ENGL 7453: Modernism In/And the Archive

https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1EF3tMWsuv1mPtzBB6ZmYRcdo1KW_23bH...

I created this map to focus on trying to map the colonialist control over Dublin which has a hold on the main character Eveline's life in James Joyce's "Eveline." Because of this, almost all that she hears of the outside world is under colonialist control, and in an effort to escape from this fate, she wishes to flee to Buenos Aires, which is ironically yet another place that was under colonial control. However, despite all of his promises, Frank intends to take her to Liverpool instead, a place in the center of colonist England where she would be without recourse or help and could be easily sold into sex slavery either there, or transported to other ports through the shipping system. I include descriptions of each of the places that are mentioned in the story, and explore how their locations and associations are overt assertions of colonialist control over the people of Dublin and Ireland, and how this encroachment affects Eveline's life and view of the world. I also draw a line showing just how far a ship from Dublin would need to travel in order to reach Buenos Aires, which is in a different hemisphere of the globe altogether.

The star icon is used to indicate Eveline's dream for escape, the place she never gets to reach, Buenos Aires. Circle icons with a small dot in the middle are used to mark locations that represent colonialist control. The home icon is used to show Eveline's home, and where exactly she lived as detailed in the short story. Ordinary icons are used to indicate places that are noteworthy, yet unique in their connotations.

The red icons on the map denote the exotic locales that Frank mentions during his pseudo-courtship of Eveline, while the green icon is placed at the North Wall of the river port in Dublin. Although she imagines exploring wildly distant places, she is ultimately paralysed on the North Wall while she watches Frank depart. 

While working on the map, it was notable that while each of the locations she imagines exploring with Frank involves increasingly significant distances, the actual location of Liverpool (where he is likely actually taking her) fits under the same large green icon as the North Wall when you are zoomed out far enough to see distant Buenos Aires. A key element of the story seems to be the ephemeral or imaginary status of these exotic locations that are associated with the ocean and Frank's occupation as a sailor. Eveline's dissociation at the end of the story leaves these imaginary places as unreal and unexplored, as intangible and fluctuating as the ocean and her theoretical future with Frank.

 In "TXTual Practice" by Rita Raley, one of the examples used to demonstrate the regimentation of public space is the illegal act of graffiti, the creation of which transgressively claims a public space for its artist(s) (Halyes & Pressman 7). This example particularly jumped out to me because of the well-established digital community of graffiti artists, many of whom go only by their tag names to protect their identities, who film themselves roaming cities and abandoned urban spaces and creating stunning pieces of graffiti artwork. This artists must work rapidly to avoid being caught, or if they are in a secure place, to practice the skills of rapid work to hone their craft. One of the most interesting aspects of this community is their sense of obligation to their local cities and towns which leads to them often only wishing to create graffiti on truly abandoned, isolated, and unowned structures. This portion of the graffiti artist community often have programs and mentorships for young or growing graffiti artists and teach them how to seek out spaces that are safe or not illegal or at least not cared about in order to create their works of art. Other portions of the community graffiti more widely and in illegal places, such as on the sides of cargo trains, old warehouses, or under bridges, seeing the illicit nature of their art as an essential part of its substance. For all of these graffiti artists, it appears that the transgressive and rebellious nature of their art, whether they flaunt it or not, is a primary part of its value, and its ability to give a voice to artists whose voices are under-represented in art galleries and display the beauty and skill of their art throughout the urban landscape they call home, speaking out of turn and against all efforts to silence it, is an essential part of its power.

