesop and Others.
The “application” which follows, is even harder on the dying oak, accusing it of temerity and a weak understanding. Then follows religious prescriptions to be persons of “quiet, still temper” so as to “allude the shocks or to receive them with the least detriment” (Fables of Aesop and Others). The LibriVox editors give no additional indication who actually wrote this version of the fable, but from the language and the fact it is public domain, I would guess it comes from the late 1800s or early 1900s. However, our reader Seaquill clearly had a greater comfort performing the beginning of the piece than they did the end. They struggled with some of the sentence structure and sounded unsure about where to put the emphasis on certain words.
Practice is key when reading text that hails from a different era. The meaning of words can change over time; some research is needed so the reader understands the text fully. Humans are very good at hearing indecision in another’s voice. As a reader, first, understand the text fully. Then mark up the script so you know when to breathe. And most importantly, never be afraid to take your time!
Aesop. “The Oak & the Reeds.” Aesop. The Aesop for Children: with Pictures by Milo Winter. New York: Rand, McNally & Co., 1919. eBook. <http://read.gov/aesop/011.html>.
Badrian, Noel. “The Oak and the Reed.” Æsop in Rhyme, with Some Originals. 2017. Digital Audio. <https://librivox.org/aesop-in-rhyme-with-some-originals-by-jefferys-taylor/>.
LibriVox. Fables of Aesop and Others. <https://ia802902.us.archive.org/12/items/fables_of_aesop_2003_librivox/fablesofaesop_2003.jpg>.
LibriVox. The Aesop for Children. <https://ia800708.us.archive.org/25/items/aesopforchildren_1308_librivox/Aesop_Children_1309.jpg>.
Schreuder, Claire. “The Oak and the Reeds.” The Aesop for Children. 2013. Digital Audio. <https://librivox.org/the-aesop-for-children-by-aesop/>.
Seaquill. “Fables of Aesop and Others.” 2020. Digital Recording. <https://librivox.org/fables-of-aesop-and-others-by-aesop/>.
Taylor, Jefferys, and Aesop. Aesop in Rhyme, with some originals. London: Baldwin and Cradock, 1828. Digital Copy. <https://archive.org/details/aesopinrhymewith00tayliala/page/2/mode/2up>.
This week’s readings were a roller-coaster ride about Western literacy and the book. I began with Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books. I am of an age that I, too, remember the fear that the rise of electronics would be the death keel for analog content. When Price writes, “[a]s magazines migrated from doormats to laptops, articles vied to diagnose the disappearance of a way of life that American had once read” (Price 2), I recalled the shock I felt in 2012 when the weekly news magazine Newsweek ceased to publish its print edition, offering instead “a paid, subscriber-only product for the tablet” (Thompson).
I grew up with Time Magazine and Newsweek, the former a voice for the more conservative thinkers in my family and the latter a sop to its younger, more liberal members. When I moved into my twenties and thirties, I dutifully kept subscriptions going to both, the better to keep the conversations less lively at family gatherings. My annual Christmas gifts of a subscription to Newsweek to my conservative uncles were accepted, if not embraced. But, when Newsweek died, I remember thinking that its loss did not bode well for the civil discord of my family, and I was not mistaken. Their attitudes hardened, and discourse soon was relegated to family gossip, fishing, and the weather.
Alan Liu’s From Reading to Social Computing was a comprehensive overview of how the arrival of the Internet has forever changed the ways that we communicate. Of particular interest to me was the section on Web 2.0 that spoke to the evolution of specific platforms into content management systems. Liu writes, “blogs and their derivatives (including all manner of sites powered by the WordPress blog engine and Drupal community-message-board engine that have evolved into general-purpose content management systems)” (Lui). As both a maker and a user of these derivatives, I often think about their archives’ ephemeral nature. A recent example is Yahoo. When that platform was sold to Verizon, the new owner promptly shuttered Yahoo Groups to new content, and old content was deleted (Brodkin).
While Verizon did give admin users the ability to download the data, and platforms like Groups.io created mechanisms to copy Yahoo group content to their servers (at a charge), the content of orphaned Yahoo groups was lost forever. Those archives dated back to 2001 and contained much of the history of the early Internet. And, because Yahoo Groups was free, it was used by a wide variety of people. I belonged to a beading group curated by an older person in Arizona; they had meticulously documented different beading methods and were generous with their historical knowledge of pattern design. When they died suddenly in 2010, there was no one to admin the group, so it went dormant. However, the content remained visible to anyone who found it. And now it is gone.
Perhaps it is the oddly ephemeral nature of online content that makes physical books so appealing, even if they are repurposed into other objects. Leah Price turns to this theme in their article Reading in Place and asks the question: “What spawns this use of fake books as real reading migrates online?” (Price B10). She posits that one reason is we live in spaces designed to house books, so we continue to collect them. Another is pleasure reading and the advent of the paperback, which can be read anywhere. For Price, “Books continue to connote stillness” (Price B11), and that is something that we who dwell in the cacophony of modern life often need to embrace.
Professor Allred grapples with the need for quiet reflection in his article Novel Hacks when he asks “whether students’ capacities for intensive focus and critical orientation will survive amid competing claims for their (our?) attention lurking at the margins of the window, a mere click away” (Allred 115). For Allred, the solution is the ability to give students the tools to make “their own reading, and the technologies that enable it, an object of contemplation and criticism” (Allred 115). In this way, the dusty tome from a bygone era becomes a living monument to how the meaning of the novel has changed over time. For example, he shares that “students are often shocked and intrigued to learn of its checkered past as a corrupter of youth, scrambler of minds, and deranger of proper sexuality” (Allred 116).
The digital tools used by Allred’s students include the ability to “share highlighted passages and marginal comments with their social networks” (Allred 117), which invites the students to become co-writers and collaborators when they create a new digital object from the source material. I was particularly intrigued by the section on creating an Audiobook. I did voice-over work for many years, and in the 1990s, one of my pro bono efforts was reading New York Magazine over closed-circuit radio for the blind and reading impaired. Two readers would share the text, one would read for several paragraphs and then hand the mic over, and the second would read for a while. That way, our voices would not tire, and we could read for several hours without a break. I was particularly amused by how challenging one group of students found producing an audiobook of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when they initially opted to do it on live radio, but when confronted with those complexities, instead opted to assign a single chapter to each individual and have them record it privately. I am very excited to see what our class will decide to do!
Allred, Jeff. “Novel Hacks, New Approaches toTeaching the Novel Genre.” Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagog (2014): 121-137.
Brodkin, Jon. “Yahoo is deleting all content ever posted to Yahoo Groups.” arsTechnica. 17 Oct 2019. <https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/yahoo-is-deleting-all-content-ever-posted-to-yahoo-groups/>.
Lui, Alan. “From Reading to Social Computing.” Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology. 2013. eJournal. <https://dlsanthology.mla.hcommons.org/from-reading-to-social-computing/>.
Price, Leah. “Reading in Place.” Chronicle of Higher Education 59 (2012): B10-B11. eJounal.
—. What we talk about when we talk about books: the history and future of reading. First Edition. New York: Basic Books, 2019. Hardcover.
Thompson, Derek. “Who’s Really to Blame for the Death of Newsweek?” The Atlantic. 18 Oct. 2012. eMagazine. <https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/10/whos-really-to-blame-for-the-death-of-newsweek/263814/>.
