Chris Forster

Graeber and Auden: Traps, Lies, and Love

2011-12-29T00:00:00-05:00

During break, I’ve been enjoying reading David Graeber’s Debt: The First Five Thousand Years. Graeber’s description of the opposing logics of the market and the state recalled to my mind the penultimate stanza of Auden’s “September 1, 1939” that I couldn’t resist quickly noting it here.

Here is Graeber:

This is the great trap of the twentieth century: on the one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don’t owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that tbetween them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it’s a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.

These two traps are what Auden will call the romantic lie and the lie of authority; and what Graeber describes as the interdependence of the market and the state is what Auden will call (and famously regret calling) love:

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

The Changing Index of Censorship

2011-12-22T00:00:00-05:00

(Jan. 17 Update: In a truly remarkable show of solidarity, as you dear reader have likely noticed by now, major sites (including wikipedia) across the internet are mainting their protest of SOPA on January 18th. I’ve add this bit of javascript to show solidarity with them. Despite the shelving of the house bill, these sites all recognize the continued threat of SOPA, PIPA, or any similar legislation.)

(Jan. 16 Update: With the news that, at least for now, SOPA is shelved, I’ve removed the javascript mentioned below.)

Depending on when you visit this page, you may notice that a whole bunch of it is blacked out; that’s a result of this bit of javascript, protesting SOPA. If you haven’t heard about SOPA, here is a fine place to start.

As someone with an interest in the history of obscenity and censorship I have been impressed at how quickly groups like the EFF have described SOPA as a matter of censorship and free speech. Unlike the 1996 Communications Decency Act (I recall the blue ribbon GIFs it inspired well), the object of SOPA is not online obscenity. As these groups recognize, however, matters of “free speech” are increasingly questions of intellectual property and the technologies of copyright enforcement.

This development is entirely consistent with the narrative offered by one of my favorite early-twentieth century anti-censorship tracts, To the Pure: A Study of Obscenity and the Censor, co-authored by William Seagle and Morris Ernst (the lawyer who, a few years later, defended Ulysses in front of Judge John Woolsey). To The Pure outlines a political history of censorship which proceeds through three stages; in a section titled “The Changing Index of Censorship” Ernst and Seagle explain:

With the invention of printing in the middle of the fifteenth century, the first condition for the censorship of literature began to be fulfilled: literature was on its way to popular distribution. The three forms of censorship which we know today began to develop: (1) the religious (2) the political (3) the sexual, which is the modern culmination. The course of evolution may be stated to be from heresy to treason to obscenity. The purpose of authority remains always the same, but the index of censorship changes. Each age produces those formulae of suppression which coincide with its dominant interest. (140)

Each age produces those formulae of suppression which coincide with its dominant interest. The three chief categories of prohibited speech—blasphemy, sedition, obscenity—reflect a historical trajectory. Despite its obvious oversimplifications, Ernst and Seagle’s account of this progression surprises me with its insight whenever I return to it.

If one were to continue the history of censorship Ernst began nearly a century ago, it would pass through questions of intellectual property. Rather than obscenity, it is piracy which is the object of contemporary censorship just as obscenity and blasphemy were the objects of a previous age’s censorship regime.

We certainly shouldn’t ignore other, more traditional, types of censorship which continue to exist (particularly outside of the United States and western Europe); however, if blasphemy was the object of censorship in (what Ernst calls) the “Age of Faith,” sedition in the “Age of Divine Right,” and obscenity in the “Age of Democracy,” piracy is the crime that the censorship regimes of our own information age seek to control. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum and Customs lists of previous eras bear a striking resemblance to the index of prohibited foriegn domains that SOPA would create.

Works Cited

Ernst, Morris and William Seagle. To The Pure: A Study of Obscenity and the Censor. New York: Viking Press, 1928. Print.

"vellum in war time": Playing with MJP Data

2011-11-06T00:00:00-04:00

It is important that you should send the edition on extra fine paper to a certain sort of person. Only a finely got up magazine will strike the eye in certain districts.
The rough paper is good enough for the other people whose names I’ve sent you. The swells in Paris won’t expect vellum in war time.
—Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson, May 5, 1917 (43)

there is a certain type of mind that worries about such things. Quant a moi, I am more concerned with what people say than with the ink it is written in.
—Pound to Anderson, May 24, 1917 (55)

“the public” likes a lot of paper for its money
—Pound to Anderson, November 12, 1917 (151)

Playing With Data

The most exciting thing I learned at MSA 13 was that the Modernist Journals Project has made some of its data available for tinkerers to play with; specifically, the full text and metadata records for five little magazines: The Freewoman, The New Freewoman, The Egoist (these latter three represent a sort of single, permutating evolution), Others, and The Little Review.

The full-text is available in very lightly marked up TEI files (for nearly all purposes, you’d be best just stripping out the tags and treating it as plain-text) and metadata about the journals in separate MODS files (the acronym is wonderfully appropriate). Their new demo site, MJP Lab, shows some of the things they’ve been doing; and if you want to try some things yourself, you can grab the data yourself at the MJP sourceforge page

I was eager to get home and start playing; this post represents a belated first stab at some tinkering, in the hope of helping to start a conversation about what sorts of neat things we can do with this stuff; because if we can do some neat stuff with this stuff, hopefully the good folks at the MJP will continue this trend, and make their other material available. In this post I focus chiefly on a pretty crude unit of analysis—length.

Paper Shortage

Why would the length of a little magazine change? It was Tim Carmody who first suggested to me that a paper shortage during World War I might have had an important impact on the publishing of modernism. I can’t now locate the tweet, or series of tweets, where Tim first made this suggestion, but the inspiration with which I’ll toy for a while here is entirely Tim’s—only the mistakes and bad code are mine.