Aside from its inherent statement of power against authority, graffiti also has great textual significance as well, which Raley did not draw upon in her essay but that supports her topic powerfully. Graffiti artists each develop tags for themselves, which can be thought of as symbols and nicknames that identify who they are. There are universal communicatory symbols amongst graffiti artists that are well understood; the crown, for instance, is considered a high honor that only the best of graffiti artists who have not only mastered their craft and "paid their dues," but have also managed to cover their cities in their art so that every other graffiti artist knows their tag and style well, can claim. If anyone who is thought not deserving of the honor of the crown above their tag, their work may be defaced or they may even be hunted by other graffiti artists and punished for stealing the symbol without earning it. There are generally only ever a few kings or queens recognized within a single community at a time, and the honor is guarded by the entire community, and sought after by all. Similarly, one of the highest offenses amongst the graffiti community is to deface or cover up someone else's work, because this is not only a destruction of art that can never be reclaimed, but a silencing of the artist's voice in that location, and is viewed as an action of grave disrespect. There are grave warnings within the community to respect the work of others, as kids and young, inexperienced artists are the ones who most commonly commit this offense, and artists who are angered by this destruction of their work may resort to violence.

Yet another interesting textual aspect to graffiti and the community of graffiti artists is language that is unique to graffiti. Artists become skilled at reading the letters and understanding them, yet to an untrained eye they are often very difficult to decipher due to the extreme stylization of the letters. There are different styles that are constantly evolving, and the ability to read and communicate through these unique letters and symbols is a powerful method of textual control of an environment through art. Though a random bystander may well be able to appreciate the beautiful colors and stylistic lettering used in the graffiti works, other artists and those who know the community are able to recognize not only the tags and signatures of the artists, but also the unique message they are communicating. Many graffiti artists choose not only to communicate a message, but also to represent their group, and there are many examples of collaborative work amongst graffiti artists, where each individual contributes to the work as a whole in a rapid and expertly choreographed dance of spraypaint upon the wall.

A few examples of graffiti artist that share their work and process digitally:

Rake43 painting in an abandoned factory:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_Z-3SuFYJ8

GhostEA:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRYaPYFga3w

Rita Raley's thesis of using the scenes of public writing to analyze "the dynamics of ephemerality and vernacularity that are at the heart of the way we read and write now" is intriguing to me. I may feel like a technological 'granny' now, but even when I wasn't, I never gave into the trend of "text speak" no matter how much faster it would be to type with my thumbs. (Okay not strictly true, as I have sparingly given in to 'LOL' a few times, but only ever uppercase; 'lol' as a reply to everything that is funny {and not} just grates on me to no end). Her descriptions of using public text installations to "construct a new public space...situated in between the actual...and the virtual" (p15) as "ephemeral graffiti" (p17) almost seems redundant. One of my favorite concepts is the idea that these public installations of a normally semi-private activity mean that "monologic advertisements instead become bulletin boards and chat spaces" (p18). We, as a public, repurpose spaces in new ways that are far more enjoyable than intended.

Matt Kirschenbaum writing about the discovery of Walt Whitman records at the National Archives highlights basically the opposite of Raley's thesis. Created more than a century ago and packed away in an archive just waiting to be found contrasts nicely with temporary installations of public participation. But because they both deal with the mundane, they're not strictly antithetical, even if it seems like they should be.

Kirschenbaum also wrote that "to archive in the realm of computation originally meant to take something offline" (p58) which is kind of funny because I once thought of archiving as creating digital copies of my physical photos and papers was the best way to achieve LOCKSS. This idea also counters McGann's need to move beyond the codex format when analyzing other codices. Yes, we can keep using them, but we're far more limited by the format and far more likely to miss the connections that digital analysis provides. As he points out, "The elecotronic OEX is a metabook, that is, it has consumed everything that the codex OED provides and reorganized it at a higher level." (p55) 

These ideas are all circling around the same broad concept. We need to create ephemeral graffitti together, we need to archive materials offline AND online, and we need the flexibility of digital analysis of bookish materials. Even though it feels like these concepts should be contradictory, they're more of a 3-D coin than diametrically opposed ends of a continuum. 

