Words’ End

Oh, Friday! Friday was a big day for electronic literature and the digital humanities (see this earlier post). A great session to go to was “New Reading Interfaces,” presided over by Rita Raley who knows how to get a discussion going. Here are some cool projects and topics discussed in this session.

Jeremy Douglass talked about tag clouds as an aesthetic medium. They are web browsing interfaces, and despite their name they’re usually organized alphabetically or by popularity. Douglass takes the idea of cloud and runs with it, exploring them as a creative medium: the example he gave of this was the Flickr Fiesta 2005 invite he received by email. Algorithmically sophisticated literary renderings like TextArc, where terms have geographic meaning may look like tag clouds, but the latter are much simpler, Douglass said; plus, TextArc isn’t searchable, whereas tag clouds are. Later in the session, he brought home the broad(er) point that the tag cloud isn’t just a utilitarian interface; it can be portraiture, for example when some blogs replace their mastheads with tag clouds.

Then Joseph Tabbi talked about the semantic literary web, mostly in the context of the ELO Archive-It MediaWiki, a joint project with the Library of Congress. How do you preserve something, Tabbi asked? Well, you can tag it, which is limited but useful as a field-building (as opposed to literary) activity. OK, so what counts as a literary interface? Clouds are interesting as conceptual art, but their literariness (found through reading) is limited. Tabbi talked about Electronic Book Review (ebr) as an example of experiments in literary interfaces: the ebr website gets completely overhauled every couple of years, sometimes with sub-optimal for readability results. The key, for Tabbi, is to find conceptual connections while reading, and cross-link, cross-categorize – both to writing within and outside electronicbookreview.com.

Elizabeth Swanstorm talked about the interface in Jeffrey Shaw’s installation piece The Legible City. This is one I would travel overseas to play with, given more time and financial resources. Here’s how Shaw himself describes it:

In The Legible City the visitor is able to ride a stationary bicycle through a simulated representation of a city that is constituted by computer-generated three-dimensional letters that form words and sentences along the sides of the streets. Using the ground plans of actual cities – Manhattan, Amsterdam and Karlsruhe – the existing architecture of these cities is completely replaced by textual formations written and compiled by Dirk Groeneveld. Travelling through these cities of words is consequently a journey of reading; choosing the path one takes is a choice of texts as well as their spontaneous juxtapositions and conjunctions of meaning.

Better: the latest installation is multiplayer! If people are using more than one stationary bike, they may encounter each other’s avatars in the virtual world. So each rider is a node in a distributed networked system; their actions influence others’ virtual world; and their physical surroundings, irrelevant, fall away. So what kind of interactor, Swanstorm asked, does The Legible City produce – readers, riders, writers? Her eventual thesis was that this project highlights textual analysis as something one does by actively interacting with the text. No kidding; imagine giving undergraduate students of literary writing and/or criticism the visceral experience of this installation. They’d have a different relationship with literature forevermore.

Finally, Victoria Szabo talked about teaching, reading and creating scholarly works in 3D environments. Specifically, she talked about how they (Information Science + Information Studies at Duke) use Second Life in teaching. Students create objects, hold events and collaborate on criticism virtually… oh, just look at the ISIS site I just linked to. Szabo’s overarching point was this architectural metaphor: building and thinking are closely related. They put this into successful ongoing practice over at ISIS, encouraging students to combine creative and critical acts in their use of 3D virtual worlds.

Been home for 24 hours now, and I realize that I didn’t finish writing up the exciting stuff I saw at MLA on Thursday. So:

1. NINES, “a networked infrastructure for nineteenth-century electronic scholarship,” continues to impress with its impact and exemplary use of the net for collaboration. It arose, Laura Mandell said in her talk, in reaction to the prejudice against electronic publishing among tenure review, faculty search and other profession-influencing committees. The NINES editorial board not only aims to separate high-quality electronic scholarship from the chaff, but also do so in a sustainable manner. To that end, from what I understand they review sites and projects but leave things like copy-editing to authors themselves, ideally aided by their own institutions.