It is hard to get the news from poems; but its harder to get the history of paper from books. Histories of paper are often histories of paper-making technologies. (I’d be very grateful if anyone has a good recommendation of a book addressing the history paper, including paper costs and shortages, etc in the early twentieth century.) In desperation you might turn to Google Books and find Paper, a periodical “devoted to the manufacture, sale, and use of pulp and paper,” which reports, in September 1914 that “So far as can be observed by surface inspection the war has not affected manufacturing conditions so much as was expected a month ago. However, every day that passes brings the time of serious affection nearer.” By December 1914, “the effects of the European war upon the paper industry was demonstrated to be quite important the other day…”

In a tweet I’ve long since lost, Tim points to this passage from an essay on Joyce which Pound published in 1918: “Despite the War, despite the paper shortage… there is a new edition of James Joyce’s ‘A Portrait of the Artist’” (Pound/Joyce 133).

So certainly some concern exists (at least in America) about the availability of paper.

Ezra Pound’s letters to Margaret Anderson (editor of the Little Review) are interesting but never quite so clear (and here follows a bunch of quotations from the letters; feel free to move along). In a letter from which I quoted at the head of the this post, Pound writes that “Failing an increase in size, an improvement in paper <(even a slight imp)> would make a fuller use of the smaller font of type less disagreeable. That might be an intermediate move.” That Pound is talking about an increase in length is clear from the next comment that “We might aim for 48 pages by September” (46). An editorial note to this letter (citing, in turn, a letter from Donald Gallup) explains that “perhaps as many as twenty-five copies… of some issues of the LR were printed on high quality paper. This fact, Gallup notes, ‘is especially important because the “rough” paper was of such bad quality that many runs of The Little Review have crumbled away and many libraries… have only microfilm.” (47). A month later Pound wants “to go to 64 pages just as soon as it can be managed.” Throughout his letters to Anderson, Pound can be seen weighing the cost of paper against other factors; Yeats, for instance, must have a copy printed on high quality paper (“he’ll fuss and lose interest if he sees his poems on cheap paper” 55); but it is equally important to “get a good deal of actual matter into Oct, Nov, Dec. EVEN if you have to use newspaper paper” (104). (Here as so often, one longs to have Anderson’s half of the correspondence.) In a letter from December 1917, Pound insists that “official stationary for official business is pure swank. AT the present price of paper!!!” (167), suggesting that indeed paper during the period of the war was getting dear.

So, did the war create a paper shortage which impacted little magazines in significant ways?

Looking at the Data

However dry this question may seem, it has the advantage of being answerable with the MODS data. Each issue in the MJP has its own MODS record containing metadata which includes the journal title, titles and authors of the texts contained in that issue, a date of publication, and a description of the physical object, including number of pages.

For example, here is the beginning of the record for the first issue of the Egoist:

<mods:titleInfo>
  <mods:nonSort>The</mods:nonSort>
  <mods:title>Egoist</mods:title>
  <mods:subTitle>An Individualist Review</mods:subTitle> 
  <mods:partNumber>Vol. 1, No. 1</mods:partNumber>   
</mods:titleInfo>

<mods:name type="personal">
  <mods:namePart>Marsden, Dora</mods:namePart>
  <mods:role>
     <mods:roleTerm authority="marcrelator"  
                    type="text">editor</mods:roleTerm>
  </mods:role>
</mods:name>

<mods:genre authority="aat">periodicals</mods:genre>

<mods:identifier type="local" 
                 displayLabel="Modernist Journals Project Identifier">Egoist:1:1
</mods:identifier> 

<mods:originInfo>
    <mods:place>
        <mods:placeTerm type="code"
                        authority="marccountry">enk</mods:placeTerm>
        <mods:placeTerm type="text">London</mods:placeTerm>
    </mods:place>
    <mods:publisher>The Egoist, Ltd.</mods:publisher>
    <mods:dateIssued keyDate="yes"
                     encoding="w3cdtf">1914-01-01</mods:dateIssued>
</mods:originInfo>
  
<mods:physicalDescription>
  <mods:extent>20 p.; 31.5 x 21 cm</mods:extent>
  <mods:digitalOrigin>reformatted digital</mods:digitalOrigin>
</mods:physicalDescription>

To get the information we want, we just need a little XSLT. Simple, right? Well, I don’t really know XSLT, but google and persistence will yield answers if not elegance:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:mods="http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3">

<xsl:output method="text" />

<xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:value-of select="mods:mods/mods:titleInfo/mods:title" />::
  <xsl:value-of select="mods:mods/mods:titleInfo/mods:partNumber" />::
  <xsl:value-of select="mods:mods/mods:originInfo/mods:dateIssued" />::
  <xsl:value-of select="concat(mods:mods/mods:physicalDescription/mods:extent, '&#xA;')"/>
</xsl:template>

</xsl:stylesheet>

The “xmlns:mods=”http://www.loc.gov/mods/v3” line is necessary to let XSLT know about the MODS namespace (you get an error otherwise; trust me); we declare an output method of text (we’ll be essentially generating an self-styled text data file; you could output xml or html). Then we match the root element, and select just the data we want, in this case the journal title, the volume and number information, the date, and then the “extent” which is the size and number of pages. If you’ve noticed that ugliness in the last select statement, it’s because I’m using the concat[enate] function to manually add a newline character entity at the end, so that we get one line of output per issue. You may also have noticed that each of these fields is separated by a double colon. The more obvious field delimited—a comma—would cause a problem here since the “extent” field, for instance, has commas within it. So the double colons will make life easier.

(Yeah, this is ugly; if you have tips on a more elegant way of doing this, I’m all ears).

