I’ve noticed thus far during my time in the Digital Humanities Program that certain assumptions about the digital humanities from the world outside the subject persist and may even become more problematic when talking about the subject. Specifically, one of the weaknesses of not-necessarily-digital humanities seems to persist in the digital humanities: the fallacy of a static, ubiquitous canon. This takes on a whole new form in the digital humanities due to digital humanities adding the element of the platform, which can be put in conversation with a work. That is, while in the classical humanities, it may be a common assumption that anyone engaged in a given conversation is familiar with, for instance, Moby Dick. In the digital humanities on the other hand, it takes on a slightly different form; people may assume that one not only is familiar with the social media platform, Twitter, but that one explicitly has an active Twitter account.

When I delved into this week’s readings, this is what I had on my mind. While it wasn’t explicitly related to the readings, it did somewhat direct my thoughts. For instance, as I was reading through the introduction of Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books, I was drawn to Price’s description of her experiences with her first smartphone. She writes that “[her] first smartphone strafed [her] pocket with predictions that even if reading survived, eyes would glaze over before the 141st character,” which is a direct reference to Twitter’s old character cap (Price 2). I was able to recognize this reference despite the fact that the only time I’ve had a Twitter account was for an incredibly brief period many years ago that I made roughly two posts on during its short existence. However, a quick query with one’s search engine of choice will reveal that Twitter has roughly 300 million active users – a significant percentage of the world’s population, but far from the entire world. Of course, there are people beyond this number who are nonetheless familiar, even intimately, with the platform, myself possibly included. However, the experience of maintaining an actively running Twitter account that you use regularly is not something that everyone has, has had, or will have.

This assumption that a given individual has familiarity with, let’s say, every site that reaches a certain traffic threshold is incredibly unsustainable. There are two ways of thinking about this. First, one could consider it ideal for the development of digital humanities to preserve the popularity of sites as they are in order to establish a proper digital canon. This, of course, is completely ridiculous. It encourages the maintenance of a very arbitrary status quo, and is frankly infeasible in the first place. Alternatively, one could consider it ideal to actively and persistently engage with any website that reaches a certain level or popularity. This may seem reasonable at first, but it quickly loses cohesion when one realizes that there are many websites that are very infrequently discussed, yet around as popular as sites like Twitter, such as Bing or Stack Overflow. Additionally, if a popular site suddenly loses popularity and another site rises in popularity to take its place, it would become the duty of those in the digital humanities to quickly engage with that site and develop at least cursory familiarity with it.

One part of Price’s piece that really resonated with me, personally, was at the beginning of chapter one – Price describes an experience in a train’s Quiet Car. She writes that her immersion in the piece she was reading was ironically “interrupted by a loud command to ‘enjoy our library atmosphere'” (Price 17). When I take the Metro North, I usually try to get tranquil seating in the Quiet Car. When I’m not being disturbed by screaming infants or grown adults blasting music from their devices, there will inevitably be a point where a loud, seemingly arbitrary tone plays over the speakers, which, unlike the recorded voice telling riders what stop the train has arrived at, is much too audacious and jarring to simply filter out.

Price’s discussion of the “library atmosphere” delves into more detail as the chapter continues. It seems like her idea is that libraries are become less significant as locations, but perhaps more significant as the basis for an aesthetic. Despite the gradual departure of libraries as the prime locations for research and information gathering, they still remain symbols of knowledge, curiosity, self-improving, and the potential of learning. While somewhat tangential, I would think that there are probably more people in the world that can identify a library with these aspects than there are people with active Twitter accounts, even if there are fewer people who patronize libraries actively.

