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work – Page 10 – Words' End

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Summit, evening the first.

I’m in Charlottesville, Virginia at the summit on digital tools for the humanities. It’s almost 10:30pm, I’ve got to catch a 7:30am bus to campus for breakfast and a day of intense work, and I’m jazzed to the point of spinning in the elevator.

The flights were fun, and even flying out of Providence at the ungodly hour of 6am was rewarded by one of those perfectly cloudless full-rainbow-spectrum sunrises. I read and read materials for the summit, and am happy to report that I completed the reading before getting to the hotel. The hotel gave me a warm chocolate-chip cookie upon check-in.

Today was a reception and dinner, followed by the usual greetings and a keynote by Brian Cantwell Smith, a computer scientist from U of Toronto. The man knows how to talk. He gesticlated wildly, looking at times as if he was about to leap towards us from behind the podium. He talked quickly and intensely, and yet managed to keep most of the audience.

Here are some points he brought up, rephrased by me; any brilliance is his, flat language would be mine. I haven’t entirely digested all of this, so present it mostly without commentary. Your thoughts, though, would be much appreciated.

Digital is a trendy word, he said, second only to like on college campuses.

Descartes was a smart guy. He separated the work, or process, of understanding the world from the world thereby understood.

Controversial revelation of this talk: computers don’t actually exist. There do exist many devices, but what are they?

Around the turn of the 20th century, we discovered that we could fuse meaning and mechanism. An example of this would be us. This idea eventually gave birth to computers.

Computers aren’t anything special, and computer scientists aren’t studying anything special. Or maybe anything in particular. This is liberating: instead of a restricted domain, they have a sort of monopoly on the universe.

We (computing humanists) shouldn’t be party to propagating the dualism between the ostensible “abstract” and the concrete. A server going down loses not the representation of mail, but actual mail.

Descartes said that we should have clear and distinct ideas. But this isn’t the way the world actually works.

Maybe the tools we build are digital at the level of the bits, but what matters about them is humanistic.

Computers are a historical moment (a long one, which started in the mid-1800s and is still going) in which we are getting past Descartes.

Matter is both a noun and a verb. Material comes from matter.

Computing is allowing us to get past the temporary, 300-year divorse between matter-noun and matter-verb.

Our commitment to what it means to be human shouldn’t be ideological (“if it’s human, it’s good”).

People can be special as in worthy of study and careful consideration, not special as in this is where inquiry stops because there’s nothing more to say.

…

That’s it for now. If you’re interested in one or more elements of this, comment and we’ll talk (in comments). I’m too tired to attempt an actual argument. Tomorrow is another day, with more photography and some serious hyperte… I mean, blogging.

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Good Monday morning, you lazy parental types.

While looking around Inside Higher Ed, I came across an old article about Princeton’s new policy of automatically granting a one-year leave from tenure track when a faculty member becomes a parent. I’d been delighted to read this back in August: one thing I don’t like at all about academe in the U.S. is the default assumption that people who make teaching and research their life’s work aren’t entitled to a life outside of the university.

Many more comments have been posted since I last read the article, and I boggle. Some of the people who choose to be “child-free” actually dare to imply that having children makes for lazy academics. That having children means you aren’t dedicated to education and research. I’d like to see them be responsible for a baby and hold down an exhausting full-time job at the same time, for just a month or so. I wonder if they’d change their mind then.

And spare me the “we have too many people on this planet” argument. Fertility is well below replacement rate (2.1 is said to keep a population stable) in a large portion of the world, including most of Europe and North America. The places with particularly high fertility rate (Niger tops the CIA World Factbook chart, with 7.55 children born per woman on the average) also have a huge infant mortality rate.

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Amodio on orality and hypertext.

Mark C. Amodio, in Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England(Notre Dame, IN: UND Press, 2004), writes (with footnote):

The reader in a literate society plays an important, active role in “writing” the “text” he or she reads* and thus plays a role in creating the “text” in just the way listening audiences in oral cultures are co-creators of the text they receive aurally, but the text produced within literate culture has an attendant physicality, and hence fixity, that oral texts lack. (8)

*A hypertext novel, and hypertext in general, can be seen as a logical extension of the subjective perspective in that readers must literally navigate their way through a “text” that has no fixed or absolutely determined path. In this way, hypertext authors are rather like modern versions of traditional poets in that they create texts with fluid narrative paths that are not easily (if at all) traceable. See further Foley, How to Read, 219-25. On hypertext’s relation to orality, see Joyce, “No One Tells You This.”

