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.

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 coming Tuesday, September 18th, come to MIT for the first in the Purple Blurb digital reading series. “The readings will start at 6pm at MIT in 14N–233 (second floor of building 14, in the wing that is across the courtyard from the Hayden Library),” says organizer Nick Montfort in the announcement.

The first reader will be Robert Kendall, and I’m very sorry to miss it due to a prior obligation: Rob’s words tend to transport me somewhere familiar I’ve never been before. At the next event on October 18th, I’ll be reading from Roland^HT and talking a bit about narrative threads running through it. The other two readings this semester will take place on November 13th (Barbara Barry) and December 4th (Andrew Plotkin).

For a good time, call on Purple Blurb.

Once again I keep getting these flashes of “should really blog that!” and then immediately “but there’s so much unsaid over there.” So, in short:

I defended and graduated.* To paraphrase my landlady, I’m Vika Zafrin, Ph.uckin’ D. That paraphrase involved changing fewer letters than you might imagine. For the first time in my adult life I am not a student pursuing a degree full-time at an institution. Mostly there’s a giant feeling of relief, but I already miss research. Although that balances out, because I sure don’t miss the constant insecurity, the “not good enough”ness, the 24/7 feeling like I have to be working.

OK, I still mostly feel like I should be working. But it’s getting easier to compartmentalize, and you know what? There’s a whole big life out there, with books and spiritual practice and cooking and friends and friends’ children and visits with mom, who lives in driving distance for the first time in thirteen years. Who knew?

Ethan and I have moved up to Boston. Best move we could’ve made. Wanderlust is tugging at my pants leg already, but I could be happy living in Boston for a long while. Given that wanderlust is my muse and near-constant companion, that’s a hefty statement to make.

The house we live in has seven human residents, five cats, a dog and (temporarily) a bird. Gods bless the marvel that is modern allergy medicine. Our two cats have established relationships with the three who have lived here for long. Nochka the tiny black cat has a hissy fit any time DJ Spooky, the black boycat thrice her size, comes into our bedroom seeking food. And there’s the impossibly beautiful lynx-y Winter, who is afraid of almost everyone. Other than that, feline people are chill. Humans are also mostly chill, and really, how bad can it get when you live with geeks and musicians (and a funny man who inexplicably deals with insurance all day)? A circus band occasionally practices in my living room. Beat that with a stick.

The past three months have been spent largely acclimating to the new house, the new life rhythms, the big questions like where to go from here and how to plan out the long term. I’m working outside of academe now, but who knows how long I’ll be able to stay away?

So much is changing. Mostly I like it. Some of it is hard growth, but on the whole I feel like I’m stretching after a long sleep.

*Oh, and my work? Here, in its entirety. Get yourself Firefox and enjoy. It’ll take half a minute or so to load, but is thereafter very fast.

Even if I have a ton of material to write out, under “normal” conditions (i.e., deadline is not within two or three days) there seems to be a word limit to what I can write. It’s a loose word limit, but it’s there — and it does not matter how much time I spend on writing these words. Happily, this limit is generous enough that I’m pretty optimistic about finishing.

Also, having less time and/or a firm stopping time — a dinner date, for example — helps productivity in direct proportion to how much time I have left. In other words, work tends to speed up if I know I must stop at a certain hour. But that’s not news.

Just because I feel like sharing. It’s a big ol’ world, and we’re not.

Internet usage worldwide varies more or less in direct proportion to national per capita income. According to the Google Gapminder World project (last accessed 28 January 2007, currently in beta), internet users per 1000 people are as low as 0.78 (Tajikistan). India and China, the two most populous countries, hover near the middle of the GNP/GNI range but count only 32 and 73 internet users per 1000 inhabitants, respectively.

(me, yesterday, in chapter draft)

Edited to add: the “children born per woman (fertility rate)” chart makes it pretty evident that the rapidly approaching overpopulation bogeyman is just that. Replacement rate (for a stable population numbers-wise) is 2.1. India may be above that, but China and a hefty portion of the rest of the world are below. Not only that, but since 1975 (use the nifty animation feature!) worldwide fertility rates have been on the decline.

