Chapter 9 Reading and Writing in the Digital Age

9.1 Literary Snapshot: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll, as we found out in previous chapters, is most famous for two books: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1872). These books follow the adventures of a seven-year-old, Alice, who tumbles down a rabbit hole (Wonderland) and enters a magic mirror (Looking-Glass), entering a nonsensical world of the imagination. If you have not already read these classic books—or wish to reread them—you can access them at the following links:

http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/CarAlic.html

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/CarGlas.html

In the first paragraph of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, we learn that “Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought Alice, ‘without pictures or conversations?’”Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. With Forty-Two Illustrations by John Tenniel (New York: D. Appleton, 1927; University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center, 1998), chap. 1, http://etext.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/CarAlic.html. Alice’s question, which perhaps seemed an absurd, childish question when Wonderland was written in 1865, seems especially prescient for a world of electronic books, literary apps, and hypertexts. Take a minute to watch the following video, an advertisement for an iPad app based on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

What does it mean to turn a book into an app? Writing about “Alice for the iPad,” the Huffington Post gushed, “The developers have created the pop-up book of the 21st-century. With this creative update to Alice in Wonderland, users don’t just flip the ‘pages’ of the eBook—they’re meant to shake it, turn it, twist it, jiggle it, and watch the characters and settings in the book react.”“Alice,” Atomic Antelope, http://www.atomicantelope.com/alice/; “Alice in Wonderland iPad App Reinvents Reading (VIDEO),” Huffington Post, June 14, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/14/alice-in-wonderland-ipad_n_537122.html. How does this kind of reading—interactive and visual—change our ideas of “reading” itself? John Brownlee admits that the iPad edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland “is certainly plenty frabjous” (an allusion to the nonsense poem, “Jabberwocky,” that appears in the sequel to Wonderland, Through the Looking-Glass), but wonders if the iPad “changes the reading game when it comes to drier books…how will people use the iPad’s capability to expand upon the text of a book like Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan or Nabokov’s Ada, or Adror, or Eco’s The Name of the Rose, or other less playful and anarchic works?”John Brownlee, “Callooh! Callay! ‘Alice in Wonderland’ for iPad,” Cult of Mac (blog), April 13, 2010, http://www.cultofmac.com/37800/kalloo-kallayalice-in-wonderland-for-ipad. Fortunately, many literary scholars and students are working to answer these and many other questions confronting literary studies in the digital age.

9.2 Digital Literary Studies: An Overview

In recent years, digital technologies—and in particular the Internet—have transformed nearly every aspect of our lives. Think of all the things we do every day that were impossible a decade ago. We keep in constant touch with friends through Facebook, we manage our bank accounts anywhere with our mobile phones, and we stream movies at will through Netflix. The same is true of literary studies. The rise of the digital age has transformed teaching and research. In today’s networked world, information is easy to come by: facts are cheap. For instance, digital archives such as Google Books (http://books.google.com) contain far more books than any human being could read in a lifetime. This proliferation of data is sometimes called information overloadThe idea that so much information is now available to human beings that we cannot process it effectively.. The term “information overload” conveys worry that human beings cannot possibly process the sheer volume of information now available to them. Many literary scholars wonder, can we still read closely in this new world of 24-hour news feeds, constant status updates, and near-infinite electronic libraries?

Scholars in the field of digital humanitiesA broad, loosely organized movement of scholars in traditional humanities fields who use digital technologies to enhance their research, teaching, and/or publishing. (http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities)—or, more specifically, digital literary studies—engage actively with these new technologies.“What Is Digital Humanities?,” Digital Humanities Questions & Answers, Association for Computers and the Humanities, http://digitalhumanities.org/answers/topic/what-is-digital-humanities. Digital humanists see opportunities for technology to help us understand the literature of the past, and they believe that scholars of subjects such as history and literature can help our culture better understand how we should engage with technology. This scholarly engagement can take many forms. Some digital literary critics use computational methods to analyze texts (or large groups of texts) in new ways. Others use geospatialA term that can describe a range of data and/or methodologies related to place. Geospatial research can include maps, census data, topographic data, and other layers that help describe a physical place and the people (or plants, animals, etc.) who live there. technology to map literary or historical events. Still others “read” technology itself, seeking to understand the way that electronic texts work and to explain how new media are reshaping readers’ relationships to knowledge.

