Over the past several weeks since my first blog post about researching digital scholarly editions, I have begun to consider how I could apply the lessons learned from my literature review to a digital scholarly edition of Katherine Anne Porter’s correspondence. As I draft several key pieces of documentation for such an edition—a name authority index and gazetteer and a TEI keying specification—I find myself preoccupied with thoughts about the relationship between textual creativity and technology, between the language of literature and the language of encoding, metaphor and algorithm.
Perhaps I spent a bit too much time at the Computer History Museum over Spring Break in my childhood home of California, where, between learning how to use a slide rule and Instagramming photos of the PDP-1, I developed a fascination with Ada Lovelace. The daughter of the poet Lord Byron and his mathematically-inclined wife Anne Isabella Milbanke (whom he called his “Princess of Parallelograms”), Ada displayed an uncanny gift for scientific thought. Her parents separated shortly after her birth, and Ada grew up with her mother, who attempted to save Ada from the perils of poetical tendencies by educating her in mathematics and music. Ada’s talent and training found legendary expression in her notes on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine—notes that included what many recognize to be the first algorithm to be processed by machine, and thus, made her the first computer programmer.
It is rumored that the adult Ada once asked in a letter to her mother, “If you can’t give me poetry, can’t you give me poetical science?” and indeed, Ada relied on access to imagination, metaphor, and simile in voicing her scientific thoughts. “The Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves,” she wrote at age twenty-eight, and I think of TEI, of an encoding engine and a tracing of patterns that seems agonizingly intricate, both purely practical and somehow inevitably creative. Could it be that Ada, Babbage’s “Enchantress of Numbers,” was equal parts programmer and poet? After all, both endeavors are rooted in language, in iterative rhetoric, and in choosing the right word…which is exactly what Katherine Anne Porter insisted on: “I beg of the reader one gentle favor for which he may be sure of my perpetual gratitude: please do not call my short novels Novelettes, or even worse, Novellas,” she urged in the introduction to her Collected Stories in 1965. “Novelette is classical usage for a trivial, dime-novel sort of thing; Novella is a slack, boneless, affected word that we do not need to describe anything. Please call my books by their right names…”
In choosing the labels we use to refer to ideas and the tags we select to encode texts, we are using the mechanics of language to craft arguments and to reason. In some way, we are filtering what might be remembered, performing an algorithm of appraisal and selection just as an archivist might deem one photo worthy of preservation and “weed” the next. Porter knew as much about this figurative “weeding” and collecting as she did about tending the Geraniums and Forget-me-nots in her backyard garden. “Well, angel, here’s another long winded letter for you to send back,” she wrote to her sister Gay Porter Holloway in 1957, referring to her project of carefully constructing an archive of her own outgoing correspondence. “It’s odd,” she continued: “A friend just wrote me that she wanted to send me the letters I had written to her and her husband for years, she did not want them lost or scattered, but with my papers. And a man at Yale bought some letters of mine from somebody…and I have written to ask him if I may see them and copy them. I cannot imagine who is selling my letters, nor where he or she got hold of them.” Nearly a decade later, Porter donated this archive of letters to the University of Maryland. She died in 1980, the same year that the U.S. Department of Defense announced a programming language they had cultivated and groomed to become the universal standard (though it inevitably gave way to a constellation of child languages). They chose for it a palindrome of a name, a perfect trochee, “Ada.”
Wendy Hagenmaier is a 2012 Master’s Candidate at the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. She is blogging about her Capstone Professional Experience Project involving a digital edition of letters from the Katherine Anne Porter Papers (http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/1532) at the University of Maryland. Jennie Levine Knies, Manager, Digital Stewardship, Beth Alvarez, Curator of Literary Manuscripts Emerita, and Trevor Muñoz, Associate Director of MITH and Assistant Dean for Digital Humanities Research, University of Maryland Libraries, are supervising the project, alongside MITH-alum Tanya Clement, Assistant Professor, UT iSchool.