Household Opera

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.