The sum of my experience with hypertext prior to this class starts and ends with Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. The format of this work involves numerous nodes of text that you can click through at your own pace. Some of these nodes tend to follow a linear narrative, while others seem to bear little connection to the following and preceding nodes. It is nearly impossible (unless you have a lot of time on your hands) to read through each and every node on your first run-through. Nodes of text may repeat themselves, but this is almost never an indication that you are completely finished reading. It merely means that you must find a new starting point. All of the nodes were ultimately connected, telling fragments of the Patchwork Girl’s story. All led to the same “conclusion” (if you could call it that), though the means of getting there varies greatly for each new reader.

BKLYN Trash King was quite different from Jackson’s Patchwork Girl. The story played out like a choose-your-own-adventure game, though the choices were limited, and you were ultimately driven to virtually the same conclusion. At the start of this story, you are placed into the position of an individual engaged in attempting to fund a kickstarter project, which varies each time from ::: SmartJelly: A Wifi-Enabled LED Inside A Mason Jar ::: to ::: SteamCraft: The World’s First Steampunk M.M.O.R.P.G. ::: to ::: A DIY Tissue Box Ukulele Kit :::. However, the Wi-Fi cuts out, presumably because raccoons have been chewing through wires. Thus begins the adventure of finding the raccoon king in order to restore internet to your residence so you can continue to monitor your kickstarter project. While, as I said, there is a choose-your-own-adventure vibe, many of your choices are unimportant such as (“Look out the window” versus “Read the newspaper”). The only choice that really seems to matter is whether or not you will choose to strip down, tie raw meat to your body, and let raccoons eat the meat. You also have to choose whether or not to literally kiss the butts of said raccoons in order to get the BKLYN Trash King raccoon (who has an astonishing amount of followers on Twitter) to retweet your kickstarter project that seems doomed to fail. On my first play-through, I said “Hell no” to the repulsive demands of the raccoons, after which my character returned home to find the apartment wrecked. Following this, you quickly discover that the kickstarter project failed. I was confused, left wondering what was the point of it all. Wanting to see all of the options played out, I went through the story again and chose to do all of the repulsive tasks requested by the raccoons, which even having my character in the game do them was unsettling. Once I did this, I was asked whether or not I wanted to hang out with the raccoons (which led to my character drinking a lot of PBR and forgetting all about the kickstarter) or go home (which brought me to the same screens I received when I decided not to do any of the repulsive tasks set before me by the raccoons). In terms of the narrative, I was definitely confused as to the purpose of the story. As I said, the choices placed before me were relatively limited, and I found that I wasn’t rewarded for choosing one way or another. I suppose the internet is turned back on–though this seems to be the case in two of the three scenarios (refusing the tasks and performing the tasks but going home) since your character watches the project fail and the third indicates that nothing matters except PBR. The linearity imposed by the limited choices and conclusions offered by the author made me think that there must be a lesson to be learned from this story, but I was definitely unsure as to what the overarching point behind the story was.

One of the things that I found particularly interesting about this piece of interactive fiction and that helped me to interpret this work was the inclusion of external links (extra points for the inclusion of an external link to a video of an adorable slow loris eating a rice ball). At one point, you are led to a newspaper article about a real raccoon problem in Brooklyn. People seemed to be at their wits end trying to cage these witty creatures and relocate them elsewhere. So, the interactive fiction has a real-life story at its foundation, making the trip to see the raccoon king come across as a fictional solution (however ridiculous) to the problem facing the citizens of Brooklyn. Later, (if you click on the appropriate links) you are led to a TED talk by Seth Godin discussing “tribes” and the need for the average individual to invoke our shared cultural values and take charge in leading others toward change for the betterment of our communities. This shed a bit more light on this strange tale, because, while the methods utilized by your character are odd to say the least, at its heart this interactive tale relates a story about an individual trying to make a change in the community (by turning the internet back on), though as I said, I am unsure how much your actions, in terms of deciding whether or not to perform the tasks set before you by the raccoons, influence the return of the internet. However, your character does at least show some initiative in each scenario by going to see the raccoon king. Perhaps this is why the kickstarter project is doomed to fail in each scenario–because that’s not what really matters. As odd as it may be, perhaps by taking a water taxi to raccoon island, your character really did make a difference.