Digital humanities scholars also value public or open-access scholarshipResearch and publication practices that are open to all interested readers, rather than being restricted to the subscribers of particular journals or databases. Public scholarship is often distributed online, through a scholar’s personal website, or through an open-access journal or archive.. Public scholarship is made widely (and freely) available to interested readers rather than being restricted to the subscribers of particular journals or databases. In his article “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” Matthew Kirschenbaum says, “The digital humanities today is about a scholarship (and a pedagogy) that is publicly visible in ways to which we are generally unaccustomed.”Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” ADE Bulletin 150 (2010): 1–7. When students work on public digital humanities projects, their work often improves because they know it will be seen by students and professors outside of their classes. When you write in public, the pressure increases, but so do the potential rewards from doing good work.

Because digital humanities is such a new and evolving field, this chapter unfolds differently than the previous chapters. Instead of focusing on one type of student assignment that develops through the entire chapter, this chapter highlights several kinds of digital assignments that literature professors might require. Each section will describe the methodologies that underlie each kind of assignment and link to real student projects that make use of those methodologies. First, however, the chapter helps you think about writing for the web, which can be markedly different from writing a long-form term paper.

9.3 Writing for the Web: A Process Approach

Writing for an online project can be very different from writing a standard five-page literary paper. Visitors to websites expect a different kind of experience than they get when reading a book or magazine. Websites are more visual, for one thing, and can use images and video to convey complex ideas. Readers bring different expectations to online writing than they do to printed articles or books. They expect to identify the salient points of a page quickly. They expect links to deeper information to be easily discovered. In short, the web is a faster, more dynamic medium than print, and writers must take those differences into account when writing for digital projects.

Web publications are also much easier to edit than printed papers, articles, or books. Writers can draft more quickly, with the understanding that they can always edit, revise, and fine-tune their writing even after it’s published on a website. This changes the process of writing. Drafts become more public, as both writer and reader understand that web-based writing is always subject to improvement.

Of course, what you write for the web will vary from assignment to assignment. With that said, here are a few general guidelines that should help you write for the web more effectively:

1. Readers expect web content to be conciseWriting that focuses on essential details and omits superfluous description or detail.. Concise writing focuses on the most salient details that the writer wishes to convey and omits flowery language or extraneous details. Readers do not expect long paragraphs of text on any given web page. Think of how this electronic textbook is presented. Though denser than much web-based writing, this textbook presents only a few ideas on each page. Writers often enhance the concision of web-based documents by organizing their thoughts into bulletedLists in which the items are not deliberately ordered and are prefaced by a symbol, often a dot (or bullet). or numbered listsLists in which the items are deliberately ordered and are prefaced by a number or letter that indicates sequence., which help readers cognitively organize the information they read online.
2. Concise writing only works if it’s also precise—writing for the web should be specific and make a clear point. While most teachers don’t like filler in student papers, they are paid to read that filler. Visitors to a website are not required to read it and will quickly surf to another site if they cannot discern the site’s purpose. If you are tracing the journey of the crew in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick using Google Earth, the front page of your website should say (a) precisely what your project does and (b) why it’s interesting. Don’t leave your reader to figure these things out. For example, “This project maps the locations visited by the crew of the Pequod in Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick. Mapping this voyage helps us appreciate the breadth of the crew’s journey and better understand the realities of whaling in 19th-century America.”
3. Readers also expect web content to include hyperlinksText in an online document that links to another resource on the web. Hyperlinks are often visually distinct from nonlinked text on a web page. where appropriate. Think about this textbook. When we reference another chapter in the book, an outside article, or an electronic literary text, we link directly to it so you can follow up on ideas you find interesting. Much as scholarly readers expect you to cite the sources you quote or paraphrase, readers on the web expect you to link directly to any content that informs your writing. If your writing builds on the ideas of others—whether that’s a scholarly website, a blog, or a Twitter feed—you should include links to those foundational works as often as you can. You should also provide links that will allow your reader to dig deeper into a topic you discuss. While readers on the web expect the writing to be concise and precise, they also expect that they will be able to further explore things they find interesting. In the preceding example, you might link to other resources on the web where readers could learn more about the Pequod, Herman Melville, Moby-Dick, or the nineteenth-century whaling industry.
4. In English classes, we don’t often talk about whether a work is skimmableA skimmable document is easy to understand quickly. It includes headings, summaries, and lists that help readers grasp the big ideas in the document without reading its details.. Instead, we value writing that can be read closely, as we learn in Chapter 2 "Writing about Form: Developing the Foundations of Close Reading". However, readers on the web do want writing to be skimmable. You should highlight key words, phrases, and hyperlinks in your text. You should also use headings to separate different parts of your document. If appropriate, you might also begin each segment of writing with a short, one to two sentence summary of the section. Your goal should be a document that readers can quickly understand, at least in its broad strokes, before delving into a more careful reading.
5. Readers on the web also care about a site’s aesthetic appealThe overall attractiveness of a web page. On the web, we usually focus on visual aesthetics such as the colors, fonts, and layout of a given page. However, audio and video can also influence a site’s aesthetic appeal.. In other words, they care how the site’s fonts, colors, layout, and images contribute to their overall experience of the site’s content. The web is a highly visual medium. When writing for the web, you should consider not only the content of your writing but also its presentation. Is the font easy to read? Do the colors you’ve chosen enhance the reading experience or do they distract from it? Very bright colors, for instance, might force readers to strain their eyes while reading. Pick a font and color scheme that you can read easily for an extended period of time.

