Jim McGrath, PhD http://jimmcgrath.us Digital Humanities, Public Humanities, History, Archives, New Media and Popular Culture Wed, 07 Feb 2018 16:35:18 +0000 en hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.4 96476493 “Reappearing Acts”: My Review of Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces for Digital Humanities Quarterly http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/reappearing-acts-my-review-of-lori-emersons-reading-writing-interfaces-for-digital-humanities-quarterly/ http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/reappearing-acts-my-review-of-lori-emersons-reading-writing-interfaces-for-digital-humanities-quarterly/#respond Wed, 07 Feb 2018 16:33:28 +0000 http://jimmcgrath.us/?p=508 Continue reading "“Reappearing Acts”: My Review of Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces for Digital Humanities Quarterly"

]]>

Head over to Digital Humanities Quarterly to read some new writing from me!

Lori Emerson’s Reading Writing Interfaces: From The Digital To The Bookbound (University of Minnesota Press; 2014) was an important book for me during the end of my dissertation-writing work, and I’ve come to use excerpts from the book regularly in courses I’ve taught on Digital Public Humanities and Digital Storytelling here at Brown. I asked if I could review it for Digital Humanities Quarterly so I could share the ways Emerson’s work has made me think differently about digital interfaces: what they promise users, what those promises often do to conceal and limit our imagined uses of technology, and how artists electronic literature have made creative work out of these limitations and conditions.

I had a lot of fun writing this book review, and I look forward to doing more writing in this vein. I’ve struggled for years to develop the “right” voice to use in “academic” writing, and the occasion of a book review for a supportive journal gave me some confidence and imagined leeway to write about popular culture, tell jokes, and reveal my personality a bit. Sometimes I feel like I was a few years too early (or maybe a few departments too removed from American Studies) to feel comfortable while writing stuff like this. I’ve still been doing some writing in more “traditional” academic styles and modes (though some of this work has also been collaborative writing, which has been fun and different in certain ways), but I do prefer this sort of thing. I was appreciative of the kind words people said about my writing on Infinite Jest and ebooks, which is in a similar mode.

]]>
http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/reappearing-acts-my-review-of-lori-emersons-reading-writing-interfaces-for-digital-humanities-quarterly/feed/ 0 508
“I am in here”: Reflections on Reading Infinite Jest on Kindles, Trains, and Airplanes http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/i-am-in-here-reflections-on-reading-infinite-jest-on-kindles-trains-and-airplanes/ http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/i-am-in-here-reflections-on-reading-infinite-jest-on-kindles-trains-and-airplanes/#comments Thu, 30 Nov 2017 01:16:46 +0000 http://jimmcgrath.us/?p=495 Continue reading "“I am in here”: Reflections on Reading Infinite Jest on Kindles, Trains, and Airplanes"

]]>
I presented this paper at the Second Annual David Foster Wallace Conference back in 2015. The paper was NOT well received by some members of the audience, mainly because I was suggesting that reading a digital edition of Infinite Jest wasn’t the end of the world. During the Q&A, one person said something like “If David Foster Wallace were here today, he’d say you were wrong.” It was amazing. There were some nice people there as well, but I’ll always remember that comment and the glares some people in the audience gave me. All in all this conference was not my particular cup of tea, but a good friend asked me to tag along with him on a panel and I’d never been to a conference dedicated to a single author before, so it was worth the experience. After our panel was done, we spent most of the remainder of the conference down the block, playing darts at an Irish bar. Thanks again for the good times, Ben. I’ve always liked this piece so I’m posting it here.

 

Cover to Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

I finished reading Infinite Jest for the first time on Thursday, December 29 2011, somewhere between 30,000 and 45,000 feet above sea level. I did not expect to finish the book on Spirit Airlines Flight 126 from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, to Boston, Massachusetts, wedged in the sky, returning to my Allston apartment after a long Christmas vacation with my retired parents and my occasionally employed brothers. Though I had spent many reading sessions flipping back and forth between the hyperlinked “Notes and Errata” and the book’s main text on my second-generation Amazon Kindle, I had misjudged how much space the novel’s “appendix” took up, and felt there was more to read. The ending, its image of Gately “flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand,” seemed abrupt, a quiet moment following one of the more grotesque sequences in the novel. I was not prepared to conclude on this particularly off-putting note, trapped in the sky in an uncomfortable seat aboard one of the worst airlines in the history of airlines, unable to talk, or text, or tweet about how it felt to finish a book that had held my attention over most of the last seven months.

This paper uses my particular experiences reading Infinite Jest to examine the public and social dimensions of reading and the ways digital media – specifically, ebooks – color those dimensions. My decision to read an ebook version of Infinite Jest was in part determined by my sense of where and how I planned to read it: primarily in transit, mainly in and around a Boston both familiar and removed from the city described in the novel. I was conscious of a variety of factors while reading Infinite Jest: the logistics of reading such a large book in close quarters on overcrowded rush hour Green Line trains, the clichéd image of young, white men reading Serious Literature in public spaces, the desire to remain anonymous while inhabiting two Allstons at once.

I bought a digital edition of Infinite Jest on May 21, 2011. I was between two depressing semesters of graduate school, where I was studying (or, more specifically, not studying) contemporary American poetry, and I figured that a detour into contemporary American fiction would be a nice change of pace. Contemporary American fiction and I had decided to see other people a few years prior to this decision; it was hard at the time to not judge the entirety of the field by the poor reading choices I had made in my early 20s: the copies of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius on my bookshelf were more embarrassing to me than the copies of Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other and Sugar Ray’s 14:59 that were in the CD folders under my bed. With my Kindle, I was free to make ill-advised forays into all sorts of literary genres without anyone being the wiser.

I received an international version of the “Kindle 2” as a gift from my parents on November 11, 2009. They had imagined my tendency to cram close to a dozen books into my bags on weekend trips back to the city (sorry, New York City: specifically Brooklyn) less as a symptom particular to graduate student life and more as a continuation of old habits: as a kid, I was not able to go to the beach, much less a restaurant a short drive away in our neighborhood, without packing the car with various copies of Nintendo Power and Wizard: The Guide to Comics. They also knew that I had a tendency to leave (or flee) neighborhoods in the Boston and Cambridge areas after a year or two, and they imagined a Kindle as a lighter, easier-to-pack alternative. I was not consulted on this purchase, but it made me happy despite my monetary and emotional investments in the independent bookstores of Boston and Cambridge.

In lieu of a touchscreen interface, the Kindle 2 featured a built-in keyboard and buttons on either side of the device that let readers move to “Previous Pages” or “Next Pages” or a basic menu. It was hard to read in the sun, the e-Ink technology sometimes misbehaved, and in order to use, say, the hyperlinked footnotes littering the digital edition of Infinite Jest, a reader had to click through various characters on the displayed page and hope that the edition had been properly encoded so that you ended up at the appropriate note and/or piece of errata. Kindle 2s could bring readers easily (and sometimes unexpectedly) to the furthest page read in a digital edition, but good luck finding your way back. This was a feature that was useful when losing one’s place in a Stieg Larsson novel but infuriating when the furthest page read was a long ways from the central narrative of Wallace’s novel. Rather than an easy hop, skip, and a jump back and forth between narrative and notes, the decision to click on an Infinite Jest footnote became an occasional headache. Later generations of Kindles attend to many of these problems, but Kindles continue to present other sorts of problems to certain readers: for example, the proprietary format of its files requires Amazon-supported apps, so the easy-to-manage library of digital books you began compiling is married to particular reading contexts and their attendant costs.