Use xsltproc with this stylesheet on the MODS file for the first issue of the Egoist and the output looks like this:

Egoist::Vol. 1, No. 1::1914-01-01::20 p.; 31.5 x 21 cm

But if you’ve downloaded all the MODS files and unzipped them in a single directory, then a command like xsltproc extract.xsl *.xml > total.dat will get the data from everything; and indeed, you can find all data from all the freely accessible journals in a Google Doc (note that the Google Doc importer seems to have gotten a bit confused by the dates).

This work flow makes it easy to add new data as it becomes available; just place it in the directory, rerun xsltproc… and there you go.

Paper and the War

You could just peruse this list to see that, for example, The Egoist does seem to get shorter during the war years. In late 1914 it drops from 20 to 16 pages, and then drops again to 12 pages in 1918 before returning to 16 pages for its last year in print, 1919. (Maybe everyone already knew this; maybe, among specialists in The Egoist this shortening has a well known explanation. Anyone?)

Since I’m used to doing things with processing, I’ll offer this rather rudimentary visualization of changes in length of all five journals for which data is available. (I’m doing something wrong in the main draw() loop so that the fonts are coming out ugly, but you get the idea):

Only three of the five journals are being published during the First World War. Both The Little Review and Others are not nearly so regular as The Egoist. Nevertheless, if you tilt you head, there does seem to be a general decline in journal length during the war; but really we’d want more data before we made anything of this.

Images

Of course, one of the reasons I wanted to share even these rather incomplete and ugly results is that once you start tinkering, its hard to stop. Consider this: if paper is getting expensive, you might begin to try to fit more on a single page. Just to see whether I could do it, I decided to try to compare the page layouts of The Egoist when it was a full 20 pages (in 1914) to the shorter, 12 page Egoist of 1915. (I focus on The Egoist here because the shifts in its length created a clear opportunity for comparison.)

There would be other ways to look into this (including doing word counts on the full text files). But here is one thing you might try: first, grab the complete PDFs of a few issues from Vol 1 (1914) and Vol 5 (1915) of The Egoist. Without too much thought I got Vol 1, issues 1–5 and Vol 5, issues 1–5. The wonderful tool pdftk has a “burst” function will separate a pdf into individual pages. These, in turn can easily be turned into individual PNG page images, using imagemagick. Indeed, imagemagick is really the secret sauce here.

After that, we have two directories containing page images, one for the Vol 1 issues and one for the Volume 5 issues. Imagemagick has a function that will “average” a set of images; imagine, for instance, taking 50 images setting each to 2% transparency and then stacking them all together so that you have a single page. The trick is that the images have to all be the exact same size for the average function to work (it is comparing the same pixel location across multiple images, so size is key). That is easy enough with imagemagick as well. To get all the images in a directory the same size: convert *.png -size 620x960\!

The trick to that command is the exclamation point at the end (which has to be escaped in most circumstances, hence the slash) which tells imagemagick to not preserve the image’s original aspect ratio. This is crucial because for average to work the images must all be identical (otherwise, after watching your CPU chug away at 100% for five minutes, it will throw an error and leave a bunch of useless files in your directory). This will introduce some very minor distortion into the images, but it is a small price to pay (so long as you’re comparing images which are all very nearly identical in size to begin with). Once you’ve got your directory of images, all properly resized, here is the magic command (thanks to the kind folks on the imagemagick forum):


convert  Vol1*.png -evaluate-sequence mean  average_page.png

When all that’s done you get something which looks like this:

Nothing revolutionary; but sort of interesting. Note, for instance, that you can more easily make out the “Egoist” logo in the Volume 5 image, which makes sense—since each issue of the Volume 5 is shorter, the title page represents a larger proportion of the total set of pages.

What may be interesting is that the alley (the gap between the two columns of text) seems to be narrower in Volume 5 than in Volume 1 (it is a little difficult to see here; check the originals below if you’re curious; maybe I’m seeing things); does this suggest that rising paper costs during the war folks to squeeze more text onto each page? (What about the margins? It is hard to tell, but the margins too may be slightly smaller in the Volume 5 image).

If you want to can see the original averages: Volume 1 and Volume 5. Warning, the files are ~2.7 megabytes.

When I get a moment, I’ll be trying to do some other things with this data. More data from other little magazines might shed light on changes in the length of little magazines during the war, at which point it would make sense to return to the journals themselves.

Concluding Methodological Postscript

I’ve made this point before, but the kludgy, tinkering series of things I did with the data is not the product of using any one tool. PDFTK, ImageMagick, processing, and XSLT were all thrown together. Rather than trying to imagine a single tool to rule them all, I think this sort of flexible tool chain is really the way to go. A little programming, a little data manipulation, and some command line tools can really go a long way.

Works Cited

Pound, Ezra. Pound / The Little Review: The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson. Ed. Thomas L. Scott, et al. New York: New Directions, 1988. Print.

My Linux Rig

2011-10-25T00:00:00-04:00

I’m a big fan of The Setup, a website which interviews people about the hardware and software they use. Hockey fan and Linux user, Steven Ovadia, runs a blog which does the same thing for Linux users. He invited me to contribute over the summer and my post is now up. A couple months on and things are pretty much the same; I’m more frustrated with Ubuntu’s Unity interface (though I haven’t upgraded up 11.10 yet) and more enamored of XMonad.

There Is No Such Place as The Public Domain

2011-09-07T00:00:00-04:00

(I wrote most of this before I had learned of Michael Hart’s death; as I suggest below, Project Gutenberg is not, in my estimation, the ultimate solution to making the “public domain” a reality. It is, however, hard to think of a better, more successful project.)

There is no such thing as the public domain.

I have been meaning to write a short post to make a brief point for a while: there is no such thing as the public domain.