During my time at UMD, I have been engaged in a constant battle to find a quiet place to study during those periods of time between work and class. I started out in the graduate study room in McKeldin Library, but it was not long before hoards of students began choosing that place to study as well. Now, I’m relatively good at tuning out certain noises. However, when people are talking to one another, I find it incredibly difficult not to eavesdrop. I get drawn in, more intent on listening to what is being said than on reading an article for class. In any case, it was not long before I had to move. Occasionally I could find a quiet spot elsewhere in the library, but more often than not, the constant traffic and conversations of passerby broke my concentration. So, I started studying in the English Graduate Lounge in Tawes. Similar problems occurred, though there was a fair share of quiet times, and I still go there on occasion. But right down the hall, I found a relatively quiet corner (unless TA’s were having conferences). I began going there on occasion in order to get both quiet (for the most part) and privacy (you can hide quite well behind the one wall, leaving only your feet and legs visible to people in the hallway). In any case, I was content.

Eventually, I started to notice writing on the wall.

First, this appeared:

After a quick Google search, I found out that these two lines are lyrics from a song entitled “The Last Lost Continent” by La Dispute. The song can be found here.

Another day, I found this:

These lines are lyrics from a song entitled “Tilde” by the band Touché Amore.

And later, I discovered these:

These lines are also from a La Dispute song entitled “Nine.”

These words, though communicating a familiar sentiment—summer love, did not bring up any definitive results on Google. Perhaps the inscriber decided to try his or her hand at composing lines.

Some of the handwriting looks similar and the fact that two of the lines come from La Dispute and three of the four are song lyrics seems to indicate that it may be the work of the same person, though I never discovered who the other person or persons were who also found that spot a good place to study or take a break. Perhaps it was just a student who would often meet with one of the TA’s in a nearby office, or maybe it was a TA seeking a bit of distance from his/her other office mates. In any case, it was interesting for me to read these little lines inscribed on the wall by a stranger who had perhaps found the same semi-quiet privacy that made the corner such a good place for me to go and study between work and class. By leaving my own kind of writing on the wall through my QR code that links to this blog post, I will make my own mark, continuing the story of that corner of Tawes.

Introduction with Ngram:

To begin my examination of The Castle of Otranto, I thought I would start with the results I found on Ngram. When we were told to use Ngram to map out two terms, I decided to go with “horror” and “terror.” I changed the dates in Ngram to start at 1700 rather than the default 1800 and mapped out the results. Here is what I found:

Since the dawn of Gothic literature, incited by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, occurred in the mid-1700s, I was not surprised to see such results, for along with the inception of Gothic literature in England, Walpole’s work also sparked a discussion of the difference between horror and terror. Ann Radcliffe, a renowned author of Gothic works during the late 1700s, utilized terror in her writings, hinting at supernatural occurrences, but eventually explaining them away as rational events transformed into terrifying ones by superstitious sentiments. Terror, for Radcliffe, is the anticipation of the supernatural. Horror, on the other hand, is the fulfillment of a supernatural occurrence. Radcliffe defines these differences in her essay “On the Supernatural in Poetry,” published in 1826. Traditionally, scholars have aligned terror with female Gothic writers and horror with male Gothic writers, though such a stark dichotomy is obviously not a perfect representation of the real relationships between male and female authors and the use of terror and horror. However, the dawn of Gothic literature and the discussion of horror and terror sparked by the differences between anticipated supernatural occurrences and the actual fulfillment of supernatural events can perhaps explain the sharp increase in the usage of horror and especially terror in the late 1700s. The steady decline leading up to the present and coming together of horror and terror can also be hypothesized to be a result of our more modern usage of these two words which tends to treat them as interchangeable.

WordItOut and Wordle:

Moving on to my text, when I put The Castle of Otranto through both Wordle and WordItOut, many of the results were similar. Names (Manfred, Isabella, Matilda, Theodore…) were marked as appearing in the text the most often, which is not all that surprising considering most of the novel concerns the “bartering” of two women, Isabella and Matilda, by Manfred. “Cried” is also relatively large, which makes sense since Isabella and Matilda are both upset with the matches Manfred tries to impose upon them. Other words that are in comparatively large font are “Princess,” “Lord,” “Prince,” and “Castle.” As the book that sparked the production of Gothic literature in England and contributed to the development of gothic tropes such as the medieval castle, the damsel in distress, and the tyrannical male, it is not surprising to find these terms in large font.

The Up-Goer Five Text Editor:

When I placed the top 100 words into the Up-Goer Five Text Editor, I came up with a lot of terms that just did not fit. Heralding back to a former age filled with knights in shining armor, princesses in distress, and ancient castles, it is not surprising that this is the case. Many of these words are not in common usage, including the personal pronouns thee, thou, and thy which again are used to suggest the composition of this text in medieval times.

