Household Opera

Sound maps

Via Matthew Battles' Twitter feed comes Cinco Cidades, a "cross-disciplinary project documenting the cultures and sounds of five cities across Portugal." Each of the five cities has its own map showing where the various sound files—children playing, street noise, birdsong, local musicians, conversation, bells, subways, construction, residents talking to interviewers—were recorded. What makes the site so fascinating is that it lets you blend the sound files into mixes. Here's one I made just now, which includes the sounds of trains arriving at a station, church bells, a cafe owner talking about coffee, a guitarist playing fado, and (my favorite) ambient radiator-dripping noise from inside a cultural center where music drifts down the halls.

As I was playing with sound files, I immediately started thinking about how one might adapt the same concept, perhaps based on Open Street Map data, with lots of volunteers armed with digital voice recorders. I'm trying to imagine what a sound map of New London would sound like (ferries leaving their dock on the river? local bands? seagulls? Amtrak trains?), or a sound map of Philadelphia, or Baltimore, or New York, or Chicago (to speak only of cities I know reasonably well). I think half the fun of a project like this would be in learning to hear the sounds that you take for granted when you hear them every day but that, all together, make a place sound like itself and no other.

Personal anthology: Scenes of reading, 1: A.S. Byatt, Possession

It's hard to write a good fictional scene involving characters reading. As A.S. Byatt authorially interjects in the passage I'm about to quote from her novel Possession: A Romance, one risks pulling the reader into a "mise-en-abîme ... where words draw attention to the power and delight of words, and so ad infinitum." And yet the scene that comes after that disclaimer is one of my very favorite moments in the novel, one of those passages that makes you (or me, at least) draw in a breath and point and say "Yes. Yes. That, exactly." Byatt's main character, Roland Michell, is rereading a poem by the (fictitious) Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, a poem he knows inside and out:

There are readings — of the same text — that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are — believe it — impersonal readings — where the mind's eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind's ear hears them sing.

Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark — readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. ...

Roland read, or reread, The Golden Apples, as though the words were living creatures or stones of fire. He saw the tree, the fruit, the fountain, the woman, the grass, the serpent, single and multifarious in form. He heard Ash's voice, certainly his voice, his own unmistakable voice, and he heard the language moving around, weaving its own patterns, beyond the reach of any single human, writer or reader.

— A.S. Byatt, Possession: A Romance, chapter 26

Most of my readings aren't of the hair-standing-up variety, and yet: that line about knowing that we understand something we're reading before we even can say "what we know, or how" — that's something I've felt any number of times, but have never quite been able to articulate as well as this scene does.

I've been thinking about scenes of reading quite a bit lately. I may quote a few more here before I'm done.

On THATCamp

Hello, poor neglected blog! Long time no see. I've just spent the weekend at THATCamp 2009, in a whirl of project demonstrations, conversation about the present and future of the digital humanities, comparisons of favorite tools, and massive amounts of Twittering. It was the most fun I've had at a conference in I don't know how long.

You can get a sense of individual sessions and participants at the main site and at the THATCamp wiki, so instead of trying to summarize every session I'll refer you there and to the tweet archive. Instead, I hereby submit my top 10 reasons why THATCamp beats the pants off most academic conferences I've attended:

