Tag Archives: toomer

Hacking Cane

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Manifold Admin Panel

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.

Manifold Project Cane

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.

Manifold Slack

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. 

Manifold Group

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.

Hypothesis Electric

Example of annotation using Hypothes.is

Annotating Jeans Toomer’s Cane

Posted on by
Reply

The Office Gingers decided to use pop culture references to bring insights and to further understand Jean Toomer’s iconic novel, Cane. The annotations are filled with paintings, photos, music, films, and a colorful look at Toomer’s world and possible inspiration and influence over specific sections, scenes, and vivid images throughout his piece. The 1920s was a time of transition, innovation, and a cultural boom for African American artists. Therefore we noticed and took notes of motifs and how artists took inspiration from one another.

I took on Karintha, Reaper, November Cotton Flower, and Becky. Karina and Becky spoke to me as an intersectional feminist, and through that lens, I noticed the stark contrast in the way women were viewed, perceived, and portrayed at the time (and frankly even know.) For Karintha speaks to the desire to obtain a woman (even at a young age), I utilized a photograph by African American Renaissance photographer James Van Der Zee. Zee focused on portraits, and one in particular Untitled, 1924 piece showcases a young woman in flapper wear. The photograph takes on the essence of what a woman like Karintha might have looked like when Toomer published this piece (1923). The Flapper was young, beautiful, sassy, and carefree. Women’s loose clothing style at the time allowed for more freedom in what she did, such as sports, driving, and riding horses, as well as the freedom to move her hips and dance. I also included Juanita Cooper, an African American actress who was part of one of the first race films, 1921 ‘s Right of Birth. She also exemplified the flapper girl style of the decade. Moving on to Becky, this tale reminded me of a much earlier work, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. While Karintha objectified a woman, Becky shames women, especially those who are unwed mothers like Hester in Hawthorne’s piece. Is as if Toomer moves a bit forward with Karintha, embracing the questionable morals of the time and speaking about a woman’s body, then takes a step back, back to puritan times where women were shunned and isolated from their communities for various sins, including single motherhood and interracial relationships.

In the more poetic sections November Cotton Flower and Reaper, I took inspiration from the cotton industry’s historical changes at the time. For November Cotton Flower, I choose to showcase this industry’s importance in the 1920s through two songs, one by Bessie Brown entitled, Song from the Cotton Field (1925-1929), and the other by Brook Benton, Boll-Weevil (1961). Brown’s song is an emotion representing the black slaves who worked in cotton fields. Once enslaved, some were renters and landowners in the 1920s. The poem also mentions the Boll-weevil, an insect that destroys the cotton. In the 1920s, this animal migrated from Mexico to the United States, and with it came the destruction of many crops and fear of production loss by those who owned and cultivated cotton. Many songs have been written about this beetle during the 1920s, including Mississi Cotton Boll – Weevil Blues by Charley Patton. Brook Benton’s 1950’s song Boll-weevil may not be part of Toomer’s time but the catchy and popular tune is all about this pest and the damage it caused the cotton farmers. Another important aspect of the farming industry in the 20s was the rise and evolution of machinery and other technological tools available to farmers, such as tractors instead of individuals having to “reap” the crop with a scythe. Game designer Jakub Rosalki knows all about this as he imagined an alternative 1920s in Iron Harvest. I noted a digital rending of one of his games to represent this shift in production, process, and mechanism that loomed over the roaring 20s farmers.

Though our plans to use the annotation tool Manifold did not work to our annotation (multimedia heavy), Hypothes.is proved to be a solid and versatile tool to showcase both text and multimedia. The tool’s simplicity allowed us to focus more on the content instead of how to use the tool itself. Hypothes.is gave us freedom and ease of use, letting our colorful annotation shine while also bringing essential insight to Toomer’s unique storytelling and writing styles.