JSTOR’s decision yesterday to make its copies of “public domain” content available to “unaffiliated” users underscores this fact. No new content has entered the public domain; but being unencumbered by copyright and being readily available not the same thing.

The “public domain,” when we talk about expanding it or about new texts and images entering it, sounds like a wonderful place. But, of course, it isn’t a place at all. Like the related concept of “the commons,” the “public domain” offers an analogy to a shared public space. As my colleague Gabriel Hankins has reminded me, however, the “commons” was once an actual, honest-to-goodness place. You could (to adopt that infelicitous phrase which Liz Lemon has made infectious) “go to there.” You could even graze your cattle there.

Should you be interested in any of the many great texts which are in the “public domain,” however, there is no “there” to which you can go. This may seem painfully obvious and simple, but this fact means that making the “public domain” publicly accessible is not nearly as straightforward as it looks.

The “public domain” of copyright law is not a place but a freedom; the public domain is a metaphor. And because of this metaphor, the assertion that a text is “in the public domain,” can mislead us into thinking something is accomplished when it remains to be done. Expanding the public domain (through orphan works legislation or copyright reform) is an important an laudable goal. But expanding the public domain is only part of the problem.

No one should pay for Jane Eyre ever again.

In this sense, if the public domain isn’t a place, it is (or it ought to be) a task. Texts entering the public domain need someone to actually make them accessible. But who?

Project Gutenberg is perhaps the most successful attempt to bring the public domain into existence. It offers great texts in formats that are enormously helpful to readers.

But for scholars the project can feel a little unnerving. The source from which these texts are created is not always clear; and the project seems unconcerned with the many cases where a single work can exist in very different forms.

This may sound like the fusty preoccupation of textual scholars obsessing about reading apparatuses and variants (did you hear the one about the “soiled fish of the sea”?). But this is not a matter solely of interest to editors and textual scholars, or even to academic.

I’m going to speculate for a moment. Please excuse me.

Every year high school and college students read public domain texts; the establishment of reliable, freely available texts in open formats would be an unambiguous and unalloyed good of the highest order. Such texts could provide a basis upon which specialized annotated or critical editions could then be built. Imagine if every known bibliographic instance of a major text were available in some standard, lightly marked up version of TEI, ready to be remixed or added to for the differing circumstances of different classrooms. (One can imagine licensing such texts with something less stringent

The time is propitious to establish such texts; if I may play the role of futurist for a moment, it seems quite likely (almost certain) that most high school and college students in the future will be using electronic texts (rather than paper). With this possibility (eventuality?) in the foreseeable future, it seems a wise investment of scholarly effort to establish such texts. I think this fantasy of mine has at least some resonance with recent discussions on TEI-L about the future of the TEI, including this thread about a repository of TEI texts.

I know that there are problems here. Running a repository is no easy feat. What incentives exist for scholars to actually work on such an enormous bit of labor?

But isn’t there also an enormous opportunity here? The person who establishes the text(s) of a work with an enormous audience (a work like Jane Eyre) will have secured an enormous boon for the foreseeable future. Surely there is value there. Isn’t that the sort of thing you’d want on a CV? ”I’m the guy who made Jane Eyre available to the future.”

There is no such place as the public domain. It sure would be nice, though, if there were.

Google nGrams: Quick Response to Mike O'Malley

2010-12-20T00:00:00-05:00

This comment is awaiting moderation at The Aporetic's post on Google ngrams, "The Segway of Digital Searching," but I thought I'd get it up here quick, just so it may serve whatever function it may have. I have a lot more say about this, especially in light of an interesting discussion at this past weekend's THATCamp. But time is short... (And, on reflection, my attempt to shift the metaphor from ngrams as Segway to ngrams as primitive combustion engine may be a little strong...) I want to defend the ngrams data and suggest that many of things which are irking you are as much a function of the primitive search interface as they are the data. The reason to be excited is that, right now, so much data is available. What we can do with this stunningly enormous bag of glyphs (I would not even use the term "word" yet) is indeed primitive. But I do think it already opens itself to possibilities you haven't fully allowed. Searching on big abstract nouns is, at best, like trying to read braille through a burlap sack. But searching on other terms is more productive. Proper names (with appropriate capitalization) produces results which, while unsurprising, seem basically right:

No new knowledge or research agenda here; but I'd be loath to say that even this primitive visualization is worthless. (I would further qualify the results and insist that what is of interest is the trend; even the relative heights can be confounded by other people with the same surname or names with unusual diacritics). I, like Dan Cohen and Benjamin Schmidt, was impressed by the way in which the Science paper attempted to examine censorship and suppression by a comparing ngram curves in different languages across the same historical period. Or consider the wonderful search which someone much cleverer than I came up with of "beft/best." (Dan Cohen mentions this example with reference to Danny Sullivan's post.) That one image confirms what we already know about book and tyographical history. But it's hard to imagine a more compelling visualization of this fact, isn't it? (I have turned off the smoothing in each case which, I think, prevents the ugliness of the underlying data from being prematurely obscured.) My point? The data itself remains non-ideal, the OCR is, let's be kind and say "imperfect." The absence of any link back to the texts from which the ngrams are extracted hampers research. There are reasons to question the quality of the metadata which provides the dates (or the justification/reasoning about how to handle multiple editions of a single work, etc). The lack of any real sense of precisely what books are being searched is a bigger problem still. The absence of periodicals, newspapers, etc, is an enormous lack. (All these points are eloquently made by Mark Davies of the Corpus of Historical American English.) Heck, I have deeper reservations than these about this sort of quantification of culture. But to judge this data based on its current state, and the currently usable interface is premature. The analogy is not to the Segway (we can do it, so what?), but to the first combustion engines (yeah it runs, but it doesn't take us anywhere). But the data itself is available. There is nothing but will and know-how (and the frighteningly large processing requirements) preventing someone from taking the 4-gram or 5-gram data and making it queryable in precisely the fashion you describe: show me most frequent collocates of "hysteria." This seems worthy of (not uncritical) celebration and support.