9.4 Creating a Thematic Research Collection

One of the easiest and most rewarding ways to begin engaging with digital research is to build what Carole Palmer calls a thematic research collectionA curated set of primary materials with explanatory and interpretive text that helps readers understand the meaning and significance of the gathered items.. In her article in A Companion to Digital Humanities, Palmer describes a thematic research collection as “digital aggregations of primary sources and related materials that support research on a theme.”Carole L. Palmer, “Thematic Research Collections,” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens, and John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), under “Introduction,” http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companion/view?docId=blackwell/9781405103213/9781405103213.xml&chunk.id=ss1-4-5. For a review of primary sourcesPrimary sources are literary or nonliterary texts from the period under study. In literary studies, stories, poems, and plays are primary sources, as are other historical documents such as letters, essays, sermons, and autobiographies., please see Chapter 7 "Writing about History and Culture from a New Historical Perspective". A thematic research collection is distinct from an archive because it does more than simply collect materials. A thematic research collection also includes the researcher’s commentary on those materials. In other words, the researcher composes text that will guide visitors through the collection, explaining connections among and interpreting the materials within the collection. In many ways, thematic research collections are like museum exhibits in that they contextualize primary materials for visitors.

Compiling thematic research collections gives students a wonderful opportunity to collaborate with professors. In fact, digital projects are often more amenable to undergraduate research than other kinds of literary research since they require many hands gathering, digitizing, organizing, and explaining project materials. For instance, the North Wind Archive (http://www.snc.edu/northwind/archvie.html)John Pennington, ed., “The North Wind Online Digital Archive,” St. Norbert College, http://www.snc.edu/english/nwarchive.html. represents a true collaboration between John Pennington, a professor and coauthor of this textbook, and his student Gretchen Panzer (http://www.snc.edu/collaborative/profiles/gretchen.panzer.html).“Editorial Intern for North Wind: A Journal of George MacDonald Studies,” The Collaborative: The Center for Undergraduate Research, Scholarship and Creative Activities, St. Norbert College, http://www.snc.edu/collaborative/profiles/gretchen.panzer.html. The two worked to digitize the entire collection of back issues of North Wind, a scholarly journal dedicated to George MacDonald (a friend of Lewis Carroll). Gretchen and Pennington eventually copublished an article about their experiences working on the digital archive (http://www.snc.edu/northwind/documents/By_volume/sk001_Volume_29_(2010)/sk001_George_MacDonald_in_the_Virtual_Library=_The_North_Wind_Digital_Archive_-_Gretchen_Panzer_and_John_Pennington.pdf).Gretchen Panzer and John Pennington, “George MacDonald in the Virtual Library: The North Wind Digital Archive and the Evolution of MacDonald Scholarship,” North Wind 29 (2010): 1–10, http://www.snc.edu/english/documents/North_Wind/By_contributor/Panzer,_Gretchen/sk001_George_MacDonald_in_the_Virtual_Library= _The_North_Wind_Digital_Archive_and_the_Evolution_of_MacDonald_Scholarship.pdf.