There are also the challenges of annotation and highlighting on a Kindle device, issues that are not necessarily exclusive to this technology but which seem to plague all e-readers and their human readers. We all know how very proud readers of Infinite Jest are of their heavily-annotated editions, with their marginalia, color-coded Post-It notes, highlighted sections, and whatnot. Pictures of these sorts of editions are displayed proudly across the web, documents of the labor of reading and more reading and writing and maybe some doodling, and I’m sure there are some food or coffee stains, and even some moments of private correspondence, like evidence of misguided attempts to gift this mountain of a novel to unsuspecting loved ones.

About a month before my purchase of Infinite Jest, the Boston Phoenix had run a story on “People Holding Infinite Jest,” a Tumblr page (that is gone, save the traces left of it on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine) run by Somerville resident Chris Braiotta. Braiotta had found a digital treasure trove of various people posing with copies of the novel on the photo-sharing site Flickr, and he had made it his mission to publicly shame “people who think they’re too smart to go to Sizzler” who were using the book as a kind of “lifestyle marker.” Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville residents have complicated feelings about cultural artifacts – books, articles of clothing, beer – and what they tell us about a person’s affiliations with particular communities in the region. We have strong feelings about many dumb things, from Narragansett tall boys to Yankees hats to David Foster Wallace novels. Reading Infinite Jest on the 66 bus line from Harvard Square to Allston seems, to some of the area’s more vigilant and obnoxious watchdogs, like a move that screamed “outsider” through its claims for insider knowledge.

It must be exhausting to go through life having to worry about people who judge how we choose to focus our attention between destinations, combing the web for documentation of perceived transgressions. I suppose you could wait until you’ve reached your destination, but reading choices in coffee shops, bars, and Chipotle restaurants force us to navigate additional social minefields: the Chris Braioittas of the world are out there, eating and caffeinating and rolling their eyes at nearby tables. And I’ll be honest: there is something fairly ridiculous to me about the sight of a person reading Infinite Jest in its hardcover or paperback formats on public transportation. It’s not a book that is optimized for use on B Line trains full of hungover law school students and terrified families of Red Sox fans. A degree of annotation seems possible, but not of the color-coded, sticker-infused variety. In addition to having an edition that called little attention to itself, a Kindle edition made it possible to read Infinite Jest in a wide range of commuter scenarios and mobile contexts.

Beyond the fears of sociopaths and the detours into self-consciousness, I do wonder more seriously about the kinds of reading experiences afforded by digital remediations of Infinite Jest, and how the mediated dimensions of these particular occasions of reading are part of a larger continuum of technologies of texts. Wallace is interested in technological interfaces and the ways they anticipate or encourage certain consumer practices and social habits. For example, the novel’s detailed description of the history of the “Transmittable Tableaux” (or TT) highlights the adoption and rejection of the “unreal stylized” interface, an expensive mode of curated and heavily mediated communication that became “a kind of status symbol of anti-vanity, such that only callers utterly lacking in self-awareness continued to use videophony,” favored by users who revealed themselves as “ironic cultural symbols of tacky vain slavery to corporate PR and high-tech novelty” during the Subsidized Era. Elsewhere, Wallace’s narrator describes the placement of “modems” in dormitories at Enfield Tennis Academy, noting that “only E.T.A. juniors and seniors get to have actual cartridge-viewers in their subdorm rooms,” and that “none of these viewers…can have motherboard cards for Spontaneous Interlace Disseminations or for ROM-caliber games.” And then there’s Marlon Bain, one of Orin Incandenza’s E.T.A. classmates who, were are told, is not “InterNetted and has an O.C.D.-phobic thing about e-mail.” There are other interesting references: the “computerized jewelry” described with disdain by the narrator on the ears of the Commonwealth’s yuppie incursion, the now-dated “old-computer-enhanced celluloid dinosaur things” of “old Spielberg’s” Jurassic Park.

The imagined and real technology inventoried in Infinite Jest is often made explicit and visible, in ways that suggest Wallace in interested in more than just providing clarity and context for his invented devices. In 2000’s Remediation: Understanding New Media, Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin argue that “the logic of immediacy dictates that the medium itself should disappear and leave us in the presence of the thing represented: sitting in the race car or standing on the mountaintop.” The dream of virtual reality, for example, is “to foster in the viewer a sense of presence: the viewer should forget that she is in fact wearing a computer interface and accept the graphic image that it offers as her own visual world.” The excitement surrounding the Oculus Rift, a more recent attempt to make the dream of VR a reality, is fueled in large part by the device’s supposed ability to remove traces of the nausea that has plagued many VR interfaces in the past. There is lots of money at stake in perfecting what Lori Emerson, in 2014’s Reading Writing Interfaces, describes as “the wonders of invisible interfaces and how they provide us with a more natural, more direct, inherently better way to interact with our computers.” Wallace calls attention to the magic trick being performed in these instances through his tour of clunky and limited interfaces.

This conference room is filled with devices and technological innovations whose interface quirks and particularities have been rendered “invisible” or “natural” to us. Here I’m talking less about the phones and laptops and Kindles and more about the unlined pieces of paper you might be taking notes on, or the books on which the corpus of Infinite Jest is printed in an unnamed font behind a cover designed by Keith Hayes. Or maybe I’m talking about the tendency to favor a perspective of “augmented reality” rather than a world met one interface at a time. Or maybe it’s the collection of digital avatars we deploy as digital ambassadors in various social networks when we don’t have time to assume the roles required for these particular performances. Or maybe it’s just this branded podium and attendant microphone and the formal layout of this conference and its peculiar investments in a kind of old-fashioned, PowerPointless mode of public speaking and direct engagement with ideas.

The size of paperback or hardcover editions of Infinite Jest reveals the novel as its own kind of clunky, unwieldy interface, one that, judging from Wallace’s interest in the technologies of popular forms of media, seems playfully designed as a kind of untransmittable tableau of text. And the decision to divide a reader’s attention between what seems recognizable by publication conventions as a “central” or “primary” narrative and what he tells Charlie Rose in an interview is the “addictive” second voice of the Notes and Errata seems done less for the convenience of the reader of this brick of bound paper and more to divert his or her attention. “Text is very linear, it’s very unified,” Wallace tells Rose, and the investment in getting readers to repeat a familiar mechanical gesture of reading ad nauseam disrupts this unity.

Kindles and the hyperlinked dimensions of ebooks designed for such interfaces might arguably unify the text. When I purchased my first physical copy of Infinite Jest in O’Hare Airport a few days ago, I was surprised by both the absence of a Table of Contents and the change in font size in the Notes & Errata section of the novel, bibliographic resonances overwritten and obscured by the imperatives of ebook designers and publishers invested in certain ideas of User Interface. But there is also the potential to further fracture the text and open up new approaches to reading the novel in digital editions. A quick Google search for “Infinite Jest” revealed a messy but nonetheless usable corpus of the novel’s text scraped from what appears to be a Kindle or ebook edition (given the presence of the Table of Contents) and placed into a crude but searchable PDF file. Such an edition allows me to search particular words or phrases in the text via two keyboard strokes (what a gross word), giving me rough estimates on the number of times words appear in the text: “cartridge” (313), “Internet” (7), “network” (43), “e-mail” (8), “Digital” (71).