The Writing on the Stalls: An Educational Project (?)

2010-11-30T00:00:00-05:00

Photo Credit: greenshock, Flickr

Who writes this sort of stuff? And why is there so much of it? And what does it really mean? This image, courtesy of Flickr user greenchock, is from the women's restroom of a Chicago bar. Now, I'm not sure if this is true of every University, but certainly at most universities I've visited, this sort of graffiti can be found all over the place: particularly in restrooms and library carrels. Often crude and obscene, not infrequently racist, homophobic, and misogynistic, these strange messages (and the equally strange rejoinders one often finds on the very same surface) fascinate me. I've been thinking about it recently because of the ways in which it offers a ready-to-hand archive of interesting (albeit controversial) material. Wouldn't it be interesting, as an introduction to certain basic "DH" skills, to try to make an archive of these anonymous messages and then analyze them? Could this be a useful exercise in going from raw, undigitized material, to basic text analysis, piping everything through an Omeka archive (for example). You could go from nothing to having a basic archive of material up at a domain in about a day. Transcribe all that graffitti and you could begin to try to get a handle on the preoccupations of such material. You could contrast the material, for example, found in Men's Rooms with that found in Women's Rooms. But how would you structure this raw data? Would you mark it up somehow? TEI seems to be overkill. But relying just on the Dublin Core elements used to describe an item in Omeka doesn't seem like enough (I may be wrong here—maybe on both counts—but for the sort of things I think would be immediately worth analyzing, DC seems an odd way to go). There is a "Graffiti Markup Language", but it is about capturing the visual qualities of graffiti art (check out this page for some very interesting, GML stuff), rather than the semantics and editorial history of that genre of "latrinalia" which I am interested in here. Here is a little off-the-cuff, nonce XML mark-up of the material in the image at the top of this post: Ok, so that is pretty ugly. That "subjects" thing is just a dirty way of fitting in some sort of subject tagging, which would be a really interesting way of analyzing all the data we cobble together. And I've cribbed a bunch from TEI (bringing along an unnecessarily odd vocabulary; "settlement"?). One of the most fascinating aspects of this sort of material (for me, the most fascinating aspect) is the way in which impromptu conversations and debates spring up between the "writing on the stall." This is marked only by numbers in what I've inelegantly and unoriginally called an "inscription" element. I'd be interested in better ways to mark this up. But for now you get the idea. I had initially imagined this project would be a hands-on way to introduce folks to various aspects of the 'digital humanities' with a project that could, working in a group, be completed (at least with some small amount of data) in about a day or so. But as I've thought about it, I've become more attached to the idea and to an expanded version of the project which would not be focused on introducing students to digital humanities skills (markup, building an online archive, basic text analysis) exclusively. Instead it would insert these DH skills within the first-year composition goals of persuasive writing. (Admittedly, this may be because I'll be teaching UVA's FYC next semester). A class of 20ish students would work first to build the archive, each student using a digital camera to capture five or so instances of such graffiti. A basic archive built, they then would set about generating claims and arguments about it. Such a class could, in a week (with the proper infrastructure already in place), gather examples from across campus pretty quickly and generate a whole slew of data, on which they would draw to more traditional essays. The more time I spend thinking about this idea, the more enamored of it I become. Students could essentially brainstorm each section: where on campus to look? What vocabulary to use to describe the "subjects" in this material? There are plenty of problems: the logistics of getting ensuring students can take decent enough digital pictures; permissions from students if this archive were to appear online openly with student work; the necessity of some censorship if, carved into some desk in some class room are actual names or phone numbers; the possibility that students might be offended or uncomfortable with such material; I never marked up that heart because I couldn't think of an easy way to do so... and so on. But, this is the internet right? So, is this a good idea?

Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association and the History of Obscenity

2010-11-16T00:00:00-05:00

Restricting Access to Violent Video Games

The Supreme Court is currently deliberating in the case of Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Assn.. At stake in the deliberations is the constitutionality of California's Assembly Bill No. 1179 [PDF], the stated purpose of which is to "require violent video games to be labeled as specified" and to "prohibit the sale or rental of those violent video games, as defined, to minors."

My interest in the case stems from the way in which the California law is modeled on the "Miller Test" for obscenity, arguing for an analogy between violent video games and pornography.

"Sex and violence have both been around a long time."—Justice Kennedy

In oral arguments, Zackery Morazzini, California Supervising Attorney General, was unwilling to specifically name what games would fall under this law, with the exception of Postal 2. MadWorld was also suggested as a candidate, though Morazzini was less certain of this particular game. (In response to a question from Elena Kagan about Mortal Kombat, Morazzini suggested that it might be covered by the law, but that it would be up to a jury to determine whether it was "violent" under the terms of the law).

In restricting the sale of such games, the law comes up in a rather obvious way again first-amendment protections of free speech. In an interesting moment, Kagan challenged the transparency of a video game as speech; she asked Paul Smith, cousel for the Entertainment Merchants Association, "do you think all video games are speech in the first instance? Because you could look at these games and say they're the modern-day equivalent of Monopoly sets. They are games. They are things that people use to compete" (transcript p. 38; this avenue led to an odd dead-end about narrative, plot, and aesthetic value, in which Antonin Scalia asked incredulously whether anything with a plot necessarily had aesthetic value, see transcript pg. 56). But, of late, the court has been pretty liberal in its contrual of what constitutes "speech."