One excellent tool for compiling a thematic research collection is OmekaA web-publishing platform that allows anyone with an account to create or collaborate on a website to display collections and build digital exhibitions. (http://www.omeka.net), a freely available “web-publishing platform that allows anyone with an account to create or collaborate on a website to display collections and build digital exhibitions.”“About,” Omeka.net, http://info.omeka.net/about. Using Omeka, you can collect various items—scans of historical documents, photographs, sound files, and videos—and organize them into exhibits that include explanatory text. The James Monroe Papers is an Omeka collection designed by students at the University of Mary Washington (http://projects.umwhistory.org/jmp).Alexandra deGraffenreid, Seth Mintzer, MacKenzie Murphy, and Chris Wright, eds., “James Monroe Papers,” University of Mary Washington, http://projects.umwhistory.org/jmp. These students digitized the letters of President James Monroe using scans of the original letters. They then organized exhibits that collect letters between Monroe and specific correspondents. If you click on one of the entries for Monroe’s letters to Edmund Randolf (http://projects.umwhistory.org/jmp/exhibits/show/edmund-randolf), for instance, you will find a brief description of the letter’s content, a link to a transcription of the letter’s text, and images of the scanned original letter.

As you can see, thematic research collections don’t look much like traditional literary research papers. For one thing, they can include more visual elements, such as images, photographs, or even videos. The text in such a collection is composed in brief, skimmable sections rather than in long pages. However, thematic research collections like this one give students the opportunity to do real, substantial research and to actively contribute to the body of scholarly knowledge within literary studies. When published on the web, student research collections can be of use to other students and even accomplished scholars.

9.5 Creating a Digital Timeline

Another easy way to use digital technologies to enhance your research is to build a digital timeline around a particular historical period or literary work. You’ve probably drawn a timeline in a class before, but digital timelines allow you to include much richer information than you typically can when working on paper. As with a thematic research collection, gathering information about your research and organizing it chronologically will help you understand it more deeply and spot relationships between events you might not have spotted otherwise. There are other uses for timelines in literature classes. In his detailed “Build Your Own Interactive Timeline” article (http://briancroxall.net/TimelineTutorial/TimelineTutorial.html),Brian Croxall, “Build Your Own Interactive Timeline,” http://briancroxall.net/TimelineTutorial/TimelineTutorial.html. Brian Croxall argues that building timelines can help students untangle the complex chronology of novels such as Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five or Toni Morrison’s Jazz (and of short stories such as William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” which you can read at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/wf_rose.html).

Fortunately there are free tools available online for building basic interactive timelines. Dipity (http://www.dipity.com) allows users to enter new events through a very simple interface. Users can even integrate content from a range of other web services such as YouTube and Flickr, which would allow you to include images and videos related to your research into your timeline. Dipity’s one major limitation for some literature classrooms is that it cannot yet accept events dated before 100 AD/CE. If you’re working with classical sources—Greek tragedy, for instance—then Dipity may not be your best choice. For a greater challenge but more flexibility, you might try Brian Croxall’s previously mentioned “Timeline Tutorial” (http://briancroxall.net/TimelineTutorial/TimelineTutorial.html). Croxall walks users through building timelines using MIT’s SIMILE Project (http://simile.mit.edu). As he notes, there’s a greater learning curve with SIMILE, but users have far more control over the timelines it produces.

Timelines can even be used to build arguments about the relationships among historical events and/or events in a literary work. To return briefly to Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” you could construct a timeline of events related to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and other events of the novel. Within those events, you could make claims and cite evidence explaining to your readers precisely how those events help us understand the story’s protagonist, Emily Grierson. When you correlate the details the story tells us about Emily with those historical events, what new understanding(s) of Emily emerge?

9.6 Mapping a Text

Many digital literary scholars focus on geospatial technologies to look at literature in new ways enabled by new technologies. In his work Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, Franco Moretti argues that creating maps of the spaces described in literary texts can give scholars insight into those texts in a way that their words alone cannot: “Literary mapsA map that traces spatial elements within a literary work, such as plotting the locations characters visit within a novel.…are a good way to prepare a text for analysis,” Moretti argues, “You choose a unit—walks, lawsuits, luxury goods, whatever—find its occurrences, place them in space…with a little luck, these maps will be more than the sum of their parts: they will possess ‘emerging’ qualities, which were not visible at the lower level.”Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005), 53. In other words, by mapping specific elements within texts, critics can gain a new perspective on how those elements relate to one another and to other textual elements. If, for instance, we map the locations that characters visit in Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, we might spot interesting relationships between the inner lives of the characters (as revealed in the text of the novel) and the exterior world of the modern, urban London they travel through (as revealed on the map).