10. Wifi. Everywhere. Always available. (I'm looking at YOU, MLA. Actually, a bunch of us were looking at you.)
9. Free registration. I didn't miss having to lug around a giant program and a big ugly tote bag full of vendor-logo-emblazoned tchotchkes. (And now I'm looking at YOU, ACRL. And you too, ALA.)
8. Casual, suit-free dress code. Plus, commemorative t-shirts.
7. No shortage of dongles for anyone who wanted get up and project something from their laptop.
6. Not only was everyone working on really cool projects, the whole gathering had a "Let's share how we built our projects and maybe find some new people to collaborate with" ethos (as opposed to "My project is a jealously guarded secret until it's accepted in a major journal and/or I read a snippet of it to an audience").
5. The complete absence of "But why didn't you just talk about MY pet topic? [10 minutes of rambling about the questioner's pet topic follow]" questions.
4. The certainty that one could say "You know that xkcd with the virus that reads people's YouTube comments back to them...?" and be greeted with nods of recognition.
3. Lots of participants were in interesting hybrid positions somewhere at the junctures of academia, IT, librarianship, museum studies, art, and a bunch of other fields, or had spent their careers shifting from one area to another.
2. Participation. Lots and lots of participation. Self-organization by the low-tech but efficient means of a big roll of paper and some markers. An emphasis on building new things, together.
1. Time limits on the shorter presentations were strictly enforced ... by the organizers playing the Keyboard Cat music every time someone ran over. Seriously, why is this not the rule at every conference ever?

In some ways I feel like a bit of a poseur among digital humanists. I'm a humanist by training and inclination, and one who's picked up a bunch of digital interests and miscellaneous skills along the way, but none of this is part of my official job description. But the beauty of a conference like this is that we're all there to learn, experiment, and try stuff out. Not every aspect of the unconference model would work for a bigger gathering, but I wish more academic and library conferences had more of the freewheeling geeky spirit I enjoyed so much at THATCamp.

My THATCamp session idea: literary mapping and spatial markup

Over at the THATCamp blog, I've just posted some preliminary ideas for a session about literary mapping. I'd cross-post here, but there's some overlap with my earlier spatiality project posts; so I'm just going to link, in case any of you are curious. In the meantime, if you're interested, have a look at my experiment in mapping Edith Wharton's Old New York and tell me what you think.

Of ghost stories, genre conventions, and Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger

I stayed up later than usual yesterday night reading the final pages of Sarah Waters' latest novel, The Little Stranger, and it's been sticking in my head with the kind of persistence that usually signals an impending blog post. I've been a fan of Waters' books for years, starting with her first novel Tipping the Velvet all the way through The Night Watch, which I initially thought would be too grim for my tastes, but I loved it. I don't think The Little Stranger is my all-time favorite, but it's wormed its way into my head and made the world look darker and creepier. This post is part review and part musing on one of my favorite genres, the ghost story. There are spoilers ahead, though I'm sticking the biggest one in the comments. Still, if you haven't read it and don't want to know how it turns out, you may want to stop reading now.

Still with me? All right then. The Little Stranger is about a haunted house—sort of. The house in question, Hundreds Hall, is a decaying Georgian manor, which, in 1947, is slowly exhausting the finances of the last remaining members of the aristocratic Ayres family. Siblings Roderick (injured in the war) and Caroline (brought home to nurse her brother) live with their aging mother, trying to keep their farm going while their ancestral house falls down around them. Dr. Faraday, the narrator, is initially called in to attend a sick housemaid but becomes increasingly friendly with the family. Creepy and inexplicable things start happening; the atmosphere gets tenser with each incident; and soon it becomes apparent that something wants to drive the family insane, kill them all off, or both.

This is a novel about the changing class system in postwar Britain as much as it is a ghost story or a Gothic tale. We're always aware of Faraday's ambivalent feelings toward the house and its inhabitants. He loves Hundreds and the dying way of life it represents, but he can't forget that he doesn't belong to the Ayreses' class. He's the son of a former Ayres family nurserymaid, and his working-class parents worked themselves practically to death to send him to medical school. Every time he starts to feel like he belongs with the Ayreses, he's reminded that he'll never be their equal. He starts an unlikely romance with Caroline, but seems to have a hard time summoning up a definite attraction to her. And yet he clings to the aristocratic ideal of the noble family in their country house even more fiercely than the Ayreses do, even as it becomes increasingly clear that there's no way this family can afford to maintain their crumbling estate.