On a slightly different note, in another course I’m taking, Introduction to Digital Humanities, taught by Matt Gold, we discussed the idea of defining digital humanities, and why it can’t entirely be as succinctly defined as other terms. In her “This is Why We Fight: Defining the Values of Digital Humanities,” Lisa Spiro suggests that “by creating a core set of values, the digital humanities community may be able to unite to confront challenges such as the lack of open access to information and hidebound policies that limit collaboration and experimentation.” In other words, the digital humanities does not necessarily need to be exclusive in nature – by bestowing it with clear-yet-malleable set of key aspects, digital humanities can circumvent the suppression of knowledge, institutional or otherwise.

While I’m focusing on the Price reading here, the other readings this week affected me similarly, especially what “Community Reading and Social Imagination” had to say about what those “engaged in the real world” were receptive to (419). Admittedly, I sneaked a peak at Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations – I couldn’t help myself, I’m a massive fan of Benjamin’s work – and I was reminded of his “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” a piece I find has aged like a fine wine. On a base level, many of the readings me left with the following thought at the forefront of my mind: “[one’s] experiences are not universal.” This isn’t because I couldn’t relate to the readings; quite the opposite in fact. Rather, in a field as expansive as the digital humanities seems to be, I feel like it’s impossible for everything to apply to everyone: a canon for digital humanities would be infinitely more difficult to manage that one for a more classical form of the humanities.

On a more personal level, the prompt itself is what got me thinking about these topics of canon, definition, and what one should and shouldn’t know and consider, and it was also probably what brought Benjamin’s other work to mind (although, just the other night, I was talking with a friend about his idea of Cult Value, so that could have done it too). I regularly do think about “the media that undergird [my] reading in all their glorious materiality,” and the ideas of “the small ‘form factor’ and cheap price of the mass-market paperback,” and “the dynamic and multimodal space of the browser window” were certainly food for thought, but the mention of “the intimate whisper of the Audible narrator in the earbuds” is what really made me turn my head and think about canon, inclusion, and exclusion. I’ve never used Audible as a service, I haven’t listened to a proper audiobook in over a decade, and I haven’t worn earbuds for a similar period of time (albeit that’s because they hurt my ears, over-the-ear headphones are my go-to now). I guess on some level, this reflects the fact that, indeed, very few experiences are universal.

I have been a consumer of books from an early age, which is just one of the reasons I became a librarian. I love to, as Price writes, “curl up alone with a novel” but then talk to people about it. My younger years were spent listening to my aunts and grandmother discuss the books they were reading and favorite authors. In high school, “racy” YA books were shared with classmates, covertly making the rounds in an all girls private school and discussed at the lunch table. Even at work, I was eager to recommend books to patrons and hear their thoughts during their next visit. I even started a book club with my friends, although many of our meetings centered around food and wine.

With the pandemic, that all changed. There were no more interactions with patrons and friends were not interested in reading for pleasure because of the uncertainties they faced with their jobs and concerns about their family’s health. I tried to find the bright side of the shutdown, thinking that with this unexpected free time I would put a dent in my ‘To Read’ list, but eventually found myself uninterested in picking up a book. I, like many people, turned to streaming services and TikTok for entertainment.

I enjoyed the TikTok dances and challenges, but one day stumbled on what is called BookTok. A 15 second video showed a girl’s wall to wall book collection and I was intrigued. Clicking on her other videos, I saw book recommendations, summaries, and book related challenges. I scrolled through the comment section, and saw others agreeing with the girl’s recommendations or offering titles they believed were better. There were debates happening in the comments, usually respectful and with other creators mentioned. Soon my ‘For You’ Page featured creators showcasing their color coded libraries, acting out their favorite passages, or highlighting the artwork of classic and new books. I even saw authors talking about their own works and supporting up and coming authors. It was amazing to me how 15 second videos could generate so much interaction between actual strangers.

My passion for reading was reignited, and I realized it was because of this digital community I was now a part of. There is nothing like reading a good book for me. But, sharing that book and connecting with others is what drives my love of reading. I love conversing with others about my current favorite or trying to decide what the hell an author was thinking with the ending they wrote. And I could once again do that, but now in a digital space.

