How can we construct a literary history of recorded poetry that recognizes media as an intrinsic dimension of the poems’ forms? Given the longtime understanding of the recorded poem as, at best, a simulacrum of a primary, written text (if not of the live performance, too—a copy of a copy), poetry recordings have not received the same kind of material and media archaeological study as their textual counterparts. Through a precis of the PennSound archive, the world’s largest archive of recorded poetry and the archival response to Charles Bernstein’s call for scholarly attention to the performed poem, this talk suggests what such a literary history of poetry audio might look like. We will examine various periods of sound recording history, starting with late nineteenth-century European work to create Stimmporträts, or portraits of voices, through American record companies’ attempts to grapple with the political-economy of sounded verse. If there is a center and a periphery of our sonic memory, attention will need to be paid to oppositional archives and their use of media to subvert systems of dominance by seizing the media of production. Examples of the various kinds of archives under consideration will include: experimental French phonetics labs of the early 20th century; Columbia University’s Speech Lab Recordings, scored to aluminum records in the 1930s and ‘40s; and so-called Soviet bone records, samizdat records cut into discarded x-ray films. We will conclude on the question of what new affordances become possible when grooves become bits and the temporality of discs gives way to the logic of disks. By looking at the newest digital humanities research in distant listening and media archaeology, we will see that the digitized forms of previously recorded poems are not just copies of copies, but generative of new possibilities.

See below for a Sutori recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Mustazza during his talk.

In this talk, I will introduce the collaboration of the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Frankenstein team with MITH to produce a new and authoritative digital edition of the 1818, 1823, and 1831 published texts of Frankenstein linked with the Shelley-Godwin Archive edition of Mary Shelley’s manuscript notebooks. We have been hard at work on the project since fall, and aim to complete the project by May 2018, the bicentennial of the novel’s first publication.

Preparing the edition has given us a fascinating vantage point on early work with 1990’s hypertext, as we began our work by up-converting hundreds of “hypercard” files in Stuart Curran and Jack Lynch’s Pennsylvania Electronic Edition of Frankenstein. That hypertext edition represented groundbreaking digital scholarship in the era of web 1.0, by deploying an interface for reading the 1818 and 1831 texts in juxtaposed parallel texts. Our work on the project has involved polishing and repurposing the code of Curran’s and Lynch’s electronic editions of the 1818 and 1831 texts. With help from Rikk Mulligan, Digital Scholarship librarian at Carnegie Mellon University, we have been correcting our restored text against photo facsimiles of the originals, and we have prepared plain text and simple XML editions from OCR of the 1823 edition, derived via ABBYY Finereader, and formatted like our editions of the 1818 and 1823. We have been preparing a new edition in TEI by first processing these documents with CollateX, which computationally locates the points of variance (or “deltas”) among the editions and outputs these as a single critical edition with TEI XML critical apparatus markup.

Collating the print editions establishes a basis for one last and especially challenging stage of our project. We are now working with Raffaele Viglianti to integrate the Shelley-Godwin Archive’s manuscript notebook drafts of Frankenstein with our critical edition of the published novels. For this we are planning a new implementation of TEI critical apparatus markup to point to specific locations in the manuscript notebooks. This will provide a way to link a reading interface of the novel that highlights “hotspots” of variance in the print edition and that links into relevant passages in the Notebooks.

We will be offering our bicentennial edition to update the one currently hosted by Romantic Circles. Our new edition’s reading interface should invite readers to learn the interesting story of how the events and characters of the novel changed over the first decades of its life, from the time of its first drafts by its 18-year-old author to the changes imposed by authors and editors over three published editions from 1818, 1823, and 1831. We hope our edition will inspire fresh investigations of longstanding questions about Frankenstein’s transformations, such as the extent of Godwin’s interventions in the text in 1823 and how many of these these persist in the 1831 text. This dialogue offers a chance to share views of the new TEI edition underway, and invites reflection and discussion of our textual methods in stitching together our new textual “monster.”

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Beshero-Bondar during her talk.

Staking a claim in collaborative models of digital archiving, exhibition and geo-spatial visualization, Sarah Patterson and Jim Casey will introduce questions, concepts and outcomes central to the Colored Conventions Project’s online restoration of the Colored Conventions Movement, 1830-1900. Working with literature and data connected to this understudied phenomenon in Black political organizing, Patterson and Casey will discuss the ways CCP’s interdisciplinary team produces narrative-centric exhibits and interactive visualizations for multiple learning communities. This presentation will especially chart CCP’s interest in tackling key questions on its journey to creating DH content for those interested in social justice pedagogies and collaborative knowledge production.

Questions of focus will include: How do we better grasp women’s instrumentality through mapping technologies that magnify their activities within historical spaces connected to the movement? How do social network analyses contribute to our understanding of Black convention leadership? In what ways do concepts of power and authority impact computing and technology-selection as the project emerges within a broader landscape of Black histo-digital studies? We seek to highlight DH praxis and pedagogies to enhance what scholarly and public audiences know about the debates, people, places and texts related to the seven-decades-long campaign for Black rights.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Casey and Patterson during their talk.

Online space often operates within an invisible white universe with blackness becoming apparent only insomuch as it is rendered deviant. In a post-Cosby and Obama era of perceived post-raciality, black people are left to exist purely within the “dominant social imagination as media constructed stars and fantasy figures.” Black characters in popular culture thrive only insomuch as they propel the post racial fantasies of white America. Radhika Mohanram argues that the black body is only black when out of its place, for within context it is but a body. She goes on to point out from Fanon, that the black (wo)man exists to provide perspective rather than to she herself have perspective. A critical analysis of the digital culture of black and white feminist thought in Jezebel and For Harriet provides a site to examine what happens when the subject, the black body, at least temporarily does not exist as an ‘other’ but is squarely within a context that allows it to be merely a body.

Within the blogosphere there are rules of invisible whiteness that pervade online interaction. Examining whiteness as embedded within the digital culture of a blog like Jezebel is done by combining material and discursive theories of whiteness focusing on how the codes of conduct privilege white discourse, culture and values. Toni Morrison describes the invisibility of whiteness as the fishbowl that contains both fish and water. While seemingly invisible, whiteness paradoxically “may be hyper-visible as either a preferred or a threatened status”. Whiteness is only made hyper-visible through its absence in the discourse about black character by black. Critical techno-cultural discourse analysis requires us to view technology as artifact, function and belief. Therefore, to better understand technologies as cultural objects we must parse through the beliefs as articulated by users and visible in the content they produce.  In a CTDA of two blogs, For Harriet and Jezebel produced for and by women that articulate a feminist agenda. For Harriet intentionally targets black women and centralizes black feminist thought while Jezebel, a feminist blog, implicitly promotes what Mariana Ortega deems ‘white feminism’. The default status of ‘white’ is removed for white feminists who must contend with becoming deviant within the normative universe created by black women in the blogosphere.

Kishonna Gray explains “embodiment is a process rather than a given, and in order to sustain this meaning, it must constantly and continually be articulated and performed.” Black women utilize online blogging platforms in celebration and critique separate from the dominant group. As Jessie Daniels explains, “the Internet offers a “safe space” and a way to not just survive, but also resist, repressive sex/gender regimes. Girls and self-identified women are engaging with Internet technologies in ways that enable them to transform their embodied selves, not escape embodiment.”

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including links to resources and projects that Steele referenced during her talk.