In addition, the most rapidly growing populations (top left region of the chart) tend to be dark-blue, which means Africa, which means horrid infant mortality rate. (The mortality rate is another one of the charts available.)

Three months left to finish the dissertation, get comments on it, fix the dissertation as per comments, and defend it. The urge to panic is great.

Support, though, is abundant – and I’m grateful for it. From all sides: family, friends, colleagues, relative strangers.

It’s not that I don’t think I can do it. I can… I think. It’ll help to have comments from my thesis readers (who will hopefully get two chapters and all of the interface from me Wednesday or Thursday), so that at least I’ll know more or less what they’re thinking. Part of me is worried that they’ll be disgruntled, because I’ve veered away from (and so haven’t addressed) some things that were suggested at my prelims. But another part of me knows that this is par for the course: dissertations change direction, and this isn’t even that radical a change. It’s “just” a shift in emphasis. But there’re three months left, so – panic.

Anxiety, more like. I’m told (and also know) that it won’t go away, so it helps to let it flow through me instead of dwelling on it and making it whirlpool somewhere near my solar plexus. Sometimes the flowing works, sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s nice to have some agency over it.

This topic is overwhelming. It’s so poorly explored; there’s so much to do. Most importantly, it’s so interdisciplinary, and I feel like the ultimate dilettante. That’s a-ok with me, but what about the rest of the world? You know, potential employers and such?

One of RolandHT‘s early premises was that acquiring knowledge can be done in two ways. You can take in (read, listen to, whatever) large chunks of information, one by one, each of them in its entirety, and analyze each as a whole and in context of the others you’ve taken in so far. Like learning literature by reading novel after novel. Or, you can dabble here and there, follow thematic threads that interest you, and slowly build up a more or less cohesive picture of the world, or a world. The Roland project is the latter; it acquaints you with the archetype(s) by letting you jump around centuries and media and locations. I do this because I think that this is how we learn almost everything we know: building up a worldview by observation, by living and paying attention.

That works very well inside my head; finding words to make it coherent is another thing. Words are coming, slowly but surely. It’ll get there.

The best dissertation is a done dissertation. Yes.

I’ve put up the latest version of RolandHT. It can only be viewed with (freely available) Mozilla/Firefox, or another XSLT-aware browser. I don’t know of any besides Firefox, so if you do, please let me know the browser and the operating system(s) on which you’ve used it.

The site definitely needs a help section, and some more intuitive navigation. For now, a few usage notes:

– The links up top don’t do anything yet.

– Pick an excerpt from the list on the left. Mouseover themes/characters/imagery that show up over the sword, and see what happens. Then click on a theme or character or image, and see what happens now.

– Click on the red “reset” at top right to return to initial state.

– For three other nifty features, find the excerpt named “Missionary Work.” Click on the “i” beside the name of the work; click on the quill in the second stanza; mouseover any underlined word.

– Check out also the excerpt, near the very bottom, titled “Battle Near Saragossa.” Click on the image.

– If something seems aesthetically or functionally wrong, it would be lovely if you emailed me to let me know.

– This is a work in progress. If you see the word “check” where you expect information, I’m working on it.

In other news, a couple of questions for the internet. The first, in two parts, is Roland-related – I’d like to know more about two geographical locations. One is Terra Major:

“Could one achieve that Rollant’s life was lost,

Charle’s right arm were from his body torn;

Though there remained his marvellous great host,

He’ld not again assemble in such force;

Terra Major would languish in repose.”

Is TM a region? Is it in Europe? If not, what is it (another name for Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire?)?

The other place is a bit more mysterious, partly because it’s in Middle English:

Roulond rod furthe—he wold not rest, I wene—

he sawe wher a Sairsin seche hym wold,

kinge was of Criklond, croun[y]d with gold.

What, pray tell, is Criklond?

And finally, a non-Roland-related query: what’s your favorite slow-cooker recipe? Things I’m trying to stay away from: large chunks of boiled onions (I’ve disliked them since forever), and really heavy dishes like mac and cheese. Meat is great, veggies are great, seafood that’s sturdy enough to survive a slow cooker is great, wacky but tasty ingredients totally get bonus points. Non-desserts is what I’m after.