I’ll need to follow up on the references he makes, but reading this raised several reactionary thoughts. This is the first time Amodio, who doesn’t seem to be very much into electronic literature, mentions hypertext in the book (which is, by the way, a nice read so far). His treatment of e-lit as something with “no fixed or absolutely determined path” seems to imply an absence of any path at all, which of course isn’t true: hypertext authors often steer the reader in a particular direction by carefully choosing link placement. Plus, it’s certainly possible to have one or more series of single-path nodes within an otherwise link-rich text.

Another debatable implicit opinion in the above the quotation marks surrounding the word text either. What, is it not text? Kind of text? In a book dedicated to orality and literacy I’d expect a more careful consideration of the word. But perhaps he explains this further into the book.

Finally, the co-creation bit. I’ve compared for years reading interlinked bits of related stories in RolandHT with listening to an oral performance of a piece about Roland, composed by a poet on the spot using archetypes from received cultural memory. But Amodio extends the process of reception to a co-creation. Tempting, in that it (again implicitly) empowers the reader and elevates the interpretive process; but how is this co-creation distinct from forming any memory at all?

FMI, Amodio’s two footnote references are:

Foley, John Miles. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Joyce, Michael. “No One Tells You This: Secondary Orality and Hypertextuality.” Oral Tradition 17 (2002): 325-45.

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note to self: knowledge acquisition is a big topic.

It sounds obvious, but in my Roland-related research I’ve been returning again and again to the question of how knowledge has been historically passed down. This needs to be narrowed down: specifically, how and why have people learned and taught stories? A related question is: what role did art (theater, poetry, music, visual arts) play in the lives of the people who have told Roland stories? In the lives of their audiences? (Who were their audiences at any given stage?)

If anyone knows of good literature or other sources of information on the subject, I’d love to know. We’re talking any time period between, say, 750 A.D. and now, anywhere in Europe, Middle East or the Americas.

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tuesday morning.

I’ve been up since 5: E. and I are trying to get into this habit, so that he can make it to his 8am (twice a week) and 9am (thrice a week) classes. It’s beautiful: circumstances encourage me to get up, get dressed and washed and maybe even breakfasted early in the morning so that I can take my love to the bus. Then, the day slowly opens up with light and noises, and I can drink another cup of oversteeped tea with milk.

I’m finally caught up on work-related email. Today is a day of planning: what conference calls-for-papers would be good to respond to, what reading I’d like to do, what my technical involvement might be. This semester is the platonic ideal of the entire two-year job gig: we’re far enough along that the technical infrastructure is baaaasically there, and the kickass encoder of yore is back for another semester of fellowship that will allow him to (hopefully) finish encoding our longest text. This leaves me with a lot of time to think, and the privilege isn’t lost on me.

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further

It’s unknown whether Hruodlandus, the captain of the Breton March who died in 778 according to Einhard, was Charlemagne’s nephew.

Based on my observations of people over the last couple of decades, it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which they were unrelated, but the story of Roland was made more compelling by the claim of royal familial connection. In other words, it’s possible that their blood relationship is a fabricated meme that has served to hook the reader (listener) in for over a thousand years.

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morality and historicity in Roland

History is one big soap opera. How’s this for a tangle:

In The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe, Pierre Riché writes about Carloman and Pippin III, the Short, two sons of Charles Martel, to both of whom he left the Frankish kingdom when he died. Carloman was Charlemagne’s grandfather. Page 51 provides quite the family tree. I’ll break down the paragraph and highlight the important bits, primarily because that makes the confusing passage easier to digest:

[Upon the death of Charles Martel] Carloman and Pippin found their first adversaries within the family.

– Their half-brother Grifo, the son of the Bavarian Sunnichild, reckoned on playing the part of an equal heir, as witnessed by a letter to him from [missionary, archbishop of Mainz] Boniface. He wanted to take possession of his due, but neither Pippin nor Carloman accepted this, and they imprisoned him in the bastion at Chèvremont, near Liège, while his mother was consigned to the guard of the nuns of Chelles.

– In another quarter, Chiltrude, the elder sister of the mayors of the palace, had secretly fled the kingdom with the help of friends and married Odilo, duke of Bavaria. This new relative of the Carolingian family hoped to play some political role; he enjoyed papal support and had also lately concluded a pact with Duke Hunald of Aquitaine. Upon the death of Charles Martel, Hunald had of course revolted against the heirs.