CLAWS:

CLAWS was intriguing, though perhaps not as useful as some of the other tools. However, there were some interesting results that mirrored what I found in my Wordle and WordItOut word clouds. There were a lot of proper nouns due to the common occurrence of names within the text. Also, there were many other nouns that serve to invoke the spirit of medieval times and Arthurian adventures: “Prince,” “Princess,” “Knight,” “Highness,” “court,” “escape,” “chamber,” and “convent.”

TAPoR:

Looking at TAPoR was a lot of fun. I definitely liked the aesthetics of the site with all of the different boxes showing me different ways of pulling apart the text and examining the words as they occur throughout the novel. Looking at the occurrences of words in the lower left hand corner of the page, I was interested to see that (after all of the indefinite/definite articles), the words “if” and “would” came up pretty high on the list. Seeing as the plot of this story centers around Lord Manfred’s attempts to convince Isabella to marry him, and later, his attempts to make his daughter marry Lord Frederic, these words seem appropriate (If only you would marry…). Once again names were high on the list. Because this tool offers you an easy way to map where the words fall and find the context in which they occur, I took the time to map out Manfred, Isabella, and Matilda to see where their names appear the most often and what is the context of these moments.

Manfred:

The moment where Manfred occurs most frequently is in a moment when Matilda decides to go and speak to her father after the death of his son, Conrad. This scene involves Matilda trying to build up the courage to speak to her father. When she finally does, he denies her admittance, telling her that he does not want a daughter, he wants his son back. This is very typical for a man to be more concerned with the male heir than his daughter. Also, other places that Manfred’s name appears are surrounded by words like “rage,” “incensed,” “angrily,” and “impatient,” giving one a hint into the tyrannous nature of Lord Manfred.

Isabella:

For Isabella, the time where her name is mentioned most frequently occurs during her escape attempt in which she flees from the evil machinations of Manfred, who seeks to divorce his wife in favor of marrying the young and innocent Isabella. Many of the other times Isabella’s name appears are in regards to discussion of Manfred’s loathsome plot and to inquiries that are being made into her disappearance so that she can be found and subjected to Manfred’s will.

Matilda:

For Matilda, her moment comes when she is made aware of the fact that Lord Manfred (her father) agrees to marry her off to Lord Frederic (Isabella’s father) so that Frederic will grant Manfred Isabella’s hand in marriage. It is a typical moment of patriarchal bartering. Manfred wants Isabella, so he offers his own daughter to Frederic without a second thought. And the words surrounding the occurrences of Matilda’s include some of the feminine virtues that prevent her from being able to refuse such as “tenderness,” “virtuous,” “goodness,” and “purity.” How can these gentle and innocent women hope to escape the wickedness of their patriarch? It is not surprising that Isabella and Matilda, whose names are tossed around so often within this text, find a greater frequency of occurrence during the moments in which their fates decided by their patriarchal fathers are pressing down upon them.

Conclusion:

Overall, I was pleased with the new perspectives that TAPoR was able to offer. Although I have studied this text before, it was interesting to map out the words, find the moments where they occur most frequently, and justify them with my own impressions of the text. The results offered by TAPoR provided me with confirmation of thoughts I had already gleaned from the text. However, the “estrangement and defamiliarization” of the text that Ramsay addresses does serve more purposes than mere confirmation (3). I definitely felt as though I was able to gain access to the bones of this text in ways that I had not been able to through my own close reading, because it really forced me to pay attention to what words Walpole chose to use and where he placed them. Like Isabella, who explores the secret tunnels and hidden passageways of the castle as she attempts to escape from the tyrannical Manfred, I felt like I was able to find hidden pathways of The Castle of Otranto that I was not aware even existed before this activity.

It can become difficult to relinquish your first impression of a text, even when you are close reading it. I used this novel in a paper that I wrote about Gothic tropes and the use of horror and terror in Gothic texts, so my view was confined to looking for evidence of these themes. By “defamiliarizing” me with the text and breaking it down into words, I was able to pay closer attention to the distress of Isabella and Matilda, as well as the intense patriarchal authority evinced by Manfred’s character. As Ramsay notes, these digital tools gave me a way to do what scholars always do with texts when they critique them—they provided me with “a text transformed and transduced into an alternative version, in which, as Wittgenstein put it, we ‘see an aspect’ that further enables discussion and debate” (16). By looking at the words of The Castle of Otranto, the building blocks of this great novel, I was able to examine the architecture of the Castle in a way that enabled me to see alternative aspects of the text—thereby sparking new conversations about the language of female oppression and patriarchal dominance that were not the focus of my initial close reading of the text.