“How do trite things get to be trite? Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti-interesting?” This sentiment, from the imagined thoughts of Gately on Alcoholics Anonymous and its “banal” epiphanies, is one of the few moments (thirty-two in total) highlighted in my Kindle edition of Infinite Jest. I’d like to bring it into conversation with Wallace’s thoughts on TV as they appear in conversation with Charlie Rose. Wallace, as has been widely reported and dramatized in film, loved television, but he also notes that “television is so darn easy: you sit there, and you don’t have to do much.” Television viewing practices have changed with recent technological developments and interfaces like Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, and other services. The inherent triteness of television as a delivery device of advertising interspersed with narrative is disrupted in certain contexts by content providers: no longer dependent on the narrative beats and breaks of commercials and the investments in air placed by particular companies, showrunners and producers often claim to have a wider degree of flexibility within the current parameters outlined by their current investors. But in many respects the interfaces of these enterprises and their attendant algorithms and features require users to do less with more, at the level of mechanical labor. A universal remote can be easily replaced by a controller with three or four buttons and a directional pad.

Similarly, a Kindle doesn’t ask you for much: in fact, it doesn’t want much, though it thinks it would be nice if you occasionally broadcast excerpts from your purchases with consumer commentary on social media. The Kindle affords me certain benefits that appeal to me on a functional and spiritual level: I can easily hide in plain sight with Wallace on the T. But the particular formatting decisions it supports and the occasions for readings it fosters may encourage the kind of passivity many readers of Wallace seem to explicitly reject in their relentless tagging and marking up of their editions. There are certainly performative dimensions to these annotative practices (even if the performance is given to a solitary audience), but there also seems to be a desire to pursue a different mode of reading in these activities.

I’ll end with some questions. What will future digital editions of Infinite Jest look like? How will they solidify certain assumptions generated from older technologies of text, or how might they take advantage of newer tools, allowing users like me to engage with other readers from my newly-wifi-enabled perch in the sky on future Spirit Airlines flights? How far have your editions of Wallace’s work traveled, and what are the advantages of inventorying and potentially remapping our reading interfaces and the mechanics of our annotative practices, our crude and sleek attempts at psychogeography? How is the reading of digital editions trite, interesting, un-interesting, anti-interesting?

Questions? Comments? Feel free to email me (james_mcgrath@brown.edu) or find me on Twitter @JimMc_Grath.

]]>
http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/i-am-in-here-reflections-on-reading-infinite-jest-on-kindles-trains-and-airplanes/feed/ 2 495
Haunted Home Pages #3: Virtual Haunted Houses http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/haunted-home-pages-3-virtual-haunted-houses/ http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/haunted-home-pages-3-virtual-haunted-houses/#respond Mon, 30 Oct 2017 20:43:20 +0000 http://jimmcgrath.us/?p=482 Continue reading "Haunted Home Pages #3: Virtual Haunted Houses"

]]>

Welcome to Haunted Home Pages, a semi-regular series of blog posts in which Jim McGrath spends October 2017 communicating with the internet’s afterlife via The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine . For all the posts in this series, click here.

I love looking at early twenty-first century Yahoo pages with undergrads and grad students. The decisions to organize information are super interesting and weird! In my search for Halloween-themed content, I discovered that there once was a “Holidays” sub-section under Yahoo’s “Society and Culture” section. Before we go there to look at some Virtual Haunted Houses (from, of course, the “Virtual Haunted Houses” sub-section of the “Halloween” section!), take a look at these categories:

Yahoo's directory of links for "Society and Culture" (June 2002)
Yahoo’s directory of links for “Society and Culture” (June 2002)

In October of 2002 there were eight options to choose from in the category of “Virtual Haunted Houses.” While many of these houses are inaccessible via The Internet Archive due to their reliance on Flash, the descriptions of these sites give you a sense of some of the activities awaiting digital trick or treaters: virtual pumpkin carving, Ozmo the Oracle, table tennis with skeletons (move over, Warren Zevon!), etc.

Virtual Haunted Houses (October 2002)
Virtual Haunted Houses (October 2002)

Of these options, my favorite forgotten haunt is Jan’s Courtyard, in which the aforementioned Jan apparently created (and definitely starred in!) a series of Photoshopped images alongside The Cryptkeeper, Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, and lots of other ghouls and ghosts. If I had these kinds of Photoshop skills in 2002, this is exactly how I would have spent my time every October.

Jan's Courtyard (October 2002)
Jan’s Courtyard (October 2002)

It’s also interesting to see the structures of web sites from this period and how they’re beginning to change. My favorite section of what’s visible in the archive of the site is the “Halloween at Jan’s Courtyard” page, which lets you scroll through a series of text, images, and GIFs.

Bats in the Dining Hall
Bats in the Dining Hall

There’s also a hyperlinked Haunted House Tour page in which Jan (and Bob) take those interested in clicking through various images of a home’s interior. As someone who spends part of his current day job thinking of how to map and tour historic houses, this was fun to take a look at! The tour begins in the Parlor and ends with a menagerie of “Swamp Critters.” It’s fun to see an aesthetic where GIFs and static images are weaved together: for example, check out the Dining Hall, where an animated bat GIF flutters above the static revelry. If you’re still looking for more to do, there’s also a tour of several digital graveyards!

Swamp Critters
Swamp Critters

If the site’s hit counts are to be believed, almost a million visitors have made their way to Jan’s Courtyard since its creation in 1996! Even if that’s spread over 20 years or so, those numbers are still way better than lots of digital humanities projects! 🙂

 

I came across a few other virtual haunted houses this month, but none of them stayed with me like Jan’s Courtyard. Happy Halloween!

Haunted Home Pages will run through October 2017! Questions, comments? Get in touch with Jim on Twitter @JimMc_Grath! You can also email me: james_mcgrath[at]brown[dot]edu!

]]>
http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/haunted-home-pages-3-virtual-haunted-houses/feed/ 0 482
Haunted Home Pages #2: The Garment District http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/haunted-home-pages-2-the-garment-district/ http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/haunted-home-pages-2-the-garment-district/#respond Fri, 13 Oct 2017 20:48:43 +0000 http://jimmcgrath.us/?p=454 Continue reading "Haunted Home Pages #2: The Garment District"

]]>
Garment District Halloween ad on The B Line (Green Line), October 2017.
Garment District Halloween ad on Boston’s C Line (Green Line), October 2017.

Welcome to Haunted Home Pages, a semi-regular series of blog posts in which Jim McGrath spends October 2017 communicating with the internet’s afterlife via The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine . For all the posts in this series, click here.

Boston has changed a lot since I moved here in 2003, but one thing has stayed fairly consistent: The Garment District in Cambridge has been a go-to source for Halloween costumes, and the ads it blankets the T with each year promoting its wares (and wears) are always instant time capsules for the year’s pop cultural touchstones, memes, and monsters. I thought it would be fun to take a tour through the shop’s home page over the years to see what we might learn from the ghosts and garments of Halloween Past!

In keeping with the tradition of me posting embarrassing photos of myself in these posts, here’s a photo of me from Halloween 2011, when I was a DiGiorno Pepperoni Pizza:

Jim McGrath, DiGiorno Pizza (Halloween 2011)
Jim McGrath, DiGiorno Pizza (Halloween 2011)

Halloween costumes and photographs of Halloween revelers and partygoers are fascinating (and often troubling) records of particular people, time, and places. Given the ubiquity of social media, there are thousands if not millions of photographs of Halloween costumes from the last  decade or so. But I wonder how many of these images will find their way into archives, special collections, and digital repositories? How many will be accessible to future historians and scholars? It’s interesting to see what costumes are already making their way into these spaces. For example, a search for “Halloween” over at the Digital Public Library of America results in a number of images from a 2014  Halloween party held at the Maryland Governor’s Mansion. A filtered search on the topic of “Halloween costumes” at the NYPL Digital Collections leads to this awesome collection of Larry Racioppo’s black-and-white photographs of 1970s NYC kids in costumes. In fact, you can see more of Racioppo’s Halloween photos on display in a “Brooklyn Photographs” exhibit currently up at BRIC!