My experience with Gephi, while not one full of cursing and outward frustration, was not entirely pleasant. I say it was not entirely pleasant because all-in-all, Gephi is a unique tool that--like Voyant Tools--opens new doors for me as we trudge through the semester and make our way to the deadline for our semester-long research project. I am happy to have been introduced to this tool, but being unfamiliar with the data loaded into it was most definitely a source of frustration for me. Had I compiled the data myself to load into this, that may have made the blind exploration process easier as I know how the data is supposed to look in certain situations.

The genre tags made little sense to me without context of how they were developed, but I'm sure made sense to whomever compiled them. I enjoyed playing around with the different types of graphs and applying different styles to the font, which makes me excited to try Gephi again with my own data. Something that was also interesting was reconfiguring the data to highlight different trends in the graph.

I loved exploring the statistical tools on Gephi, regardless of having no idea what the results implied with little knowledge of the original data. Gephi was definitely foreign to me, which is strange because I typically find myself as the pseudo-IT person in most situations as my professional work includes a focus in web devleopment. It made me uncomfortable having little control over what I was doing, but I enjoyed that discomfort and figuring out how to manipulate the graphs. I look forward to employing this tool again in the future with data that interests me.

"I think I'm getting the hang of this Gephi thing!"—My famous last words. 

Anyways, the potential of Gephi and data mapping in regards to literature is, honestly a little thrilling? It's a whole different way of reading works that we've read for ages. Like I mentioned in class, the example work Gephi uses to demo their software is characters in Les Miserables. It might be too much to say that the potential of software of Gephi it makes these works feel new, but the idea that there are overlying structures that we don't usually see and now can... That's amazing! It's like we have X-ray vision. 

Now, applying the software to my data proved more challenging. I think my nodes might have been broken somehow, since I only had twelve, and it was easy to make mistakes that I didn't know how to undo, but following the step by steps from Gephi and Dr. Drouin, I think I was able to at least sort of arrange the data how I wanted. It had shapes and colors, and when you export as a PDF, it does this beautiful curve thing. Quite nice to look at. 

The thing I guess I am still so intrigued/frustrated by, is how it feels difficult to know which questions are the right to ask. I guess in the humanities I'm so used to the more philosophical and theoretical side of things it feels weird to look at something this mathematic. Once you have a graph organized and layed out is when the questions really start to arise. In this case, it really layed out the thematic soup all the authors were living in. Relatable! 

I tried to embed my photo, but I don't know that it succeded so I am also linking a photo to my work. 

As an editor of a literary journal, you can't go much lower than a themed issue. It's the absolute zero of the creative writing world. An editor's sad nadir. A literary journal's last death cough from a consciousness that's blinking out. The other day, an email arrived in my inbox from some literary journal straddling uneasily the periphery of relevance. They were advertising a new call of submissions for a scab themed issue. The advertisement read:

Not quite broken, not quite mended. A reminder of what was, and what will be. Scabs protect our wounds, and yet the temptation to pick at them and peel them off is always there. They call attention to what is already disappearing, and we don’t yet know if they will leave a scar. Scabs are a reminder that healing can be a long, ugly process.

It's the kind of thing that should make any creative with dignity left blush. Yet, it's also kind of instructive, right? It announces what we already know: a lot of people are in pain right now, so a lot of people are writing about pain. Scabs are wounds. Scabs are painful. Scabs are a kind of healing. Scabs are ugly. Pain-->scabs-->wounds-->healing-->ugly.

What I’m trying to say is that Gephi allows us to access these kinds of associative networks that we are always consuming as we read. And we know exactly what we are consuming, but we don’t talk about it, because it’s obvious and kind of embarrassing to talk about. Ugly correlates with scab, because scabs are ugly.

The fact I spent my time trying to operate Gephi with all of the subtlety of a baby trying to fit the triangle shape into the square hall isn’t the point. The point is clear. Identifying associative networks is requisite element of performing close reading is. Gephi just allows us to access what we already know but can’t express yet. Turns out: every issue is a themed issue.

I think there was some kind of error in my data importing process. While I agree with the topic tag connections, there are duplicate tags that will list different permutations of the same words. I would have to do more investigation to figure out how to eliminate the duplicates. They make the graph more cluttered than I would like.