Carving a First Amendment Exception: Obscenity and the Miller Test

So, if you are trying to carve an exception to the first amendment, how do you do it? Well, there are "fighting words" exceptions for speech/writing which represents a direct incitement to violence. During the oral argument Justice Breyer mentions fighting words exceptions, but Justice Ginsburg, in questiong Morazinni, notes: "you didn't latch on to fighting words. Your analogy is to obscenity for teenagers, as I understand it" (transcript p. 18). And, indeed, it is by analogy to obscenity, not the immediate harm of "fighting words," that the California law tries to restrict the access of minors to video games.

It makes sense that California would use obscenity as a model for their ban on video games. Obscene speech, however difficult it may be to determine precisely what is obscene, is the largest category of material which clearly and unambiguously falls outside of first amendment protection. Ginsberg v. New York establishes a more nuanced exception, allowing access of minors to materials which may not be obscene in the strict sense to be limited: think Playboy, which is not obscene but which may be considered obscene for a certain audience of minors.

The key test for obscenity in current law is the so-called "Miller Test" (itself evolved out of a series of such tests in Anglo-American law, beginning with the 1868 establishment of the "Hicklin Test"). The Miller Test defines a work as obscene if and only if it meets the following three criteria:

taken as a whole (here is a key departure from Hicklin), the work tends to appeal to the "prurient interest."
it depicts, in a patently offensive way, sexual material.
the work lacks scientific, literary, artistic, or political value (the "SLAP" test; an unfortunate acronym, all things considered)

Determining what, exactly is offensive, what appeals to prurient interest, and what has value, requires imagining the judgment of the "average person" (first invoked by Judge Woolsey as "l'homme moyen sensuel" in the 1933 Ulysses decision) and "community standards.

Violence and the Miller Test

So in trying to restrict access to violent video games without violating the first amendment, the California law revises the Miller Test to apply to violent material. A "violent video game" according to the definition offered in the statute must meet these three criteria (here quoted directly, with bold and italic emphasis added):

A reasonable person, considering the game as a whole, would find it appeals to a deviant or morbid interest of minors.
It is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the community as to what is suitable to minors.
It causes the game, as a whole, to lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

All that stuff in bold restricts the law's applicability to minors exclusively (and thus, I take it, represents an attempt to bring the law within the more restricted ambit of Ginsberg v. New York). But the test itself, as the italicized phrases make clear, is pretty clearly modeled on the Miller test. It brings the test under the supervision of reasonable person who considers the game as a whole from the perspective of contemporary standards. And it preserves the escape-hatch for materials of "serious . . . value."

It substitutes "a deviant or morbid interest" in violence, for a "prurient interest" in sexuality. And, unsurprisingly, determining precisely what constitutes such an interest (or its deviance and morbidity lies) is no easy task.

Not Texts, but What we Do with Texts (or what they do to us)

When Justice Potter Stewart claimed that, despite his inability to define hard-core pornography, he knew it when he saw it, he was on to something. Obscenity laws seek to identify a certain, prohibitable class of texts; but their motivation for doing so is to regulate what people do with those texts. One of the "innovations" of the Hicklin test in 1868 was to eliminate the intention of an author in a work from a consideration of whether the work was obscene. In so doing, Hicklin established a tradition of trying to imagine the effects of an experience of a text on its consumer.

The notorious difficulty of definitions and determinations of obscenity stems from the fact that the law tries to manage certain types of aesthetic experience (broadly conceived here on the model of "relating to the senses") by controlling the circulation of certain types of text. There is, however, no one-to-one relationship between texts and the affects they provoke or the uses to which they are put. George Costanza's involvement with an issue of Glamour magazine (in a quite infamous episode of Seinfeld) demonstrates the point; as do the arguments in the early twentieth century about whether a postcard reproduction of a classical nude could be obscene (the, I think savy and thoughtful, answer of vice crusader John Sumner: yes).

And certain kinds of affects are attached to certain types of people. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, discussions of obscenity were often obsessed with protecting young women. The Hicklin Test prohibited matter that "depraves and corrupts those whose minds are open to such influence"; the minds most susceptible were those of children and, especially, young women. The prosecution (or one prosecution) of Ulysses was initiated after a copy of the "Nausicaa" episode (contained in the Little Review) fell into the hands a lawyer's daughter (see Rachel Potter, "'Can my daughter of 18 read this book?' Ulysses and Obscenity," Critical Quarterly 46:4, Dec. 2004 ).

the adolescent male is emerging as the object of greatest cultural anxiety

In revising the Miller Test, California's law preserves many of its key ideas. But its object is very different. It does not simply shift the scope of the Miller Test from obscene, sexually explicit, prurient material to (deviant and morbid) violent material. It also shifts, implicitly but no less certainly, the audience it seeks to protect. Admittedly, since the 1970s the concern of obscenity law (insomuch as it has been enforced) has been with video material and particularly the relationship between hard-core pornography and sexual violence. But with California's repurposing of the Miller Test, the object of greatest cultural anxiety shifts from the young women, whose virtue is imperiled by reading, to the teenage males who, in basements across America, are being transformed into violent sociopaths.

It seems very likely that the Supreme Court will affirm the lower court's ruling that the law violates the first amendment. As Scalia and Sotomayor both noted, however difficult it has been adjudicate, the tradition of treating sexual material as obscene is long and well established. It seems very difficult to slip "violence" in under existing law, however much of the California statute's language is borrowed from the Miller Test. The fears which motivate this law are unsupported by any clear, unambiguous empirical evidence. But it is an interesting moment in the history of media and culture when a law designed for one set of material, within the technological horizon of one period, is repurposed and changes the gender of its chief object of concern.