 

The Garment District's Halloween-themed home page, October 2002.
The Garment District’s Halloween-themed home page, October 2002.

The earliest Halloween home page I was able to find via The Wayback Machine was interesting because it deviates from what later become the aesthetics of Garment District Halloween advertising. There are no local models here, nor are there costumes featuring characters from popular culture.

The Garment District's Halloween page (October 2017).
The Garment District’s Halloween page (October 2017).

The cat mascot of The Garment District is visible on this page as well, but various models (many of whom are employees!) are front-and-center advertising this year’s offerings. Viewing these images while considering their archival dimensions and what they might tell us about the people in them and their habits of cultural consumption can be interesting and fun. Specifically, Halloween can be a reminder that history doesn’t follow neat and tidy trajectories and that patterns of reading can quickly be frustrated and broken down. It’s tempting to read the proximity of Jem (from Jem and The Holograms) and Beetlejuice (from, uh, Beetlejuice) as a sign of millennial fascination with all things 1980s, or to cite this pair as evidence of a major trend, but it’s more interesting to see them as part of a larger mosaic with all the other time periods and performances on display here: the Storm Trooper from Star Wars, Waldo from Where’s Waldo?, the dinosaur, the reindeer, the rest of the gang.

The Garment District’s blog (parts of which have also been saved by The Wayback Machine) is a good resource for photos of customers and staff members prepping for the store’s annual ads (or photos of people restocking stuff in Klaus Nomi attire). It might be interesting to compare the costume selection, appearance, and uses of local models by The Garment District over the years to the kinds of modeling seen on sites like Amazon and other national / international costume outlets.

The Garment District's home page, October 2005.
The Garment District’s Halloween-themed home page, October 2005.

In what remains of the 2005 site we see models showing off costume materials but there are no explicit references or images from specific media or news stories.

The Garment District's Halloween-themed home page, October 2007.
The Garment District’s Halloween-themed home page, October 2007.
The Garment District's Halloween-themed home page, October 2009.
The Garment District’s Halloween-themed home page, October 2009.
The Garment District's Halloween-themed home page, October 2010.
The Garment District’s Halloween-themed home page, October 2010.

Of course, Halloween activities are also cultural events where generalizations and stereotypes are literally walking among us, and it’s always fascinating (and occasionally infuriating) to see what identities and attires are acceptable to who and how those performances are encoded and encouraged.  There’s an interesting disconnect from the imagery of these “pimp” accessories and the descriptive language used to advertise their features.

"Pimp" and "Big Daddy" Halloween apparel on sale at The Garment District (October 2005).

Boston Costume, the main supplier of Garment District Halloween costumes, occasionally updated their corner of the web with interesting content, like this mega-Photoshopped home page from 2006.

Boston Costume home page, October 2006.
Boston Costume home page, October 2006.

 

I love this image, but I also love what remains visible of the earlier Boston Costume site, like this list of “Modern Trends” from 2003 (featuring a “Mr. Albert” that is most likely this guy):

"Modern Trends" identified by Boston Costume, 2003.
“Modern Trends” identified by Boston Costume, 2003.

There’s also this helpful list of costume ideas for those of you who might want to “Strut Your Stuff.” I probably wouldn’t have opened with “Sexy Lobster” but I am not very brave. These lists get less funny when you get into the “Ethnic Groups.”

Strut Your Stuff
Strut Your Stuff

And there are delightful off-brand costumes inspired by intellectual property owned by other companies, like this outfit that is totally not meant to suggest the appearance of the Marvel Comics character The Punisher.

"The Punisher" (please don't sue us)
“The Punisher” (please don’t sue us)

In any case, I think it’s nice to know that the images, descriptions, and design / organizational choices created by stores like The Garment District are out here for serious and recreational Halloween scholars alike!

Haunted Home Pages will run through October 2017! Questions, comments? Get in touch with Jim on Twitter @JimMc_Grath! You can also email me: james_mcgrath[at]brown[dot]edu!

 

]]>
http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/haunted-home-pages-2-the-garment-district/feed/ 0 454
Haunted Home Pages (#1): Stephen King http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/haunted-home-pages-1-stephen-king/ http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/haunted-home-pages-1-stephen-king/#respond Mon, 02 Oct 2017 18:17:10 +0000 http://jimmcgrath.us/?p=434 Continue reading "Haunted Home Pages (#1): Stephen King"

]]>
The Official Stephen King Web Presence (2000)
The Official Stephen King Web Presence (March 2000)

Welcome to Haunted Home Pages, a semi-regular series of blog posts in which Jim McGrath spends October 2017 communicating with the internet’s afterlife via The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine . For all the posts in this series, click here.

I wanted to kick off Haunted Home Pages with a look back at The Master of Horror, Stephen King. I went through a huge King phase back in junior high and high school, and I will provide an embarrassing image of myself from this period to prove just how into King I was back then!

Jim McGrath, Stephen King fan (Christmas 1996)

The Wayback Machine has entries for stephenking.com stretching back to November of 1998, but this March 2000 cached page is the first one I found to provide a clear vision of the author’s “web presence.” We’re greeted with a static home page that visualizes the site’s architecture as a large circle with a smaller one devoted to “Links” orbiting it (half of the larger home planet of All Things King is dedicated to a timeline, while the other half covers a range of topics about the author).

The section dedicated to “rumors” is disappointing to gossip hounds (like me) since it’s primarily about fan correspondence and autograph policies, though there is a question about an alleged haunted house run by King on Halloween (“this is not true and never has happened.”). “the man” is a biography of King (co-authored by Tabitha King, his wife) spread across a number of individual pages: each page has about a paragraph of text on it and includes a link to a printer-friendly version. There’s also a brief note about a 1999 appearance by King on Dateline that apparently led to fan concerns that the author was “unable to write”: this note isn’t clearly dated on the home page, which seems to aspire to the “endless present” of static home pages then and now.  King’s site in this incarnation was “designed, maintained, and hosted” by i-forge Design Factory, a company whose own home page from this period is sadly hidden from the Wayback Machine by robots.txt.

THE PLANT, an unfinished serial narrative King began selling on his personal web site in 2000.
THE PLANT, an unfinished serial narrative King began selling on his personal web site in 2000.

The next major transformation of King’s personal web site comes in 2000, when the author decided to add a “downloads” section in order to sell The Plant, “an epistolary novel set in the 1980s (before email, in other words, and when even the fax was a fringe technology).” As the  project’s Wikipedia article notes, King would never complete the novel, but it was a fascinating experiment in self-publishing via electronic means, especially given the author’s stature and his commitment to transparency. You can read what was completed on The Plant, as well as commentary from King during and after this publishing experiment, on the current “live” version of the author’s site, free of charge.

Stephen King’s personal home page during the distribution of “The Plant,” late 2000.

King’s most famous experiment with serial publication is likely The Green Mile,  a “serial thriller” published in six print installments in 1996 (my dad, also a King fan, was cool enough to buy each part as it came out and loan them to me). Then again, maybe fans of the film aren’t aware of this publication history? In any case, The Plant comes on the heels of King’s success with Riding The Bullet, a 2000 novella that Wikipedia calls “the world’s first mass-market e-book.” It’s remarkable that King gets The Plant up and running so quickly in the wake of Riding The Bullet’s popularity: Bullet was available for purchase in March 2000, while the first installment of The Plant went on sale in July of the same year!