The Yifan Hu layout algorithm seems to bifurcate the data based on the amount of connections between tags; in the chart that I’ve created that filters the ID network by relationship to James Joyce, the network produced by the Yifan Hu layout is two wings connected by a central node of the novel, which is a convenient visual to conceptualize the two main written works related to Joyce. When the full data set is arranged in the Yifan Hu layout, the duplicate data creates a lot of visual clutter as the data separates into grouped islands; I’ve included a screenshot of one island, where I can note the centrality of the term “poetry,” although the rest of the data is a bit jumbled.

Given the limits of visuality in the Yifan Hu arrangement, I was pleased with the image generated by the Fruchterman Rheingold layout, which created a modular arrangement that flexes upon rearrangement to maintain the relationship between nodes. I felt that this model was more visually intuitive (although that may be partially because of the visual limitations of the duplicate nodes) because it kept the data contained and connected rather than dispersing it into discrete islands, which I think models the conceptual relationships between topics.

I think this network visualization is a useful method for periodical studies (given the future ability to import data without error…) because it reveals relationships that are not evident upon close reading, but, once revealed, may help guide/inform close reading. I think I could benefit from this procedure as a way of giving a fresh set of eyes to the same brain.

...felt so technologically inept as I do now while trying to navigate all these fun new tools (*cough, Gephi) I never knew existed, so I might as well blast all my shame here for everyone to see. Once upon a time I might have rated myself as technologically proficient (although even that seems like a stretch now), but I have permanently disabused myself of any notions of ever being 'tech-savvy.' I used to laugh when my Dad struggled with basic computer usage because I didn't get how hard it was for him to navigate unfamiliar territory, but I'm sure not laughing now (sorry Dad!). 

To add insult to injury, that blank space ↑ is where the picture of my Gephi Little Review is supposed to appear; apparently I don't even know how to share an image of how much I don't know how to use Gephi. (I uploaded it to Shutterfly & copied the link because I don't know how else to get an image url.)  

I have muddled my way through Gephi as much as possible, but I honestly have no earthly idea what I'm doing and nothing really means much. I can't tell if there's anything missing, or how the nodes really relate to each other through the edges; because of this, I can't offer an educated opinion on the genre and topic connections. I thought the Fruchterman Reingold layout was more aesthetically pleasing than the Yifan Hu layout, but I didn't really glean anything different from one or the other. Despite this, though, I think Gephi is a veritable treasure trove of potential for literary analysis of all kinds; the samples show how well it works with Les Mis and it would be really fun to see Moretti run his Hamlet analysis through Gephi. I get the idea even if I don't actually get it. 

(And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to hide in a corner and try to figure out how I got technologically left behind in only my thirties...)

Whenever I teach English Composition, I tell students that good writing is really only a matter of building bridges only you can build; making connections no one else can make is what separates an essay that is a rote mechanical exercise of getting words on paper from a creative expression. One day I will write a paper about Joycean neologism in Finnegans Wake and neologism in the music of Young Thug. But that’s for another response. Point is: when I went into Voyant for the first time, I was excited all of the new avenues of bridge building that the digital humanities provide. I was drawn immediately to the contexts and correlations sections at the bottom of the window. The correlation that interested me the most was between the words “children” and white.”

It’s a curious correlation for a number of reasons. In a journal made by and for black Americans, why are white children appearing so often and so close to one another? I can’t help remembering my disgusting priest’s classroom in my wasted Catholic high school. A pro-life poster that read “black children are an endangered species,” was the only permanent fixture on his only bulletin board. We passed it every time we were dismissed. Dear God, a species. Of course, no analogous poster exists for white children. A bias, even an unconscious one, is obvious: white children are, well, children. Black children are not. Consider Tamir Rice, the twelve-year-old boy who was shot for carrying a toy gun. For black children in this country, childhood and play ends prematurely. As soon as black bodies appear within the institutional gaze, childhood gives way to a long adulthood. Now, obviously I’m reaching, but I think that’s the while point. The process of the reading and building the digital humanities not only allows for, but encourages reaching and grasping for ideas that are just beyond the periphery of traditional paper scholarship.