Faraday fulfills a role found in a lot of ghost stories: the skeptical character who scoffs at the mere suggestion of anything supernatural, insisting that that strange noise was just the cat, that weird shadowy shape was an optical illusion—right up until he (or she) has an incontrovertible encounter with the ghost.* In some stories, the skeptic narrates the whole thing, prefaced by "Well, I used to not believe in ghosts, but then I had a very odd experience, and now I'm not so sure. It went like this..."

One of the interesting things about The Little Stranger, for me, is that Faraday never stops being the skeptic. His rational explanations get more and more strained as the novel goes on, as various reviewers have noticed, but he doesn't stop offering them. Another interesting thing, and another sign that Waters is playing with the genre conventions of the ghost story, is that we think we know who the ghost is before the novel is halfway over. We learn in the first few pages that Mrs. Ayres had a daughter who died as a small child, and we put two and two together. We think we're heading toward an ending that explains it all. But we're wrong.

[The last paragraphs of this post are in the comment section, because there's a plot element I want to discuss, but it's also a massive spoiler. Click through if you want to keep reading.]

* To take a few examples at random: the narrator of H.G. Wells's "The Red Room"; the insistently anti-supernatural Professor Parkins in M.R. James's "'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'"; the hapless young man in Rhoda Broughton's "The Truth, the Whole Truth, and Nothing but the Truth" who promises to disprove the ghostly events by sleeping in the haunted room and winds up dead as a result.

More Twitter-fiction reenactment: is this a trend?

Someone's clearly been reading my mind. Dracula, one of my current obsessions, meets Twitter-fiction, another of my current obsessions, over at Real-Time Dracula, a "reimagining/modernization/condensation of the classic horror novel Dracula in the Web 2.0 medium." I don't quite agree with all of the characterization (e.g. Lucy's use of OMG giggly teen txtspeak!!!1!), but I like the way author Michael Gordon is using Twitter to follow the timeline of the novel and let the story play out. Plus, @JHarkerEsq's tweets are a riot:

Carpathians are a whirlpool of superstition, cultures, languages. Peasants all fear for my life. Also have excellent chicken paprikash here.

Count went on bit of a rant about vanity. Threw away my 1 good mirror. Well, not so good-didn't see Count in it, tho he was right behind me.

Dear @MinaHarker2be The Count has asked me to write to you. Things are SUPER! Hugs & Kisses!

*Deep breath* Count is NOT an inhuman lizard man (despite mounting evidence). I am NOT trapped in the castle (see previous). *deep breath*

Rat bastard not only stole all my papers, he nicked my good suit. Worst. Host. Ever. Hiding this diary for now, just in case.

It's interesting how much more comedic the story becomes when retold like this; I suppose every version of Dracula is to some degree self-consciously presented as a version or an adaptation. It'll be fun to compare Real-Time Dracula with the Twitter War of the Worlds.

Personal anthology: poems about haunting

I'd had Thomas Hardy's poem "A House with a History" on my mind for a while (see my post from a couple of weeks ago) when I ran across Wallace Stevens' "A Postcard from the Volcano," which, for some reason, I'd never read before. In one of those odd moments of literary synchrony, I found that each of them reminds me of the other. I don't think Stevens was consciously alluding to Hardy, but both poems seem to share the same preoccupation with what remains, if anything does, of a person's consciousness after they depart or die, and how that consciousness attaches itself to places, and houses in particular. One might call this haunting, except Hardy's poem is more about a kind of failure of haunting, about the new inhabitants' inability to recognize the traces of memory connected with the house. The children in Stevens' poem perceive something, at least, even if they can't perceive "what we felt / At what we saw."

Here's Hardy:

A House with a History

There is a house in a city street
Some past ones made their own;
Its floors were criss-crossed by their feet,
And their babblings beat
From ceiling to white hearth-stone.

And who are peopling its parlours now?
Who talk across its floor?
Mere freshlings are they, blank of brow,
Who read not how
Its prime had passed before

Their raw equipments, scenes, and says
Afflicted its memoried face,
That had seen every larger phase
Of human ways
Before these filled the place.