1904 Thom's Directory of Dublin: Some Wet Blanketism

2010-10-07T00:00:00-04:00

"The Dublin setting is built partly on data supplied by an exile's memory, but mainly on data from Thom's Dublin Directory, whither professors of literature, before discussing Ulysses, secretly wing their way in order to astound their students with the knowledge Joyce himself stored up with the aid of that very directory."—Nabokov, Lectures on Literature

Thom's Official Directory of the United Kingdom or Great Britain and Ireland for the Year 1904.

Ulysses is the archetypal modernist novel: it is a massive experiment in literary form, a wild, allusive romp through most of Western literary history, and an attempt to plumb the depths of the waking lives of its chief characters.

It is also an unusually organized archive of materials and ephemera relating to life in Dublin in 1904. It is a cliché repeated in seminar rooms around the country every year when introducing Joyce's massive novel that its author bragged that he "give[s] a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book." In attempting to reconstruct Dublin, Joyce relied on a number of sources, among them Thom's Dublin Directory.

Thom's returned to my attention recently as I've been thinking about "Wandering Rocks" (a project I am still playing around with when I have an idle moment); I was interested in locating the map of Dublin streets contained in the 1904 Thom's. It is not the only map which Joyce used, but it would likely be the most reliable for the state of Dublin's streets in 1904; the "Preface" to the 1904 Thom's brags that it has a "Map of Dublin City and Environs, specially designed and prepared for Thom's Directory, and most carefully updated with regard to accuracy and detail, has had all the recent changes in Streets, &c., embodied."

I think that Thom's 1904 directory should be out of copyright by now (though, since British copyright terms are based on the life of the author + 70 years I'm not entirely sure—how are corporate authors dealt with? Is the factual material in Thom's even subject to copyright or is it, like a phone book, non-copyrightable?). I wondered aloud on twitter earlier this week whether anyone had a digital copy. I was wondering in particular if maybe Joyceans (quite a few of whom I follow on twitter) had a PDF of this helpful document which they circulated or could point to.

It doesn't appear that this is the case. But a number of folks (whom I invite to comment below) seemed intrigued by the idea. And before you knew it folks were wondering whether a digitization of Thom's would be an interesting project to pursue. This is the sort of enthusiasm one finds on twitter and in the digital humanities more broadly. It is one of the things, I think, which attracts people to the digital humanities—a collective, "can do" spirit. But is a digital edition of the Thom's Official Directory of the United Kingdom of Great Britiain and Ireland for the year 1904 a good idea?

Let's hold that thought for a moment.

UVA has a microfilm reproduction of the 1904 Thom's taken from a copy held at Cornell. Frustratingly, however, this copy did not include the map announced in the "Preface." I'm not sure where the map went. Perhaps the map was a separate insert, like the maps I used to remove from the copies of National Geographic as they arrived, before both map and magazine were promptly forgotten in a pile in the basement. Or maybe it was the instructions on Cornell's photo-duplication request (also photographed as party of the microfilm copy): "Film entire volume except map on back" (come on!).

Nevertheless, the microfilm is not without it delights to a reader of Joyce. Here is a reference to the Ascot Race (which, you will recall, in a stunning upset, is won Throwaway, not Sceptre):

1904 Racing Schedule from Thom's Directory

Here is the property evaluation of 7 Eccles St, unoccupied at the time:

Eccles Street Property Evaluation

And here is that other Mr. Bloom, with whom a careful reader will not confuse Leopold, listed in the business directory:

Mr. (Marcus) Bloom, Dental Surgeon

This advertisement for boxes isn't referenced in Ulysses. But it illustrates the sort of advertisements one finds in Thom's, which may reward greater attention (no Plumtree's Potted Meat though; which makes the entire exercise feel rather... incomplete):

Thom's Carton Boxes: Economical and Convenient

So, fun right? Very neat, right?

Absolutely. But after spending an evening with the 1904 Thom's I am less convinced that a "digital edition" is really necessary. The insights it can offer a reader of Joyce are many (and I have not, by any means, even begun to plumb them). Indeed, as Nabokov suggests (well, exaggerates), it has long been a staple of Joyceans. The data about street addresses to be culled from Thom's in conjunction with Ulysses could be valuable indeed. But Thom's is big, ugly, and unwieldy. And to digitize the whole thing in any but the most basic form would require an enormous amount of labor; if the odd genre of Thom's has a contemporary(ish) analogue, it is a phone-book. There's lots of data there; but do we really need it all?

I know that this is a controversial claim (which is why I'm making it). We have neither world enough nor time, however, to digitize everything as well as it may merit in the eyes of a scholar. So, for purely pragmatic reasons, we need to make distinctions about how much effort a project is worth.

Why markup or build an interface around this item? I'd love to see a complete, high quality, color scan of the entire text, even as a PDF. A PDF of the 1904 Thom's would, I think, be more than enough for most people (even OCR may be overkill). The data to be culled from it might be put to other, better, uses in an analysis of Ulysses (particularly a mapping project). But devoting the effort it would take to create a true "digital edition" does not seem worthwhile to me.

I hate to be a wet blanket. The enthusiasm of DH is one of its greatest strengths. But if discretion is the better part of valor, wet blanket-ism may be the better part of collaboration.

I'd love to hear if you disagree with me. I'd be happy to be convinced otherwise—to be convinced that a digital edition of the 1904 Thom's would be a worthwhile project. Such an edition could be usefully linked it to relevant parts of Ulysses and referenced to Dublin maps and other material. But right now I think the 1904 Thom's is too big, too cumbersome, and too irrelevant to (itself) be made the object of a digital edition.

I can, however, see it as just one source of data for a very interesting project mapping Dublin...