Laura’s point that the digital resources don’t, and can’t, disguise the human agency that creates them is worth repeating every once in a while. One of the ways in which electronic scholarship has been good for the humanities is that computation forces us to admit we’re constantly making choices, and some of these choices are arbitrary in that equally valid options exist for many editorial decisions. Objectivity as an aim falls away when you’re working computationally, and what’s left is a need to clearly explain your decisions. As we know from so many spheres of life, transparency is key communication. Scholarly communication is no exception from that.

2. In the same session, Robert Blake talked about the UC Language Consortium, which totally blew me away even if their site has been down for a few days now. They’re developing online resources for the teaching of foreign languages, starting with impressive projects in Filipino and Arabic. The consortium solicits proposals for development of these resources, and gives out small ($5,000-20,000) grants. The courses for which these resources are developed proceed to be open – for credit and all – to all students within the UC system, and the online materials are open to anyone to look at. Now that’s open courseware. And their next big project is Punjabi Without Walls! Apparently the Punjabi communities in the U.S. (and presumably elsewhere) are excited about this, since they want to keep their language alive and these materials will make that easier.

On to MLA Friday in the next post.

Highlights from Thursday:

The first session I went to was “The Challenge of a Million Books.” The title refers to computational mining of huge amounts of text at a time, in an attempt to discover bird’s-eye-view-level things we’d have trouble seeing with the naked eye. I discovered at this session that text mining is also called knowledge discovery. The latter is a term a bit too generic, I think: my encoded Roland excerpts also permit, even encourage, knowledge discovery, but what I’ve done with manual encoding and a simple interface is a far cry from sophisticated algorithms and machine learning.

Sara Steger presented on her research of sentimentality in nineteenth-century literature. This doctoral dissertation work is one of the test cases for the MONK project (Metadata Offer New Knowledge), one of the coolest collaborative endeavors currently out there. Simply put by the project creators themselves, MONK “is a digital environment designed to help humanities scholars discover and analyze patterns in the texts they study.” Sara took a bunch of mid-19th-century English texts, designated some chapters as sentimental (she brought up Little Nell’s death scene from Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop as an example), and other chapters as unsentimental. She used these as the training set for the MONK algorithm, “asking” it to figure out more or less on its own what makes a text sentimental or unsentimental, and then having new chapters automatically classified. Statistical analysis then revealed some interesting things: some words are clearly associated with sentimentality (having to do with the female gender, or children, or death, or love), while others are just the opposite (including titles such as Mr./Mrs., and business- and law-related words). Sara’s theory is that this means sentimentality is not just there when we “feel it.” It’s at least in part a formula, used by 19th-century writers to political ends. Her research is still in progress, but is already producing quite cool results.

The other cool URL I gathered from the session is SEASR (pronounced Caesar), Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research. This project works in tandem with MONK, and seems to aim for “construct[ing] data services that access and normalize unstructured information.” It looks as though the final product will be available not only to large projects but to individual scholars as well; exciting.

Later that evening John Unsworth spoke on “Cyberinfrastructure and Open Standards, Methods, and Communities.” As usual with Unsworth’s dense and whirlwind talks, I quickly gave up on taking notes, Luckily, the entire talk is online, albeit a bit difficult to read without margins. But copy-paste, print it out even, read it: this powerhouse of digital humanities always impresses with his ability to synthesize large, important topics in an accessible way.

Actually, new species discovered deep underwater. Gorgeous video set to good music, just under five minutes long.

There is so much we still don’t know about the life with which we share the planet.

(The title of this post refers to Captain Low-Rez and the Pixel of Destiny (SWF). If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. Watch the entire thing, especially if you have designed a website lately.)

Chicago-town has strange weather. I got in on Thursday to a dry, near-freezing city very similar to Boston – but yesterday there was a wet-snow storm that was gorgeous, diagonal and swirling, out the huge hotel windows but left almost no snow on the ground. That’s lake effect for you.