As a librarian, I recognize the importance of a community of readers. I think I just underestimated the usefulness of digital tools in creating that community. I focused more on the traditional ideas of how the community should meet, rather than the community itself.

One of the greatest honors in Catholic school was being tapped to go down to the school office to pick up copies of a worksheet or quiz for the class lessons. In the late 70s, this meant carrying a warm stack of papers back to the classroom and privately basking in the strong scent of the ditto machine ink. Once the paper cooled, dried and landed on our desks, its distinct perfume was much harder to summon. 

Textbooks, workbooks, library books, and books on my own shelves, like those warm dittoed handouts, each bring their own very specific perfumes. Usually, the smell is fairly neutral, and often it is oddly appealing. I rarely can identify the source; perhaps it is the ink, the glue in the binding, or the adhesive used to attach the library-card pocket to the inside of the front cover. Maybe the smells originate from the environments in which the books have been transported, stored and read, permeating the paper in a permanent and lasting way. If a heavy smoker and coffee-drinker had recently returned my borrowed copy of Dune to the library, the previous reader becomes a perfumed-participant in my reading experience. If I carry a novel in my bag along with the leftovers of a restaurant meal, I remember that Saag Paneer when I read in bed that evening.

In Catholic school in the 70s, we would occasionally be delighted to discover a truly revolting smell. If it was a school textbook or a workbook, the entire class would gasp each time we had to open the book for a lesson – the smell was usually a bit like vomit. While the nun spoke and wrote on the chalkboard, we’d exchange looks of dramatic disgust, gesturing fingers down our throats, some students audibly gagging. If the stinky book was instead in the school library, we’d bring the suspect specimen to friends and dare them to sniff it. Only a chicken refused.

When a book has a distinct smell, that smell becomes entwined with my reading experience. Each time I open a book, the smell can bring me back to the specific mood or frame-of-mind that lingered when I last closed the book. The smell of a book indelibly marks my reading experience; even now, when I open some of the old books I read as a child, a faint scent can bring back memories and trigger a strong emotional response.

My kids will never know the smell of ditto machine handouts. Perhaps the ink was carcinogenic, so this may be for the best. Likely there are other smells that inhabit their educational landscape. But the same technology trends that drove ditto machines to extinction have robbed us of these special smells shaping our reading and learning experiences. Today when I read on a computer screen or a kindle, I may enjoy the smell of the gingernut biscuits next to me on my desk. Tomorrow, the smell of laundry may be the most dominant note in my scent-scape. The story that I am reading is disconnected from smell-memory.

Printed novels “in all their glorious materiality” provide visual and tactile experiences. But the smells that inhabit the materiality of books – the perfume-infused nexus of paper-ink-glue –  bring a level of meaning, sustain memory, and connect readers. These mysterious and elusive benefits will be difficult for technology to mimic or replace.

Our first session will discuss a few texts that consider, on the most basic level, what reading is. Reading comes so naturally to us that we often fail to examine what it is, how it works, and what kind of mental and material practices it encompasses. Using the readings as a springboard (I hope the Leah Price book arrives on time from reserve!), write a post about some combination of the following:

• the media that undergird your reading in all their glorious materiality: the small “form factor” and cheap price of the mass-market paperback; the intimate whisper of the Audible narrator in the earbuds; the dynamic and multimodal space of the browser window.
• the community, implied or literal, that is convened by your reading: the book group, the Goodreads or Facebook “friends,” the Twitter literary dustups, the fandoms around popular texts, even the feeling, however abstract, of the other “implied readers” hailed by the narrator of whatever your reading.

The best posts will drill down into specifics. You might even focus on a single text you’re reading now, challenging yourself to tease out aspects of reading it that are normally invisible because so deeply ingrained in habit.

For a general overview of why I assign blog posts and what makes for a good post, check this out. For this course, my expectations are a bit looser, since it’s an interdisciplinary program and close reading of texts is less central. But the overview gives you some idea of what I’m looking for.

I’ll send out via email as well, but a few things:

1. I’ve created a little space for introductions using the nifty Padlet platform. Follow my lead and jot down something about yourself using parts of speech to guide us prior to our Thursday meeting.
2. Please fill out the simple survey I created so I can learn more about you.
3. If you haven’t, respond to my invitations to the Commons. I sent out new invites today (Tuesday) if you missed the first one.

Just a quick welcome to 720 students for the fall. We’ll meet in earnest on Thursday. For now, be sure to check the email I sent and respond to the quick survey so I can add you to the Commons group/site we’ll use to share work and stay organized. Looking forward to meeting you soon!

As I mentioned in class, Thursday we’ll be sharing our experiences/projects, briefly and informally, as we eat, drink, and think about the semester as a whole. For those who feel more comfortable with some parameters, here are some ideas of how to approach this brief assignment (3-5 minutes is ample):

• for essays, give a sketch of the argument
• for objects you’ve built, share a few slides that show what the thing looks like
• talk about interesting materials you dug up in your research
• tell us where you’d like to to take this project in the future, or otherwise how the project might lead to future work (e.g., Kelley has discussed doing Twine games with HS students; Katharina is interested in expanding her project to include all available narratives of Jews displaced from Vienna during the Nazi period)
• talk about failures and frustrations: we don’t do this nearly enough in higher ed, though JITP is a leader
• explore ideas for new projects that working on this project inspired in you

Have fun, and I look forward to hearing about your work next week.

A hearty thanks to Patrick for his excellent tour of text analysis and NLTK in particular. I just wanted to follow up with a couple of notes and links that might be useful to those interested in further study:

• The NLTK Book is one-stop shopping for getting up to speed on the platform and (as Patrick demonstrated several times) quick searches for syntax, etc. even for experienced users.
• The Stanford Literary Lab is an excellent place to sample the kinds of things you can do with text analysis in ways that combine traditional humanistic questions with data-driven answers grounded in the kinds of analysis that computing makes possible, or in some cases, just must easier, than traditional print-based research methods.
• In case anyone was puzzled about Patrick’s references to the cloud over Franco Moretti, the figure most associated with “distant reading” (and a founder of the aforementioned Stanford Lit Lab). He has been accused of truly horrible acts: for those who want to read about it, one of his accuser’s narratives is here.

Katharina asked the very useful question last week, after I suggested that one or both groups might choose a substitute for the planned Billy Budd: what makes for a good text to play via Ivanhoe? Here are some thoughts on that score:

• you can “play” virtually any fictional narrative (or even historical event, legal debate, etc.): as long as there are an array of different personae to inhabit, the play will work.
• shorter is better: in my experience, the game works best in groups of 4-7, to allow for a range of different personae and to give a sense of the text as a whole. As I joked in class, Russian “doorstop” novels have too many characters and too much plot complexity to work well. Novella-length is great, given the time constraints.
• public-domain is always nice but less necessary here: we are transforming these texts and thus can “publish” our work in the open under “fair use.” So the only downside is the expense, potentially, of getting your hands on an in-copyright text.
• interesting publication history: if you dig deeply enough, almost any text has a rich publication history on some level, but it’s nice to think about texts that occasioned some kind of vivid debate, or had unusual itineraries through the publication process, or otherwise teach us something about the production/consumption/distribution of texts.
• As I mentioned in class, the Bedford Cultural Edition series has a few 19thC texts that have rich publication histories, are of manageable length, and are chock-full of the kinds of cultural materials that would enhance your play.

For an example, check out the site in which my honors course at Hunter played Charles Chesnutt’s The Conjure Tales last term. As you can see, both teams played the same text but with different emphases and different “paratextual” characters. The fun of the game emerges through the interactions, in which players, much as in improvised music or theater or dance, have to listen to one another in order for their expressions to mesh with the whole. Of course your play will look very different, but I think these students did great things with the project.