Screenshot of the "Agreement" page for The Plant.
Screenshot of the “Agreement” page for The Plant.

Readers knew up-front that King was waiting to gauge their interest in consumption before committing to more than the first two installments of The Plant. The whole initiative was an interesting experiment in self-publishing and self-distribution, made possible thanks to the author’s popularity and ability to self-finance, but also in larger part due to recent developments in content creation, e-readers, and e-commerce. Readers had the option to pay via an early version of Amazon Payments (though they could also pay later via check or money order if they noted as much on the Payments page) to receive a copy of each installment of The Plant in PDF (the “nicely formatted version,” which the project’s F.A.Q. page recommended be read via Acrobat Reader), PRC, PDB, OEB, or “text and HTML” formats.

The Plant: Frequently Asked Questions
The Plant: Frequently Asked Questions

In his initial framing of The Plant back in 2000, King revels in the potential to become “Big Publishing’s worst nightmare”:

“Not only are we going glueless, look Ma, no e-Book! No tireless encryption! Want to print it and show it to a friend? Go ahead!”

This language is missing from the project description currently circulating on King’s web site, though he does recirculate an interesting letter included with digital copies of the first installment of The Plant, in which he explained the motives behind the text’s lack of encryption:

On one hand I applaud Metallica’s decision to try and put a few spikes into the big, cushy radial tire that is Napster, because creative people should be paid for their work just as plumbers and carpenters and accountants are paid for theirs. On the other hand, I think that the current technology is rapidly turning the whole idea of copyright into a risky proposition…not quite a joke, but something close to it. It took hackers only forty-eight to seventy-two hours to bust the encryption on “Bullet” (as Tabitha [King] says, spending invaluable hours to obtain an item that sold for $2.50 and was at many sites given away).

King’s update on sales of Part 1 of The Plant. (July 2000)
King’s breakdown of the expenses and profit of the work completed and sold on The Plant.

Adhering to a belief in an “honesty is the best policy” among his “Constant Reader[s],” King hoped for “a ratio of nine honest folks for every chiseler” in terms of sales. As installments debuted, the author updated his site with information on project costs and sales, demonstrating a commitment to transparency that was surprising then and remains so now. The Plant “furl[ed] its leaves for the time being” after the publication of the fourth installment in December 2000; while the initial note on the author’s site suggested King might resume the project, new material never surfaced. One wonders if the ratio between profits and expenses was a factor, if the experiment in self-publication (and its attendant challenges) had run its course, or if King got distracted or bored and then moved on to other things. In any case, the material saved by The Wayback Machine documents a fascinating moment in the realities and economics of digital publishing and remediation.

The desire for new and constantly-updated material on web sites is visible in the strain it puts on the layout of King’s home page: as readers come to expect this information on the author’s site in the early years of the twenty-first century, the sidebar highlighting this content begins to disrupt its cleanliness and order.

GIF promoting excerpts of King’s work on the Time magazine site.

GIFs in the sidebar go on to further complicate things. It may be time for a redesign!

There’s also an odd quirk in the site’s favicon from this period: the current site’s is an “SK” with a raven resting on top of it (nice), whereas the earlier site’s is…the BBC logo? I wonder if this is a quirk in The Wayback Machine or a sign of where the web site’s earlier design team borrowed some things.

Also, let us never forget this web banner advertising the personal home page of John “Cougar” Mellencamp that appeared on King’s page (King collaborated with John Cougar on a musical):

Ain’t that America (Online).

Stephen King’s home page in 2003.

Anyway, King’s homepage gets a redesign halfway in May of 2003. Most of this “facelift” isn’t visible on The Wayback Machine due to its reliance on Flash, but a few new features are documented in text by the site’s design and editorial team.

There was an entire section dedicated to The Dark Tower series (which King had resumed writing after a lengthy break) that was dependent on Flash, for instance. There was also an audio file “Welcome Message” available as an mp3 file or in Windows Media Player format!

The photo gallery mentioned above is still accessible, though a “Map of Stephen King’s Maine” is not: I would love to see what that looked like! We also see links to a “Links” page and information on King’s email newsletter documented in the site’s new “miscellany” section.

Image gallery from King’s personal web site. (2003)

As the web moves into the age of social media and the 2.0 of it all, we see King’s personal site make explicit reference to these spaces. Apparently “MySpace Imposters” were a problem in April 2006:

Scattered between press releases and updates on King’s publications and media appearances are occasional “Special Notes” from the author on the News page (and archive) .

King also frequently documents his pop cultural consumption habits (perhaps unsurprising to some readers familiar with his Entertainment Weekly column) in semi-occasional bits of microblogging.

He did not like Crank. No word on whether he liked or disliked Crank 2: High Voltage.

The current iteration of King’s website is a lot more polished and image-heavy, which is perhaps unsurprising. The GIF above was made this past weekend (nice timing on the Adobe update, Adobe! I just noticed that: whoops), and the recent film adaptation of It over on Twitter (which I still need to see) is one of several items featured there. To be honest, I prefer the weirder, infrequently-updated, highly personalized King home page, but I’m sure there are many reasons why King has moved on to other uses of his time (you can find his current microbloggery , naturally). I’m excited to finally check out The Plant

Haunted Home Pages will run through October 2017! Questions, comments? Get in touch with Jim on Twitter @JimMc_Grath! You can also email me: james_mcgrath[at]brown[dot]edu!

 

]]>
http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/haunted-home-pages-1-stephen-king/feed/ 0 434
DH2017 Poster Roundup: Mapping Violence and Day of Public Humanities http://jimmcgrath.us/uncategorized/dh2017-poster-roundup-mapping-violence-and-day-of-public-humanities/ http://jimmcgrath.us/uncategorized/dh2017-poster-roundup-mapping-violence-and-day-of-public-humanities/#respond Wed, 09 Aug 2017 20:21:22 +0000 http://jimmcgrath.us/?p=389 Continue reading "DH2017 Poster Roundup: Mapping Violence and Day of Public Humanities"

]]>
2017 marks my third trip to the biggest DH conference in the game, and for this go-round I wanted to bring the work of some of my awesome collaborators (and some of the collaborators themselves!) at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage to the event.

The work documented in these posters is highly collaborative and it involves undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, and faculty members in American Studies and Public Humanities. It’s been interesting to think through the relationships between these two fields and DH during my time at Brown; the ASA’s Digital Humanities Caucus has been super helpful in the former, and I wonder if there’s more people interesting in talking about the latter. I was excited to see “public DH” in Amanda Visconti’s paper title, for instance. And while “public humanities” isn’t explicitly named in the titles of any other posters and discussions, there’s clearly a lot of interest in questions of “access” based on the number of presentations here utilizing that keyword. “Access” is this year’s conference theme, but public humanities folks might find the range of uses interesting nonetheless. Additionally, “public humanities” is showing up in several tweets about presentations (like here and here, in tweets referring to a talk by my pal and partner in digital public humanities, Lauren Tilton!), suggesting that attendees invested in the term are recognizing its presence in methodologies and project emphases.

OK, on with the posters!

“Public Humanities: In Search of A Field”

Day of Public Humanities

“Public Humanities: In Search of A Field” documents the Day of Public Humanities (#DayofPH) initiative I co-lead with my friends and colleagues Robyn Schroeder and Inge Zwart.  I’m curious about when public humanities is mentioned and missing from DH conversations, so I’m grateful that the conference gave us the opportunity to make some of this work more explicitly visible in this institutional and academic context. The questions we outline here are especially important to DH initiatives that aspire to be public-facing, accessible, or otherwise in collaboration with or in the service of particular publics.