I’m here for the annual convention of the Modern Language Association. MLA is an odd beast. With about ten thousand attendees a year, I’m pretty sure it’s the largest humanities conference in North America. (I’d be curious to find out that I’m wrong! If you know of a larger one, tell me.) It’s of necessity impersonal, and filled with stressed-out people interviewing for jobs, sitting in one committee meeting after another, taking every advantage of being in the same town as far-away colleagues to cram in as much geeking-out about their favorite geeky topics as they can, losing sleep in the process.

OK, that last part is true of any academic conference. But still, MLA isn’t generally thought of as an exactly enjoyable event.

This year, though, the organizers seem to have gone all out in promoting digital humanities sessions. The poster/demo session I was in, “Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, Navigating,” was mentioned in the Winter 2007 newsletter – a big deal, considering the thing goes out to 30K members. The result was a rush: the hour-and-fifteen-minute session was packed with people, and I didn’t get to see my colleagues’ work until the very end because pesky people were coming up and being all interested in RolandHT (poster, 1MB, and teaching modules, 31K, both PDF files) .

I loved every minute, of course. The whole thing left me flyin’, feeling much like I do at Digital Humanities conferences. This was both unusual in the context of MLA, and a welcome respite from the past few months’ job search both in and out of academe. So, if you’re reading this and were there: thank you! If you have any further thoughts on the project, please comment here or email me, username vika at this domain.

I’ll post a few session notes later on. For now, breakfast.

This afternoon the sun was shinin’ like there’s no tomorrow. Barely out of the door on my way to the only open nearby coffee shop, a car pulling out of the neighboring driveway blocked my path so that an elderly couple could get in. I didn’t feel like climbing over the melting snowbanks to both sides of the walk, so stopped and waited. The old lady looked at me with a slightly apprehensive smile and said, “We’re going to delay you for a while here.” I assured her that it was ok, and looked around at all the gleaming-clean houses.

They took their time with the complicated affair of one getting into the front seat, the other in the back, unable to do so simultaneously because of strange car-door geometry. “Merry Christmas,” the car people called out. “And to you,” I said, and meant it. I don’t like Christmas, but I liked the old lady and her partner with their slow ways and their festive sincerity.

I walked to the coffee shop wondering about what Christmas might mean to those people. Davis Square was ghostly-empty and, if not for the cold and the snow and the barren trees, if you only looked at the light and the buildings, felt like deep spring. Everything bathed in light.

Then there was a pumpkin spice latte by the dancing fire in the gas fireplace, and a book. By the time I came outside again an hour and a half later, clouds had moved in and the light was whiter, less expansive.

Then out again in the twilight, and the blue houses stood out among those of all the other colors. There are at least half a dozen blue ones between my place and Davis Square, and they’re all different glorious colors. If the house I live in weren’t a pleasing shade of purple, I’d be jealous of all those blues. As it stands, I get to look at them in the changing light of the sun.

Coming back home, it was dark enough that the strings of tiny lights on our porch were already lit. Whenever I open the front door in the dark, I feel like I’m entering the secret center of some deep-playa Burning Man installation. And speaking of Burning Man, if you haven’t yet, do check out Neil K. Guy’s photos from this year’s event. He is easily one of my two favorite BM photographers, the other being Bucky Sparkle.

Dinner of tiny quiches and raspberry vodka. Conversation with beautiful women. Cats sleeping on me for hours as I do my thinking and writing. The blissed-out quiet of a house large enough to make it seem like we’re all impossibly far away from each other. Aaand an 8:30am interview tomorrow morning. Nothing like job search to bring a girl firmly back onto the ground.

When you are being kind to yourself, how does that kindness manifest?

Winter solstice is come and gone, and yesterday was a minute longer than the day before. Not a moment too soon. Events conspired to make this the sucker-punch winter, and lack of light hasn’t been helping any. –.– I love Boston for its seasons, not least because it reminds me that everything has a limit. The night is on its way out; it too will pass. Things I want to spend most of my time on – home, work, food and other arts, my Buddhist studies, hopefully further research on Roland – will settle, become more defined. Upheaval will give way to silent blue and yellow sunrise again and again. Rain droplets on my window don’t occlude the life-giving star, about the only thing I worship steadfastly these days. –.– It’s so quiet in the early morning. Just the rain falling. Or maybe the rain’s in my head.