To them that house's tale is theirs,
No former voices call
Aloud therein. Its aspect bears
Their joys and cares
Alone, from wall to wall.

(from Late Lyrics and Earlier)

And here's Stevens:

A Postcard from the Volcano

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is ... Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

(from Ideas of Order)

Try as I might, I can't think of other poems that dwell on houses, haunting, and memory in quite this way, though I'm sure there must be some. I thought of Walter de la Mare, but a quick scan through the only book of de la Mare's poems I own—Peacock Pie, in a Faber & Faber edition given to me when I was very young—didn't turn up anything quite in the same vein, though "The Old Stone House" comes close.

Reader, are there other poems out there that play with the haunted-house motif?

My summer cooking adventure: Project Sourdough

Although I do a lot of cooking, I've never been much of a one for baking my own bread. Foccaccia was pretty much the only yeast-raised bread I'd seriously attempted, and I'm more of a cook than a baker, anyway. But I'm also a bread snob who was hopelessly spoiled by five years of living a few blocks away from Zingerman's, and New London doesn't have all that many bakeries, so finding bread that isn't a square squishy plastic-shrouded oblong has been something of a challenge. The DIY approach started to look a lot more appealing.

So about a month ago I acquired some sourdough starter from a colleague at work, and set to work cultivating it. Sourdough starter, if you've never made your own, is a colony of wild yeasts and lactobacillus bacteria that can be maintained in the refrigerator as long as you periodically feed it flour and water. It smells oddly like glue, but with a strong acidic whiff after it's been fed. When you feed the colony, it gets frothy (from the yeasts producing carbon dioxide) and doubles in size. You put half of the starter back in the fridge and use the other half to bake something; the yeast, once activated, raises the bread, and the lactic acid from the bacteria produces the distinctive sour flavor. It's like having a pet that's also a biochemistry experiment.

So far, this is what I've made:

• Sourdough bread loaf #1, part whole wheat. An abject failure: it didn't rise, and I don't think the gluten developed properly either. The result was a sad, bricklike object. I chalked it up to experience and moved on.
• Sourdough bread loaves #2 and #3, mostly white flour. Much more acceptable: they could have been a bit rounder and fluffier, but they had the right texture and made an agreeably dense, slightly sour bread. The feel of the dough was much more like what I remembered as the way bread dough should feel while you're kneading it.
• Raspberry sourdough muffins. Sadly, they didn't rise; I suspect I overbeat them. They were still edible, though, and I may repeat the experiment with the remainder of the frozen raspberries.
• Sourdough coffee cake. The sourness is barely perceptible amid the cinnamon and brown sugar topping, but it made an excellent breakfast.

Actual kneaded breads are something of a time commitment, and require advance planning, but I'm very pleased that one can also use the excess starter in everything from quick breads to pizza crusts (haven't made any yet, but they're on the list of Things to Try). And someday, I'll manage to acquire a banneton so I can make properly beautiful boules.

Notes toward an ongoing project: poetry, space, and mapping

I've blogged previously about my map obsession, and about wanting to do something with poetry and spatial or geographic visualization. And since one of my plans for this summer is attending THATCamp 2009 (yay!), I've been thinking a lot about what kinds of projects these interests might lead to. What follows is some thinking-out-loud.

As I said in the previous post, I love applications that let you georeference various types of information, but I keep finding myself wishing for something that would indicate vaguer (or even imaginary) locations, such as one tends to find in poetry and fiction. And I'd like to be able to indicate motion from one place to another within a text—the westward movement in the last paragraph of Joyce's "The Dead," for instance, from the Dublin hotel where Gabriel watches the snow to the churchyard in Oughterard.

I've been thinking a lot about the connections between space and memory in Thomas Hardy's poems, about the way he repeatedly uses a single location to juxtapose a scene in the present with memory of what happened there in the past. (I'm thinking of any number of Hardy poems, but especially "The Walk," "At Castle Boterel," "A House with a History," "Paths of Former Time," "The Self-Unseeing," and "Sacred to the Memory.") I don't know how you'd visualize that, actually. I think you'd have to show movement in time as well as space. A lyric space-time continuum?