When could digital humanities projects do more to engage with particular publics and their various needs and interests?

What are the benefits as well as the limitations of certain forms of digital advocacy for the humanities in 2017 (and beyond)?

What are alternative models for digital and public humanities beyond grant-funded and university-driven projects, and what resources (and rhetoric) do they require?

If you’re new to public humanities and curious about its institutional history, check out Robyn’s great overview on our project site. And to see the postcards reprinted on the bottom of the poster (and more postcards), go here.

Mapping Violence: Visualizing State-Sanctioned Racial Violence on the Mexico-Texas Border (1900-1930)

Mapping Violence: Visualizing State-Sanctioned Racial Violence on the Mexico-Texas Border (1900-1930)” is an opportunity for the DH community to learn more about this amazing digital public humanities initiative at Brown. Led by Monica MartinezMapping Violence is part of the larger Refusing to Forget initiative, an amazing project whose collaborators work to acknowledge this history of racial violence in an impressive and important variety of contexts: in classrooms, in landmarks, and in digital spaces (among others). Presenting at DH was also a great opportunity to highlight the undergraduate collaborators who have supported digital work on this project under the direction of Prof. Martinez: I’m truly lucky to have Cole Hansen, one of said collaborators, with me at this poster session. I’ve been fortunate enough to provide consultation and support to this project, but my main objective in serving as a co-author on this poster was to see this work reach a DH audience (and this poster is just the beginning of that awareness campaign!).

I’m happy to talk more about these posters and projects: please be in touch via email (james_mcgrath@brown.edu) or on Twitter (@JimMc_Grath)!

]]>
http://jimmcgrath.us/uncategorized/dh2017-poster-roundup-mapping-violence-and-day-of-public-humanities/feed/ 0 389
Days of Future Past: Augmented Reality and Temporality in Digital Public Humanities http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/days-of-future-past-augmented-reality-and-temporality-in-digital-public-humanities/ http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/days-of-future-past-augmented-reality-and-temporality-in-digital-public-humanities/#respond Wed, 19 Jul 2017 18:36:33 +0000 http://jimmcgrath.us/?p=351 Continue reading "Days of Future Past: Augmented Reality and Temporality in Digital Public Humanities"

]]>
Uncanny X-Men #141 (1981 [1980])
In July 2017, I presented a version of this talk on a panel on “Temporality” at the Keystone Digital Humanities Conference (#keydh on Twitter) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The project  I discuss here, a digital tour of the Nightingale-Brown House, will debut in September 2017. I’ll update this post with a direct link when we go live!

I wanted to start by outlining three of the major questions I hope to raise in this discussion of a digital house tour I’ve been working on at Brown University’s Public Humanities program. This presentation will focus on the details of our particular project, but I hope this overview is useful to people who are specifically interested in the metaphor of the tour in DH as well as anyone who might have thoughts on temporality as it relates to DH work and the interfaces we rely on (or develop) in various initiatives.

Excerpts from Uncanny X-Men #141-142 (1981 [1980])
This talk takes its title from “Days of Future Past,” a 1980 storyline from Marvel Comics’ Uncanny X-Men serial in which a member of the superhero team travels back in time to stop the bleak future she calls home from existing in the first place. “Welcome to the 21st century,” reads a caption box on the opening splash page of #141. Chris Claremont, John Byrne, and their collaborators present readers with a dystopian vision of 2013 and a ragtag team of surviving heroes so desperate that they’re “toying with the basic fabric of reality” in an attempt to travel back in time to literally rewrite history.

I’ve found the phrase “Days of Future Past” useful when considering the place of temporality in digital humanities projects. Its success, for me at least, is in the way this particularly poetic sequence of words disrupts my sense that the past, present, and future are distinct and discrete things. It demonstrates the exploratory potential and the inherent limitations of speculative thinking, reminding us that our visions of the future are inevitably shaped by the historical and cultural conditions in which they are envisioned, and that they are often reliant upon particular versions of the past. For example, the X-Men’s time travel mission is to stop the assassination of an anti-mutant United States senator and the Orwellian government his successor creates in the name of this martyr. Here we see the comic book’s creators looking back at the political murders of the 1960s while looking forward to the symbolic weight of 1984 and its implications. Later X-Men narratives will introduce time traveling narratives that reflect their times and places; an early 1990s story hinges on incomplete digital records that obscure key historic details rather than illuminate and preserve the past. A post-9/11 crossover hinges on the protection of a young messianic figure that will one day guide our heroes out of their bleak and violent present.

Screenshot from “Digital Tours of The Nightingale-Brown House” (Brown University)

I revisited “Days of Future Past” while working on a time travel project of my own at Brown. Over the summer of 2016, a team of undergraduates joined faculty members, a house curator, and myself to create digital tours of the Nightingale-Brown House, a former residence of the Brown family that now functions as the institutional home of our Public Humanities program. The tour focuses on five spaces in the House, the material histories of the objects that still reside there, and stories of the Brown family that relate to these objects.  

Our circumstances were far less dire than those of the X-Men: we were looking for a way to provide an augmented experience for individuals interested in self-guided tours of the house (and we have iPads available for visitors: though the house is an active institutional space full of students, staff, and faculty, we get foot traffic from tourists, especially during the summer). Ideally, we wanted to create exhibits that could also be accessed by people who were unable to make the trip to Providence. And as a Public Humanities program, we were interested in developing a digital tour in-house so we could learn more about the relationship between non-digital and digital tours and the potential uses of augmented reality. After researching the available options within the range of our resources (Sarah Dylla, one of our former grad students, wrote a white paper reviewing the uses of QR codes and location-based technologies), the project team decided to create exhibits with Neatline, Omeka’s exhibit-building plugin. Sarah and others considered augmented reality, virtual reality, and location-based technology like sensors. But these options seemed expensive, clunky, or in some cases, redundant. For example, QR codes seem outdated at a moment when the users with mobile devices they interpellate can just as easily Google the desired information. Most of our experiences with house tours, whether they take advantage of digital tools or not, are always already augmented reality experiences. A digital tour that was web-hosted could be accessed by a wider range of users beyond the house, and there were also fewer barriers to digital entry for on-site visitors.

On the tour, users are provided with overviews of each space in relation to the history of the Brown family as well as a series of annotations highlighting particular objects.

The work of building a digital house tour may seem to some less like an adventure in time travel and more like a fairly conventional exercise. In many ways this project is a textbook example of DH when it’s defined as the act of using digital methods to pursue traditional humanities lines of inquiry.  And your mind can quickly move to strange places when you’re tasked with the job of mapping time and space.

unstuck in time

Like Bethany Nowviskie, I started to feel a bit “unstuck in time” the longer I spent thinking about what she calls “the problem of temporal orientation in our digital cultural heritage interfaces.” Reflecting on the ideas of temporality shaping her own digital scholarship in a 2016 talk she later published on her personal website, Nowviskie begins by channeling Kurt Vonnegut and eventually finds, most visibly in Afrofuturism, generative means of imagining alternate futures that counter ideas of order and control and attempts to “master” time.