Maria is a student in a sophomore-level literature class that has just finished Melville’s voluminous novel Moby-Dick (http://www.melville.org/diCurcio/bib.htm).Robert A. diCurcio, ed., Nantucket’s Tried-Out Moby-Dick: Robert A. diCurcio’s Companion Reader to Melville’s Masterpiece (Nantucket, MA: Aeternium, 1996), http://www.melville.org/diCurcio/bib.htm. Maria has already written one paper about Moby-Dick—a psychological analysis of the monomaniacal captain in the novel, Ahab—and wants to do something different for her final class project. Maria is very interested in the scope of the Pequod’s voyage, and so she decides to map the ship’s journey through the novel. She hopes that mapping the ship’s journey might illuminate other aspects of the novel that she had not previously considered. Fortunately, the free Google EarthFree software that allows users to plot points on a globe, annotating them with contextual information. When combined with David Rumsey’s Historical Maps Collection, Google Earth allows users to view the globe as it was described at previous points in history. software makes it easy to create detailed maps—even literary maps like the one Maria envisions.

After Maria adds her place markers, she can move from location to location in Google Earth and trace the Pequod’s voyage. She’s not entirely satisfied with her map, however. By default, Google Earth includes modern geographic information, and the events of Melville’s novel, published in 1852, look anachronistic on a twenty-first-century map. Maria brings her concern to her professor, who recommends she look at the David Rumsey Map Collection (http://www.davidrumsey.com), a freely distributed collection of scanned historical maps. The Rumsey Collection even makes many of their historical maps available as a KMZA file format that allows users to share events plotted in Google Earth with other users. file that can be easily opened in Google Earth (http://www.davidrumsey.com/view/google-earth).David Rumsey, David Rumsey Map Collection, http://www.davidrumsey.com/view/google-earth.

Figure 9.1 Maria’s Final Map

© 2012 Google.

Maria’s final map, which you can see in Figure 9.1 "Maria’s Final Map", allows other students and scholars to follow the Pequod’s voyage for themselves, and even (if they wish) to layer different historical maps under it. You can download Maria’s KMZ yourself (http://www.flatworldknowledge.com/sites/all/files/pennington-mobydickvoyage.kmz) and experiment with the work she did. Now let’s look at Maria’s reflection paper, in which she explains what building this map taught her about Melville’s novel and the nineteenth-century whaling industry.

9.7 Student Sample Paper: Maria Slusarek’s “’Mapping Melville’ Reflection”

9.8 Student Sample Digital Project: Maria Dzurik’s St. Augustine’s Confessions

Maria (yes, another Maria!) is a student in an interdivision course taught by Ryan Cordell, an English professor at St. Norbert College and one of the authors of this textbook. In this course, “Technologies of Text,” students built digital projects as their final assignment. These projects made use of materials available in St. Norbert College Library’s special collections, which primarily hold texts related to St. Norbert’s Catholic and Norbertine heritage. For her project, Maria chose to digitize several rare translations of St. Augustine’s classic text, Confessions.St. Augustine, Confessions, ed. John Fabian (Commodius Vicus, 2010). These editions were published over several hundred years, from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century. Maria made high-quality scans of each book’s cover and introduction. She then used Omeka (discussed in more detail in Section 9.4 "Creating a Thematic Research Collection") to publish her images and create interpretive exhibits to help visitors to her site better understand the nine translations she digitized.

Maria’s project provides a wonderful example of how digital projects enable students to find and make significant use of materials unique to their schools. Not only does this result in interesting projects for students, but those projects can also prove useful to other scholars who do not have access to those local resources. You probably don’t have materials quite like these at your college or university, but you may have other resources that would be perfect for digital archival projects like this one. You can find Maria’s work at http://mariadzurik.omeka.net.Maria Dzurik, ed., “St. Augustine’s Confessions,” St. Norbert College, http://mariadzurik.omeka.net.

9.9 End-of-Chapter Assessment

9.10 Suggestions for Further Reading