I also think it would be a nifty project to map the history of various poetic forms in both space and time: to show the emergence of the sonnet in Italy and its spread to England during the Renaissance, to explore the complicated multilingual history of the ghazal in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. Among many others. Kind of like the Atlas of Early Printing.

And, as much for my own reference as anything else, here are a few of the links I've been bookmarking:

• A Place in History: A Guide to Using GIS in Historical Research, by Ian Gregory
• The Spatial History Project at Stanford University and its tools wiki for spatial humanities
• The New Geography, a roundtable from the April/May 2009 Bookforum
• Mapping the Digital Humanities, a HASTAC discussion (April 2009)
• "Literary Geospaces," a Chronicle of Higher Ed article by Jennifer Howard (paywalled, sorry) (link fixed; thanks, Dave!)
• Gutenkarte geographic text browser (not a lot of texts yet, but an intriguing idea)

Wanted: a fuzzier mapping tool

For the most part, I love Google Maps. I use it all the time when I want to find out where the nearest (fill in the blank) is, and I've put together a lot of practical maps for my own use: public transit in New London, yarn stores in all the towns I've visited, opera houses, things to do in nearby cities, Italian groceries, and on and on.

Thanks in part to Franco Moretti's work on literary geography and distant reading, I've also been playing with Google Maps as a way to visualize literary settings and look for patterns that might not be obvious without taking geography into consideration. I've been making, for example, a map of places in the stories of my favorite ghost-story author, M.R. James. (Here's a link, if you're curious. It's still a work in progress.) It's been interesting for me to see James's predilection for setting stories on the east coast of England represented in visual form. Eventually I want to see how James's settings compare with other ghost story writers' settings. I don't have a particular conclusion that I'm chasing at this point; I'm just interested in what a map can make visible.

Some of James's stories are very easy to place: Burnstow in "'Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad,'" as James himself remarked in the preface to Ghost Stories of an Antiquary, is a fictionalized version of Felixstowe, and Seaburgh in "A Warning to the Curious" is Aldeburgh (better known as the setting of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, which makes two reasons why I want to go there someday). "Casting the Runes" takes place partly in an unnamed London suburb but also in the British Museum and on a train to Dover.

But others are trickier: fictional country houses in unidentified counties, fictional cathedral towns, stories without a definite setting at all, other than somewhere in England. And that's where I start to want a different kind of mapping tool. Google Maps is very good for pinpointing exact locations: a building, a street address, an intersection. Which is excellent if you want to find the nearest laundromat or public park, but less useful if you want to indicate a non-specific location, like "somewhere in Brooklyn,"* or (in the case of James's story "Lost Hearts") a country house "in the heart of Lincolnshire." What you want is a map that can include fuzzy locations—an entire city, a county, a region. This isn't something that Google does very well (yet), but if we ever develop a tool for literary mapping, the fuzzy location feature would be invaluable for those vague or fictionalized but sort-of-placeable settings that crop up in fiction.

Ideally, I'd like a fuzzy mapping tool that could also visualize literary spaces that aren't geographically specified at all: the street layout of imaginary towns, shifts back and forth between city and country or between house and wilderness, the expanding and contracting spaces of Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" or Keats's odes. But that's probably a long way off. For starters, I'd like to see something that can graphically represent both a Henry James character's Washington Square address and an M.R. James character's indeterminate destination: "I need not particularise further than to say that if you divided the map of England into four quarters, he would have been found in the south-western of them."**

* I've been noticing this with Google's H1N1 flu map. The dots evidently don't correspond to particular addresses, but they look like they do, if you zoom in. Which is rather misleading. Fuzzy locations get more confusing when you can zoom in as far as you can with a tool like Google Maps.

** From the opening paragraphs of "A View from a Hill."