But Nowviskie also notes that scholars have less and less time to devote to “speculative thinking” in times of economic scarcity, and I would argue that digital humanities practitioners may have even less time than some of their peers. Many established and emerging visions of DH seem to present digital initiatives as practical, utilitarian, public-facing alternatives to more cloistered or specialized modes of scholarship. Our DH projects, we explain in our grant applications, tenure portfolios, and Twitter bios, can make history available, accessible, simultaneously comprehensive and comprehensible.

nowviskie quote

Our abilities to achieve these goals may be exaggerated at times, but as far as aspirational goals go, they’re not bad. That being said, I believe that these ambitions can take up a lot of our resources (time, labor, collaborative energies, money, among others), and that the speculative dimensions of these projects are often unexplored as a result. As many of you likely know, the realities of digital projects can sometimes feel like endless speculation, as we describe future projects that require materials and money and time we don’t presently possess, as we navigate traps laid for us by well-intentioned past selves whose digital methodologies we may no longer agree with.

The Nightingale-Brown House is an intimidating place, especially if you didn’t grow up rich. I was afraid to touch anything for the first few months. On Instagram I joked that my office, with its illuminated stained glass portrait of a Brown family member, was definitely haunted. While the Public Humanities program has occupied this space for almost a decade, the past inhabitants of the Nightingale-Brown House cast an imposing shadow over the present.

The images we use in our digital house tour remediate the staging of these rooms for on-site visitors. Like many historical houses, its various objects are arranged in a manner that suggests an authentic image of the past in which no one who lived in the space actually sat on or touched anything. Some of us may have had older relatives with similar rooms fixed in invisible amber. I’ve worked on a few digital house tour projects, and I remember being surprised to learn that every material object in a given room wasn’t owned by the same person or from the same period of a historical house’s long history. This information is not immediately visible to most of us, and the surprisingly layered and varied material histories of these spaces are frequently only available to us via the labor of docents, volunteers, and tour guides.

Our team of undergraduates learned a lot about the history of the Nightingale-Brown House, but the project was also a more general introduction to the technologies of cultural heritage: tours, but also house curators, photo albums, archives, genealogies, and, of course, digital exhibits. Students worked with archival materials from Brown’s Hay Library, composed and performed their own oral narratives for physical tours of the house, learned about metadata, and created layouts and content for Neatline. When we hired a photographer to take high-resolution images of each space in the house, they worked with him to select frames and angles: what may have seemed at first like a relatively straightforward task further revealed the challenges and constraints of using particular tools to tell stories in various forms of media. In other words, this project made the relationship between cultural memory, technology, and temporality visible in a variety of ways, as students examined the personal and professional dimensions of documenting the past and preserving it in the present for imagined future uses.

Neatline describes itself as a tool that “opens new possibilities for hand-crafted, interactive spatial and temporal interpretation.” As its “Demos” page reveals, projects have used Neatline to annotate fictional and historical travels across time and space, to georectify older maps, and to create campus maps for visitors. On Our Marathon, we used Neatline to “map” the variety of notes written on a temporary memorial left at Copley Square. Since then I’ve been experimenting with Neatline as a tool that maps interior spaces for a few years, first as a consultant on digital house tours at Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, and now on this project at Brown. With high-resolution images of these spaces and a server to host Omeka and Neatline on, it’s relatively easily and inexpensive (especially when compared to grant-funded, multi-year initiatives) to create and finish digital exhibits like our Nightingale-Brown House tour.

That being said, Neatline and Omeka present several challenges as well, and I don’t know if I’d use these resources again in the same way. If having students design and publish their own digital exhibits is a learning goal, then the lack of version control in Neatline (and Omeka more generally) can be tricky. Additionally, since Neatline was intended more for maps than interior images, it can take a while to get the hang of drawing, positioning, and styling polygons and annotations. And while we use an “out-of-the-box” Omeka theme (The Daily, which was created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media), I would likely invest time and energy in designing a theme that anticipates some of the particular needs of house tours.

Collage by Dylan Cole-Kink
Collage by Dylan Cole-Kink

I wanted to wrap up by considering some of the alternate realities of this project. I hope I’ve made it clear by now that I found the experience to be particularly valuable to undergraduates, and that I believe we developed a functional and engaging exhibit that anticipates some of the questions on-site and virtual visitors might have about the space. But I’m also interested in more speculative and exploratory work in relation specifically to digital house tours and more generally in digital humanities. For example, several collages from Brown family photos were created by Dylan Cole-Kink, a recent undergrad graduate working with us in 2017. Our faculty lead asked Dylan to use Photoshop to create an image that blurred past and present. She didn’t think these mock-ups fit with our project’s aesthetic, and I agree. But I love these images because of how rough they are, because they don’t neatly connect past to present, and so I began thinking about where and how work like this might find a home. For example, in a Digital Storytelling course I ran last spring at Brown, I became interested in ideas of distortion in DH and invited students to read and create digital projects via this lens. I can see the value of distortion in Dylan’s wedding collage (above), as it juxtaposes a staged performance from the Nightingale-Brown House’s past (a wedding photo) with an image from its present (a lecture held in the house’s former library), in a manner that also more generally invites us to think of the house as a kind of stage on which inhabitants and objects take up particular roles.

Collage by Dylan Cole-Kink

Despite the frequently-stated potential of web-based projects to expand and reimagine more traditional forms of knowledge production, we found ourselves using Neatline to essentially create fairly conventional exhibit labels for items in these digitized rooms. Students may have invited users to start their digital tours with an item of their choosing, but these fragmented snippets can easily be reassembled to reveal the narrative conventions of the oral tours they gave as physical guides to the house. The finished product is a relatively clean interface, and it may leave more skeptical visitors curious about what that interface conceals as well as reveals. One of the goals of this project was to explore and model conventions, and I think this work was generative in that regard. Many of our students may find themselves working in professional contexts where these conventions are valued, but I also want to take advantage of our own institutional space’s capacity for experimental and exploratory work. And I think there’s room in our field to interrogate the limits of best practices, and to provide interested students with spaces to ask these questions and model different kinds of answers.

As in archives, there’s a constituency of practitioners skeptical of the innovative potential of digital tools and methodologies. But I would push back on outright dismissal of projects that remediate technological conventions along fairly traditional lines, for three reasons. The first is the aforementioned learning goals previously outlined. Secondly, the conventions we embrace in our digital tour align with the contexts and expectations of many of our on-site visitors, who are familiar with exhibit labels and expect snippets of history rather than deep-dives during the time they explore the house. And finally (and more importantly), this project might best be read as exploratory, inexpensive work that operates within particular constraints but has also (for me at least) generated new ideas for how to think about tours and exhibits in digital and non-digital contexts, specifically in relation to their temporal dimensions.

But in order to read projects in this way, we have to situate them as “a” critical lens rather than “the” comprehensive take. We have to support research and projects that imagine alternate pasts as well as futures. We might develop smaller-scale initiatives aimed at specific audiences instead of general publics, work situated as learning environments instead of finished products, intended for short-term consumption and reflection instead of permanence, imagined as exploratory and speculative instead of didactic and factual. We should create and support opportunities in digital humanities and public humanities to both pay the bills and play Bill and Ted.