“Scarborough Fair” is an old one! The Fair itself, a huge month-and-a-half-long trade show, originates in the 13th century, and the ballad appears to have its origins in another one from the late 17th. I, of course, am partial to Simon and Garfunkel’s version (link to YouTube video), because it takes me all the way back to 1993, when I moved from New York to sunny southern California (and hated it). S&G’s “The Concert in Central Park” was one of the first CDs I mail-ordered from BMG, an unspeakable luxury back then. That CD came with the bonus of “A Heart in New York,” which I sang to myself whenever I missed Queens. Which was often.

Come to think of it, I also hummed it to myself whenever I flew into New York to visit my brother (or whatnot). Have you flown into New York City in the dark? It’s unbelievably cool.

But this is a recipe post, of course:

-Take a chicken breast. Preferably a locally-grown, awesomely outrageous chicken breast, like the stuff I get from these folks. Defrost if necessary. (Never ever defrost meat in the microwave: potential health problems aside, it just gets an icky texture.) Preheat oven to 400F (200C).

-Put some salt, pepper, parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme in a leettle bowl. How much? I dunno. It’s hard to over-herb a chicken breast. Mix.

-Put in a couple spoons of mayonnaise. Again, I don’t know how much: enough to coat the chicken. Mix well with the herbs.

-Slather the mixture all over the chicken. Use your hands. Get some under the skin too, if you like.

-Put chicken in a foil-lined or greased baking dish. Bake for 45-50 minutes, or until the juices run clear when you poke it with a fork. Eat, and tell me you don’t love me. I dare you.

By the way: I’m generally not a white-meat person. The meat CSA share has changed that! The Chestnut Farms chicken – as all their other meats – is amazing, and given that I’m not going to give up meat for environmental reasons anytime soon, it’s just about the most eco-conscious stuff to get. We get to eat meat of animals raised humanely, meat that hasn’t been plied with mysterious ingredients and transported the usual long distances. Support local agriculture, and all that.

If you have a chance to support your local agriculture, meat-raising or not, I encourage you to do so. Chestnut Farms’ minimum monthly share (ten pounds) is way too much for us, so we share it among three households. That way, even though the per-pound cost is high ($7 or a bit less, depending on whether they have thrown in freebies), it doesn’t break the bank to get a 3-4 lbs a month. Paradoxically, this arrangement has encouraged me to eat less meat than I normally would: store-bought stuff just doesn’t compare unless it’s really great and thus even more expensive.

Being able to participate in this meat-share thing has made me very, very happy to be back in Massachusetts: there was nothing like it around Providence, although the fruit-and-veggie farmers’ markets there are pretty good. It’s just one more thing that makes Boston feel like home all over again.

Boy, am I grateful for excellent housemates and a snow blower. Especially since I’m not doing anything with the snowblower, but Eric is. Having gotten home at an ungodly hour from a drum and dance,* I’m in no condition to plow snow. I did, however, redeem myself a bit by making hot chocolate. That and a freshly-baked apricot-ginger-Grand-Marnier muffin == breakfast of the goddess.

Two things I just had to share with you. First up is the environmentally appropriate global warming mug (1 min long):

And secondly, because it’s insanely cool, an almost-six-minute-long evolution video. Nothing like 3D animation to make you feel like an alien on your own planet. It’s set to heavy rock music; you might want to turn your sound down (but not off):

Now I cuddle my cats and drink and read. Add a job into the mix, and I’ll be a happy camper. Keep your fingers crossed for me: I’m waiting to hear on one. Here’s hoping…

*Another drum and dance, yes. In Cambridge this time, lovely lovely, my hands still hurt a little, must get djembe of my own. Although, as I discovered yesterday, a bass drum is great to play too. It’s really too bad that this was the last such event in this long-running series, but it seems that there are plenty of others if I’m willing to drive a bit. And for this, I’ll drive.