– Finally, Theutbald of Allemania, the brother of the Lantfrid subdued by Charles Martel, made a new grab for autonomy and a restored duchy.

Carloman and Pippin would thus be occupied for several years to the south and east of the kingdom.

OK, so: Charlemagne is linked to his grandfather Carloman by virtue of having more or less the same name. Charlemagne’s grandfather’s sister, from the royal standpoint, betrayed Charlemagne’s grandfather by marrying his adversary-by-proxy. This is presumably a source of shame for the family. [If I put this in my dissertation, is the evidence for that last sentence common knowledge? Do I have to explicitly present it?]

In the Song of Roland (France, 1095-1099), Roland is Charlemagne’s nephew.

In the Karlamagnús Saga (Norway, 13th century), Roland is both Charlemagne’s nephew and his son by his sister named Gilem. When Karlamagnus finds out Gilem is pregnant, he “[gives] his sister to Milon, and [makes] him duke of Brettania. The boy [is] born seven months later.”

Italians make yet another case. From Italo Calvino’s preface to Orlando Furioso di Ludovico Ariosto raccontato da Italo Calvino (Milano: Mondadori 1995, sadly only available in Italian, it’s a brilliant book):

Di Roland la tradizione francese non dice se non l’ultima battaglia e la morte. Tutto il resto della sua vita, nascita, albero genealogico, infanzia giovinezza avventure prima di Roncisvalle, egli le troverà, sotto il nome di Orlando, in Italia. Viene così stabilito che suo padre è Milone di Clermont (o Chiaromonte) alfiere di re Carlo, e sua madre è Berta, la sorella del sovrano. Avendo Milone sedotto la fanciulla, per sfuggire alle ire del regale cognato, la rapisce e fugge in Italia. Secondo alcune fonti Orlando nasce in Romagna, a Imola, secondo altre a Sutri, nel Lazio: che sia italiano non c’è dubbio. (11-12)

(The only things that the French tradition tells about Roland are his last battle and his death. The rest of his life, birth, family tree, childhood youth adventures before Roncesvalles, the character acquires under the name Orlando, in Italy. Thus, his father is established as Milon of Clermont (or Chiaromonte), Charlemagne’s standard bearer, and his mother is Berta, the king’s sister. Having seduced the girl, in order to escape his sovereign brother-in-law’s wrath, Milon kidnaps her and flees to Italy. According to some sources Orlando is born in Romagna, in the town of Imola; according to others, in Sutri, Lazio: of his Italian origin there is no doubt.)

OK, so:

1. Historian Riché claims, presumably based on good evidence, that the Carolingians had a shameful episode a couple of generations previous to Charlemagne’s. This was during the 700s, A.D.

2. The French write down The Song of Roland at the end of the 11th century. Roland is established as Charlemagne’s nephew; there is no further discussion about the dynasty. There is no historical evidence for or against kinship between Charlemagne and the Count Hruodlandus mentioned by Einhard’s account of a battle with the Basques, the only historical mention of a Roland.

3. I would speculate that plenty of gossip about the Carolingian propagated amongst their subjects: it seems to be just the way people react to celebrities, no? Or do I need to substantiate this?

4. The Norse give their tale an incestuous twist: Roland’s father is Charlemagne, and his mother Charlemagne’s sister Berta. The cover-up husband, married into the incest, is named Milon. It would be important, however, to know whether they combined the two stories about Charlemagne’s family, fabricated juicy gossip about Charlemagne, or uncovered yet another shameful secret.

5. The Italians keep Berta, but buy the story: Roland’s mother is Berta and his father is Milon. If there was incest involved in real life, then the Italians become complicit in covering it up; but then, they may have done so in ignorance of the real events.

It just seems to me that there’s a possibility that the Frankish storytellers (who were, in some cases, the king’s unofficial biographers) deliberately covered up for their sovereign, that Norwegians ran a gossip column exposing the secret, but that the Italians never got the memo encoded into the Norse saga and bought the lie, but were vain enough to appropriate the credit for Roland’s survival.

I’m not sure this is provable, though. But one thing that thinking about this has already taught me is: reading relevant histories is not merely “an OK expenditure of dissertation-researching time for my general education.” It may prove to be an absolutely necessary tool that points me more precisely about why stories were told in these particular ways, at these particular historical points.

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advantages of falling asleep early.

Woke up a few times in the night (our own fault, starving the poor kitty of both food and attention for hours!), then definitively at 5am – which was fine, since I’d fallen asleep before 9pm.