Collage by Jim McGrath

  Jim McGrath is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Public Humanities at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage (Brown University). He received his doctorate in English from Northeastern University, where he worked on Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive and several other digital humanities projects and initiatives. Jim is on Twitter (@JimMc_Grath) and he’s always happy to talk about digital humanities and public humanities. If you’re interested in house tours, mapping interior spaces, or more experimental and exploratory DH initiatives in the classroom, get in touch! Email: james_mcgrath@brown.edu

 

]]>
http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/days-of-future-past-augmented-reality-and-temporality-in-digital-public-humanities/feed/ 0 351
New Project: Day of Public Humanities (#DayofPH) http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/new-project-day-of-public-humanities-dayofph/ http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/new-project-day-of-public-humanities-dayofph/#respond Wed, 12 Apr 2017 18:43:08 +0000 http://jimmcgrath.us/?p=340 Continue reading "New Project: Day of Public Humanities (#DayofPH)"

]]>

I’m excited to announce my involvement in Day of Public Humanities (#DayofPH), a public humanities initiative about public humanities. So meta! When I started working at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, I inevitably got questions from friends in and beyond academic contexts about what this “public humanities” thing is and what kind of work I do. Many of us here get these questions, so myself, Robyn Schroeder (Postdoctoral Fellow and Director of Graduate Studies in Public Humanities), and Inge Zwart (graduate student in Public Humanities) decided to spend the past year researching the term, its uses, its limits, its past, present, and future. While doing this work, we became particularly interested in how and why public humanities practitioners came to embrace the term “public humanities” and what forms of labor they do on a daily basis. Like the Day of Digital Humanities (#DayofDH) initiative, #DayofPH asks practitioners to make their labor visible, reflect on the field and where it’s going, and show people what cool things they’re up to. We hope you can join us on May 9th, 2017!

You can learn more about #DayofPH on our web site. Specifically, you can find suggestions for how to participate on May 9th, blog posts highlighting some of the day-to-day work we do here at the JNBC, and recommendations for further action before and after May 9th. We also talk about the project on the JNBC blog. We’re excited to see what other people are working on, what “public humanities” means to them, and how we might all learn to become better Public Humans.

I’m happy to answer any questions you might have about this project on Twitter (@JimMc_Grath) or via email (james_mcgrath[at]brown). And if you’re attending NCPH next week, I’ll be there too, so please get in touch if you’d like more info!

 

]]>
http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/new-project-day-of-public-humanities-dayofph/feed/ 0 340
New Project: New York City and The Marvel Universe http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/new-project-new-york-city-and-the-marvel-universe/ http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/new-project-new-york-city-and-the-marvel-universe/#respond Wed, 22 Mar 2017 21:21:31 +0000 http://jimmcgrath.us/?p=334 Continue reading "New Project: New York City and The Marvel Universe"

]]>

Last year at HILT, I pitched a project (as part of the “Community Keynote” series of lightning talks) examining images of New York City in the Marvel Universe, and I got a lot of good feedback from the people in attendance. I’ve been juggling a million things between then and now, but today I finally found time to create (and start to populate) New York City and The Marvel Universe, a Tumblr “work-in-progress” research blog tied to this research. I hope you’ll check it out and let me know what you think!

The blog will mostly be excepts from particular comics and research materials and some thinking out loud about various topics. I’ve decided to start with Daredevil (The Man Without Fear!) because he’s explicitly connected to a particular part of NYC (Hell’s Kitchen) and many creative teams have set their stories in interesting (and weird) versions of New York City over the years. I’m also particularly drawn to Daredevil because of the Netflix TV show and its ever-expanding Hell’s Kitchen, so I imagine my work will also look at those images of the city eventually. I’m looking at the early days of the character: the above image is from 1964’s Daredevil #2, a particularly nutty issue that I talk a bit about over at the blog. But I’m also reading across time periods to bring images and creative teams into conversation with one another (here’s an example of that).

Beyond Daredevil, I’ll be looking at the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The Punisher, Ghost Rider, The Avengers, and some other NYC-centric books (like Power Man and Iron Fist, Hawkeye, and Damage Control, among others).

I’ve been a comics nerd for a long time, and as someone who was born and raised in Brooklyn I’ve always been fascinated by the uses of the city in these stories. For various reasons I haven’t done much work with comics in academic contexts, but I’m excited to finally have a project that dovetails with my professional life a bit. While I wouldn’t say this work will be explicitly driven by digital humanities methodologies and approaches, I’m currently building some (rough) datasets and I’m thinking about how I might visualize and otherwise make use of this material on this site and in other forms of traditional and not-so-traditional scholarship. I’m also working with various editions (print and digital) of comics and thinking a bit about the material conditions of these sites of publication, circulation, and reception. This work is also very much informed by my various experiences with online comics fandom, a long history of engagement that began on Prodigy bulletin boards, continued into the blogging boom of the early aughts (I’ve buried my old Blogger site, sorry guys), and lives on via my “unprofessional” Twitter account and in @CK1Blogs, long may he blog.

Stay tuned, True Believers!

]]>
http://jimmcgrath.us/blog/new-project-new-york-city-and-the-marvel-universe/feed/ 0 334
New Post at the JNBC Blog (the Colored Conventions Project and the Frederick Douglass Transcribe-a-Thon) http://jimmcgrath.us/teaching/new-post-at-the-jnbc-blog-the-colored-conventions-project-and-the-frederick-douglass-transcribe-a-thon/ http://jimmcgrath.us/teaching/new-post-at-the-jnbc-blog-the-colored-conventions-project-and-the-frederick-douglass-transcribe-a-thon/#respond Thu, 23 Feb 2017 15:11:16 +0000 http://jimmcgrath.us/?p=330 Continue reading "New Post at the JNBC Blog (the Colored Conventions Project and the Frederick Douglass Transcribe-a-Thon)"

]]>
Last week, the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage joined a number of other universities in a Frederick Douglass birthday party transcribe-a-thon to support the (awesome) Colored Conventions Project. I wrote about how our day went over at the JNBC blog:

Transcription may seem like a mundane or even dated way to contribute to a digital project in the twenty-first century: can’t scholars and archivists use optical character recognition (OCR) software to extract text from scanned documents? As someone who has worked on a number of digitization projects, I can tell you that the technology we imagine to be freely available doesn’t always match the realities of doing digital humanities scholarship, and the available resources can vary from project to project. While we are right to be suspicious of third-party platforms, apps, and social networks that ask for our personal data in exchange for use of their services, we are often not required to think as much about the labor that goes into the creation and support of our shiny digital interfaces. Do you know how Google Docs handle collaborative writing across a range of devices and issues related to version control when they arise as you’re drafting something? Have you ever wondered what makes Clippy so useful (or annoying)? Exposure to the nuts and bolts of a digital project like CCP can often help us gain new perspectives on the materiality of the web, the technical dimensions of systems and actions we take for granted, and the challenges of doing public-facing digital work that circulates alongside well-funded and well-oiled machines made by Google and other heavyweights on the web at-large

It was fun and easy to collaborate with the CCP: I was particularly impressed by how much work they put into ensuring that their remote collaborators had everything they needed to make their events run smoothly. They’re a fantastic model for how to do public-facing digital humanities work within and across institutions, and I hope to work more with them in the future! It was also great to get some of our students, faculty, and community affiliates working on and thinking about the labor involved in digitization projects.

]]>
http://jimmcgrath.us/teaching/new-post-at-the-jnbc-blog-the-colored-conventions-project-and-the-frederick-douglass-transcribe-a-thon/feed/ 0 330
http://jimmcgrath.us/feed/
jimmcgrath.us
crawl=CC-MAIN-2018-09
210871
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:2EMCDKLCB4AJMWAG7GIFKW4VTODOIJ4U
<urn:uuid:f6923ea4-26d3-4bee-9e8b-ea842d7bfaba>
2018-02-21T05:10:11Z
67.205.186.189
application/rss+xml
sha1:KK4W2NZH3A5TLWRW2Z5MQ4UG6A3ZBJS3
<urn:uuid:ea4c56ab-37a6-4741-b3ad-50b3ddcbcd48>
http://jimmcgrath.us/feed/
length
response
<urn:uuid:51def382-4dda-4a7a-90f7-f005f741e40e>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-47-182-162.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2018-09
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for February 2018
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf