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).

As I learn more about new and old digital humanities projects and the history of the discipline, defining the scope of the digital humanities becomes more elusive. The space of DH activity seems to be changing and expanding constantly; not only in the nature and number of projects created, but in its values and attitudes. Elyse Graham’s Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires examines the history of a few pioneering digital projects, and in the process it illustrates the very changing and expanding nature of the digital humanities. As Graham herself writes, “the discipline that has come to be known as the digital humanities encompasses too much activity and incorporates too many histories to identify a single genealogy for its protean operations.” P7

More than the evolving values and approaches of digital projects, the ultimate focus of the piece is sustainability. The Graveyard of Digital Empires came to be because the values and attitudes of digital scholarship have changed, moving away from “print architectures as the primary blueprint” etc. But most importantly, these projects are no longer alive because they did not deal with issues of sustainability, including their own. When it comes to issues of sustainability, I find myself as optimistic as Vannevar Bush about the reliability of machines, or at least I did before reading this article. I consistently dismissed concerns about the preservation of digital projects, because I was certain that this was purely an issue of technological advancement. Graham’s tour of the ‘graveyard of digital empires’ opened my eyes to the urgency of sustainability. 

There are two central values to digital humanities projects that have emerged as inherent values of the discipline in the course of this program; they are collaborative and open. I considered the collaboration and openness of digital projects primarily as means to elevate marginalized voices, by highlighting and preserving their histories and experience, but it is in the engagement of user activity that these projects truly live and are sustained. These values are central to the sustainability of digital projects. “The reliance of digital artifacts on the labor of human agents for development, support, and preservation is (it is now clear) a condition of digital textuality, even as it presents a challenge to older tendencies in the humanities to privilege the labors of the solitary scholar.”p8 

It is a little ironic that the Infinite Ulysses project is still in a coma, as Graham offered it as an example of a contemporary project focusing on sustainability. It is in the other example of James Joyce’s Ulysses that comes a unique example of conservation efforts. The project shares the data with major institutions, such at the University of Oxford Text Archive, and works to bring it to the attention of a large number of users, thus helping preserve it. But the most unique effort in sustainability is the active proselytizing, as “the project’s affiliates actively campaign to attract the interest and participation of new contributors.”

While reading Vannevar Bush’s piece As we May Think, I couldn’t help but recall Leonardo Davinci’s famous notebook collection, Codex on the Flight of Birds. In the 1500s, the renaissance man stetcked flying machines that couldn’t be constructed/properly executed until the 1900s. Though I’m more of a secretive notetaker myself, this shows that nowhere is it more important to preserve and share one’s notes/thoughts than in the area of STEM. Yes, we can also credit science fiction writers for other human-made inventions like Jule Vernes’ under the sea and flying machines that inspired the submarine and the helicopter, but it’s the experimental logs and notes from women and men in science and technology that takes an idea and transforms it into reality.

“Science has provided the swiftest communication between individuals; it has provided a record of ideas and has enabled man to manipulate and to make extracts from that record so that knowledge evolves and endures throughout the life of a race rather than that of an individual.”

Vannevar Bush, As We May Think

We have an enormous capacity to capture and store information (notes, logs, etc.) through digital tools and machines. However, it takes more than just that to use the notes its full capacity and make something out of them. With all of the methods we have now to preserve even the most miscellanies of notes, we must also consider accessibility and agency. Not everyone has the ability to read, interpret, and develop/carry forward important information. We have digital archival tools like the WaybackMachine and DH projects such as the bookshelf of W. Ross Ashby’s Journey that try their best to capture at least some of our history digitally, but are these methods of preservation enough?

The article left me with these questions: Are we doing our best to preserve important records to be used by others later? Most importantly, who is in charge of preserving these, and what is considered “worthy” of archiving? Whose notes are we allowed to read, and who’s being educated/trained to read and transcribe these notes? And lastly, are we thinking too much in the future instead of taking note of what’s happening now and repairing our systems before forging ahead?

Elyse Graham’s Joyce and the Graveyard of Digital Empires drew my attention from the title alone – I correctly assumed that it was referencing James Joyce, and my house has a small “computer graveyard” in the basement where we keep in-tact but heavily outmoded computer equipment from yester-decade. Upon actually reading it, I found that Graham had quite a few unfamiliar, but certainly striking ideas, many of which connected to my studies in the realm of Deleuzian rhizomatics.

Graham writes that as opposed to “page-bound [texts]” of the physical variety, which “lead the reader along branching rather than linear paths, hypertexts construct such paths “into the physical architecture of the text, whereas page-bound texts do not; nonetheless.” This brought to mind many fictional pieces I’ve read that are littered with footnotes that present the reader with contextual information – for instance, when I studied Dante’s Divine Comedy, the editions of the books I used had a very large section at the back that would inform the reader of the origins of some of the references Dante makes. This also made me think about my own experiences with hypertexts. If one counts SCP Foundation as a hypertext, many of the entries on it link to other entries in order to fill the reader in. Indeed, I’ve found myself reading very brief articles that would then link me to longer-form pieces tens of thousands of words long.

Later on, she discusses Amanda Visconti’s Infinite Ulysses, which in my eyes, is a particularly sharp sort of double edged sword. Graham describes it as an “interactive edition of the text emphasizing the sharing, curating, and ranking of annotation,” but goes on to mention that “users must employ their existing Facebook and Twitter accounts to engage with the text and each other.” On one hand, this encourages collaboration and is almost artistically beautiful, as it brings the “twenty-first-century triumph of social media platforms” into conversation with the rest of what the project offers. On the other hand, in a way, it’s needlessly confining – Facebook and Twitter are probably the two most popular conventional social networks out there. If I wanted to take part in this project, the presupposition is that I would have an account, and the reality is that I would have to make an account if I didn’t already have one. Maybe I’m too much of a skeptic, or maybe I’m just lazy, but I’m really not a fan of websites where you have to register by way of another website, despite the almost-rhizomatic nature of such a registration.

Finally, Graham comments on a time she sat in on a panel featuring Jonathan Reeve and others: she asked the panel “about the relationship between Joyce and hypertext; the response was a matter-of-course agreement from the panelists that Ulysses is a form of proto-hypertext.” While I’m not entirely sure sure whether I agree that Ulysses is a “proto-hypertext” (although I do lean towards agreement on the subject), this did cause me to consider other “proto-hypertexts.” Is Divine Comedy a “proto-hypertext?” Could a review of a movie be considered a “proto-hypertext?” And perhaps, most self-indulgently, is A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia perhaps a valid guide for those looking to learn more about hypertexts, both “proto” and otherwise?