Had a beautiful, lazy morning in bed with my love.

Drank coffee, also in bed.

Took a shower.

Took him to the bus that goes down to Kingston, RI where the main URI campus is.

Came back, had breakfast. Cottage cheese is a superb carrier for nutritional yeast, if you’re into savory breakfasts.

And now it’s 8:15 and I’m about to sit down working. It’s quiet and light. Bliss!

Re-reading my previous long post about Burning Man is strange. I feel like I’ve lost my facility with language, especially as compared to a couple of years ago when I took that nonfiction writing workshop. Time to find a writing voice again.

As part of getting back into Roland, I’m reading about Pierre Riché’s The Carolingians (Michael Idomir Allen, trans.). Very well written, one of those academic books that read more novelistic. And oh, this is why his name was familiar! He also wrote Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, translated by Jo Ann McNamara, which I came to own by a fluke (probably the booksellers at the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress) and loved as well.

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NWF on digilit

Went to a talk today, the last (?) in a series of lectures on digital literature in research and teaching. This one was by Noah Wardrip-Fruin, a charismatic polymath. The man does it all: he teaches writing in odd spaces, he blogs (at Grand Text Auto), he has co-edited a couple of books, and he’s an active participant in various electronic literature and art communities in addition to being an artist himself.

Today, Noah theorized about both digital literature itself and approaches to teaching it. Two things struck me in particular.

One is his classification of important aspects to consider when looking critically at digital literature and art, broadly defined as that which requires computation. Noah went through several classification schemes that are both useful and not meant to be exhaustive. For example, there are works in which computation happens without human intervention (for example, email novels), as opposed to pieces that require a lot of very obvious human input (interactive fiction comes to mind). A few more two-sided classifications, and he arrived at the poignant triad of media (text, image, sound), audience and processes (computational and aesthetic). All of these, he said, must be analyzed preferably in depth, and in relation to each other, in order to understand digital literature and art and their impact on our thinking.

The second part of Noah’s talk centered around pedagogical issues that immediately arise when one proposes to teach digital literature to humanities students. The single most important thing, from his perspective, seems to be the teaching of processes: recognizing them in code, critically analyzing them from an aesthetic perspective, and designing them as well. This should be achieved not only through familiarization with theory but also through the learning of languages that can be used to design processes. Michael Mateas and his teaching at Georgia Tech came up multiple times; apparently his students are learning all these things, and in the span of a semester at that. Impressive.

Of course, I immediately started thinking (again) about how all these things could be effectively and concisely taught to humanities students. Those who study digital media specifically, as a major or a minor, are one thing; but what about the students whose principal interests remain firmly in history, sociology, literature? How does one cover different types of digital art and its various backbones, and teach them to not only read but also write creatively in heretofore unfamiliar languages, not to mention how to familiarize themselves with critical literature which might be absolutely relevant to what they are doing but is presented as computer science papers, which they might have difficulty reading or indeed finding in the first place? All of these things, Noah said today, are crucial; but they’re a [composite] field unto themselves.

Noah’s passionate enough about the necessity of knowing all these things that he was willing to “do away with calculus” (joke!, or is it?) in favor of having more space in the curriculum for cross-disciplinary study of digital literature and art. I tend to agree with him on this; as cool as calculus is, the knowledge of (dare I say it?) humanities computing issues is more practically useful if presented well. Computing and the network are now indelibly interwoven into our lives as individuals and as societies. My own feeling is that understanding of computing as both art and science is as important as the study of languages, of public speaking and of writing.

Challenges remain. Literary criticism, for example, must expand its scope to include digital materials as a matter of course. At the same time, it would be helpful if computer scientists and humanists came up with a reasonably penetrable common language that would make it easier for students of digital media to read literature relevant to their studies.

College curricula must be expanded to eventually include humanities computing in a way that targets all students; I think that the conglomerate of subjects this implies is crucial and should be a requirement for a well-rounded education. The problem with this is that some colleges are already brimming with required courses. In the States at least, where college education particularly emphasizes personal choice, expansion of the set of general education requirements will probably be met with much scepticism and resistance. This, of course, leads straight into the problem of primary and secondary education, which is frankly crap in this country, widespread inadequate preparation for college-and-beyond. (Generalizing for the sake of brevity; yes, private schools etc., I’m talking overall and public schools.)

Anyway, good talk. More interesting stuff was said there, but these are the broad strokes.

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