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