The book that I have chosen to investigate on Project Gutenberg, Google Books, HATHITrust, and the Internet Archive is Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764). Given that the author of the text alleged to be a translator by the name of William Marshall who had recovered the text (said to have been originally printed in 1529) from obscurity in an old library in England and reprinted it for public dissemination, I thought this made The Castle of Otranto an interesting choice (my love of early Gothic literature aside). For as we all know, one important role that digital archivists play involves the rescuing of obscure texts, which are then scanned to the web for public consumption. In terms of availability, all four of the digital archives mentioned above have copies of The Castle of Otranto. The text is available in HTML, EPUB (with images), EPUB (no images), Kindle (with images), Kindle (no images), Plucker, QiOO Mobile, PDF, and Plain Text UTF-8. In terms of editions and provenances, they tend to vary. In the Internet Archive, you can find a version of the novel that is the third edition and that comes from the Bodleian Library at Oxford with a date stamp of 27 Oct 1930. There is also an edition from the University of Toronto library. On Google Books, there are versions from the Stanford University Library, the Library of the University of Michigan, and the same third edition scan from the Bodleian Library that can be found at the Internet Archive. In the HATHITrust Digital Library, one can find the University of Michigan version, as well as versions from the University of California (published in 1823), Princeton University (1811), and Indiana University (1854). The version available on Project Gutenberg appears to be the 1901 version taken from the Library of the University of Michigan. There definitely seems to be a lot of overlap between these digital archives, though from my examinations of the sites, it appears that HATHITrust has the best range of copies since they date back to 1811.

The first result you get when you search for The Castle of Otranto on Google Books is also perhaps the worse copy available. After you get the cover, you have to scroll down through several scans of a woman’s hand to get to the actual title page. Even then, there are still occasional fingers or dark ink splotches that cover up parts of the text. If someone actually wanted to read this version, it would be possible, as long as you could fill in the blanks caused by the more damaged scans. Ink splotches happen on several other versions, and sometimes the text cuts off the sides in some copies. Each of the versions seems to have little quirks like dirty pages or ink splotches or text that is blocked by mysterious rectangle-shaped objects. However, overall, like I said, the text tends to still be readable for the most part. I wouldn’t say these are the best scans ever, but given the amount of texts being scanned and the fact that we are in the midst of the transition to digital archives, rather than approaching the final stages of completion, I would say that the texts serve their purpose at a very basic level. The ability to perform searches within the text is a feature that has definitely been helpful for me as an academic. Reading The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe and then trying to go back and find a quote that I didn’t highlight because I did not think it was useful at the time is not a fun task. Digital Libraries like Google Books, HATHITrust, and the Internet Archive that allow you to not only find words quickly, but also see their context before you go to the actual page the word is on, is definitely a blessing for the toiling scholar.

One of the things that I found most interesting about the Internet Archive is the ability to read the actual book online. The archive is set up to present the book in such a way that makes you feel as if you are actually reading the book itself, rather than just scrolling down a screen. It keeps several of the affordances of the book, such as the comparative space, and gives you the illusion of a three-dimensional object as you “flip” through the pages. This is nice for a reader wanting the experience of the actual text and the comparative space is definitely a plus, but such a skeuomorphic design does little to utilize the affordances of the digital archive. Several of the other versions allow you to click through the pages, but most often this still gives you one page at a time, and as with Google Books, there is still some scrolling involved to see the full text. Of course, the option to download on each of the Digital Libraries lets you make the page bigger or smaller as you like so you can use the page up and page down keys.

As I just stated, each of these sites allows you to download the text. However, if you prefer to stay digital, Google Books lets you compile a “library” of books and HATHITrust lets you create a “Collection” of books. In terms of making these texts writable as well as readable, I did not find any options to annotate any of the versions of my text. Additionally, only authorized users seem to be able to add texts to the digital libraries, making this an exclusive project that is available for consumption by readers, but not open for reciprocity. Along those lines, I did see a link to provide feedback on HATHITrust and report any errors or trouble with the text. As for Google Books and the Internet Archive, I did not see any link for feedback, but there are links set up where readers can write reviews of the text. I imagine these reviews could both be for the book itself and the quality of the scans. However, I do not know if the people who are able to make changes to the texts will actually be reading those reviews. I did not find any way of providing feedback on Project Gutenberg.

The advent of Digital Libraries is a wonderful thing. However, from what I saw of the somewhat obscured scans, the inability to “write” on the texts, and the limited capability for providing feedback that will go directly to the people in charge of the scanning process, there is still much work to be done. As I stated above, I see us in the middle of a transition to Digital Libraries and engaged in work that is nowhere near completion. As time progresses, I hope to see more innovative archives that better utilize the affordances of the web to make texts that are writable/readable and that allow us to research and analyze texts in new and innovative ways that could not be done away from a computer.