Visualizing "Wandering Rocks": Paper, Yarn, and Processing

2010-08-24T00:00:00-04:00

"I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description."—James Joyce

So, let's say you took Gabler's edition of Ulysses, photocopied each page of "Wandering Rocks" (episode 10) at 50% of its normal size, and then taped them all together. You now have one long piece of paper. Cut at the breaks between the nineteen sections of which the episode is composed and you have nineteen pieces of paper—one for each of the episode's sections. The sizes of these pieces, of course, would vary; the first (describing Father Conmee's walk and trip on the tram) would be the longest.

Next, grab some yarn and some paper clips (because they're handy). Cut some short lengths of yarn. Tie a paper clip to each end. Now let's have a look at the second sheet ("Text Interruptions") in this Google Doc, containing a list of moments in "Wandering Rocks" where a recognizable line from one section intrudes in another. Take one end of your paper-clip/yarn device and clip to the line where a reference occurs; connected the other side to the area referenced (the Gabler edition has lines numbers; that is chiefly why we're using).

When all is said and done, with some variability depending on how exactly you connect things, you might have something that looks like this:

(Check out this Flickr image for an annotated version of the same image.)

This is a sort of basic visualization of the connections between the sections of "Wandering Rocks." Using scissors and some basic office supplies you can begin to get a grip on how, precisely, the various sections of the episode related to one another.

This only visualizes, however, one of the ways in which these sections are connected. Certain characters, for example, help synchronize the sections by appearing in more than one section: this is not visualized (perhaps we could highlight proper names which occur in more than one section; or connect them with a different colored thread). Location also helps synchronize the sections: Bloom, Stephen, and his sister all appear at the book stall, for instance. Maybe we could lay the nineteen pieces of paper out on a map (how would we handle the episodes where characters are moving?). You'll notice that I haven't even tried to make sense of the final, nineteenth section, where many of the characters see the cavalcade as it moves through Dublin (its movement appears in a number of other sections too). Have a look at the Google Doc to see my raw data; if you think you can improve it, email me (cforster @ virginia.edu) and I'll happily add you as an editor for the document.

It is also worth remembering that the chief unit of analysis here is the "line" in the Gabler edition. But all "lines" within the narration are not equal in terms of the time narrated. So you can line up the sections based on the synchronizations within the sections; but these provide only a point of synchronization; you cannot extrapolate out beyond that point.

There isn't too much to be learned from this very basic attempt to get a handle on the complexity of this episode. But it does seem interesting that sections tend to branch out—rather than, for instance, many sections all referring to one section (though this situation is precisely that of the final section, which I have ignored; and, in another, of Father Conmee's walk which, through its geographical progression, may relate to other sections in ways I have ignored).

This yarn stuff is fun, but wouldn't it be nice to have this digitally? Let's take this and do it in processing. In trying to write up in code this same visualization, I think the chief lesson of playing with yarn is that there are essentially two key types of objects for this analysis: chunks of text (representable as a rectangle of length propotional to the amount of text they represent); and flexible connections between parts of the text (not necessarily between sections: a link could, theoretically, be within a single section).

These two types of things were instatiated as two basic classes in my code: textChunk and connection. A textChunk contains its starting line and ending line, its length (computed as the difference between those first two pieces of data; I keep it onboard rather than re-computing it constantly), and a quick description (stored as a String); each textChunk object also contains the coordinates of its current location on the screen. The connection objects similarly contain the points they link together (stored as simply two integers representing the two line numbers that are linked; we don't even need x,y coordinates since we're working with a basically one dimensional representation of the text here). There are also a handful of methods for these objects: constructors to load up the data (though the way the data is currently stored/loaded is an embarassment); some methods to draw the objects, etc.

Here is what is looks like, comparing my yarn visualization with my version in processing (not too bad, huh?):

(In mapping things out, I got some of the inspiration here from my friend & colleague Jean Bauer's much more sophisticated tool for visualizing relational databases, Davila, also written in processing; originally I was simply going to gut her code and repurpose it here; but her code is far more elegant than mine, and is designed for situations far more complex. It made sense to just start from scratch.)

Each object bridges the gap between what it represents (which remains basically static) and the current state of its representation (which can be moved around and interacted with).

The interactions are basic. You can grab each textChunk and move it around manually. Hovering over a block will produce a little description of that block in the white section near the bottom of the window. You can hit 'a' and the blocks will automatically align. That function isn't working entirely perfectly yet, so I had to do manually massage things a bit to get them to look as these do above.

But as you move the blocks around, the connections stretch and keep the links between the sections evident. The blocks lined up on the right hand side are those without connections. (Oh yeah, those curved white lines; they're my beginning of an attempt to mark the skiff's progress.)

There would be other ways to begin visualizing "Wandering Rocks" (and I'd love to hear suggestions). And there are certainly ways to improve this one. One could attach the entire text (its available through Project Gutenberg y'know) of each section; though I'm not sure what the advantage would be of doing that would be. The colors just alternate now (for odd and even sections), to avoid sheer monochromatism. But the color of the textChunk could be tied to location or character; similarly the color of the connection could be made meaningful in some way.

I may post the code if I can get it cleaned up enough; if you'd like to see it in its current state, just email me, and I'll chuck you a tar ball with everything as it stands.

What we're playing with here is the tension between narrated time and narrative time. This neglects the entire dimension of space, which is central to the text of "Wandering Rocks" itself. In the comments of my previous post, crazymonk pointed to these maps from the wonderful Robot Wisdom site which is full of interesting Joyce material. The next step on this odd little project will be to continue to improve this visualization with an eye to moving towards a mapped visualization of the action of the episode. The simultaneity I've trying to visualize here is directly connected to the way the episode attempts to unify diverse locations. Bringing together a basic geographical representation of the episode's action (and the action of the novel) with the concerns I'm tinkering with here, would allow this visualization to move from merely playing to something else I think... Of which, more anon (or, anonish).