Looking at The Crisis through Voyant was a novel way of reading through text that ultimately proved to be quite difficult. In particular, I found it hard  to know the right questions to ask. 

The thing about the sort of close readings I am used to, is that your brain is the machine, indexing and interpreting in ways that we don't think twice about. It’s like walking versus driving. You can do things with a car that you could never do by just walking, but you have to adapt your thinking to the vehicle's mode of transportation. The kind of connections that we make through reading the text have to be manually input by us, yet, without satisfactory knowledge of the material I was feeding Voyant, any question or hypothesis felt like a stab in the dark. 

I wanted to know if the language surrounding race changed over time in The Crisis, and so I plugged in the words "negro" "colored" and "black", and my results were... inconclusive. I had assumed that as time went on, negro and colored would go out of fashion and Black would become far more popular, but that wasn't the case. Even futher, there are no results for "African American", I hadn't realized how recent the term was.

https://voyant-tools.org/?corpus=18a5cf1225c6141837902f3e4bb35c15&stopLi...

Overall, negro and colored were both used seemingly interchangably, with black being far less used overall. in the last few data points, however, use of colored and negro is down, while black remains the same. I'm not sure what exactly to make of any of it. 

Regardless of how much more removed I felt, it turns out, distanced textual analysis still requires one to get their hands in the mud and grapple. Reading Crisis through Voyant only convinced me of the need of both distanced and closed reading working together in tandem for more complete picture. 

Considering the range of publication years of The Crisis, I used Voyant Tools to see the woman’s suffrage movement fused in the magazine along with the race issues. Since it was not a one-time movement, but a long-term one, I found it super helpful to track the movement within the circle of The Crisis columnists and audience, using Voyant Tools which extracts the results across the whole series of magazine issues. I first typed in “suffrag*” and saw the five peaks—04.5 being the highest, then 10.4, 15.1, 11.1, and 12.3 in sequence—in the graph that deal with the suffrage movement the most. Thinking that it is not as often as I imagined, I became curious about how frequently The Crisis deals with any issues pertinent to woman and typed “woman*.” As it’s shown in the graph below, the top three peaks coincide with the results of “suffrage*,” which reveals that one of the main social issues The Crisis printed in relation to woman is the woman’s suffrage movement, at least before 1920s.

Meanwhile, I became curious about whether the suffrage issue dies down after the 19^th Amendment, and so I typed in the words, “disfranchise*,” “enfranchise*.” The result below shows that “disfranchise*” has a highest peak in 21.4, which seems to speak that after the enfranchisement for all people, the magazine is harshly critiquing the issue of disfranchisement still existing out there.

The experience of distant reading with Voyant Tools definitely helped me have a fresh perspective to see the construction of the context around the readings in longer period.

I've lived in Tulsa for just over a year now, but I'd spent my entire life in Arkansas until the big move. When poring through The Crisis, my first inclination was to see how many times Arkansas and Oklahoma appeared. It's no secret that both Arkansas and Oklahoma have had catastrophic racially motivated massacres. Using Voyant, I was able to pinpoint the related issues quickly, as well as compare their total mention frequencies.

I was somewhat...relieved? that Arkansas and Oklahoma didn't come up as frequently as the Deep South, but it was still gut-wrenching to read the listings of lynchings that occurred. The Elaine Massacre happened in early October 1919, but I was fascinated to read about a lumber plant employing 500 African Americans in Crossett and plans for new manufacturing plants in Hot Springs in the November Issue. A year and a half after the Elaine Massacre the Tulsa "Race Riot" Massacre occurred, and the July 1921 Issue  does feature a chilling report and a photograph of the devastation. This is the ugliest possible history, but it's absolutely crucial that we learn from it to heal the country and the people.