Household Opera

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.

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.

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."

This is not an April Fool's Day post

...but it is rather silly, in its own way. Consider:

First there was the Facebook Hamlet, at McSweeney's.

Then there was the Facebook Aeneid ("Dido changed her relationship status to Married. Aeneas changed his relationship status to It's Complicated.") and the Facebook Pride and Prejudice.* And the college class that reenacted Romeo and Juliet on Facebook and used the Friend Wheel to graph the connections between characters in the play.

And now there's the Facebook Haggadah. No, really. If you're among the five people who haven't seen it yet, go read it. It's fantastic.

Is this the beginning of a whole new subgenre of humor? And, specifically: why Facebook? Parodic retellings of the canon are nothing new, but what is it about Facebook that invites them? Is it the way it foregrounds relationships (especially their beginnings and endings)? Or is it the contrast between Facebook's telegraphic style and the text being parodied? Or something else?

I find Facebook kind of annoying a lot of the time, but this trend toward using its format to retell the classics almost makes up for the deluge of applications and invitations that greet me every time I log in.

* I want to do a Facebook Emma, myself. "Emma Woodhouse posted an album: Pictures of my family and my new best friend Harriet Smith." "10 of your friends are attending the event Exploring Party at Box Hill." And that game of anagrams could very easily turn into a game of Lexulous or the like, don't you think?

Fiction in the age of the social web

I've blogged previously about characters from TV shows (most notably Battlestar Galactica) showing up on Twitter. And it's not just BSG: just recently I started watching AMC's Mad Men, twittered about it, and shortly thereafter got a notification that "Peggy Olson is now following you on Twitter." It turns out that the twittering Mad Men characters are the work of fans, not the network, and that after a clumsy attempt on AMC's part to shut down the unauthorized tweets, the network relented and the characters returned to Twitter.

Having fictional characters turn up on the web is an interesting sideline, but the main stories on BSG and Mad Men are still being told on the shows themselves. But I've also been seeing more and more instances of people using Web 2.0ish ways to tell stories interactively. There was the War of the Worlds reenactment on Twitter last November (postmortem here, tweet archive here), itself a reference to Orson Welles' transposition of H. G. Wells' novel to the new medium of the radio and the resulting confusion between fiction and reality. And one of my favorite things on the web last year was an online series called Shadow Unit, a kind of virtual science-fiction/horror/police procedural about FBI agents, written by a very smart crew of writers and conceived as a written homage to episodic TV. It took me a while to realize that in addition to the episodes themselves, several of the characters were keeping LiveJournals in which the storylines continued to play out—and fans could interact directly with characters. It's as if Mulder and Scully had blogs where we all could comment, only somehow much more satisfying (probably because the Shadow Unit writers don't have to answer to any non-fictional network). I'm waiting eagerly for the start of the second season.

I have a theory that fiction and fan fiction are heading toward some sort of convergence with the social web, and we'll be seeing a lot more virtual audience participation (and creation, as well as participation) in the future. I suspect that Cory Doctorow's vision of a near future where masses of people contribute to an online novel, the best bits of which find their way into fan-produced physical books, isn't all that far from happening. I'll be very interested to see what happens next.

Reading on tiny screens

I've had a chance to try out the new iPod Touch lately, and I'm predictably in love with its combination of usefulness, high-end aesthetics, and ridiculous but cool features (among the apps I've downloaded from the App Store, just for the hell of it, are a Magic 8 Ball simulator and a carpenter's level). The email interface is simple and sensible. I love the fact that if I'm in the kitchen wondering what to make for dinner, I can use it to grab my building's wireless network and surf over to Chocolate and Zucchini in search of a half-remembered recipe. (I like the colossal storage space for music and whatnot, too, but since I've already experienced that with an earlier-generation iPod, it's not as much of a novelty.)

But far and away my favorite application is Stanza, an ebook reader that allows downloading from various free ebook sources, from Project Gutenberg to a few I'd never heard of. The download catalog is a bit tedious to navigate, but reading on the 2" by 3" screen is surprisingly easy on the eyes. Over the Christmas holidays I read an entire short novel, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, on Stanza. I never saw the appeal of reading on anything as small as an iPod before, but now I do. Carrying a massive book collection on the train or plane in a tiny device that fits in one's pocket is the perfect solution to my perpetual "must bring along a ton of stuff to read" travel quandary.

But the real advantage of reading on the iPod is that it cuts down on the distractions you get while reading ebooks on a computer. Oh, you can still close the Stanza application and fire up Safari or check email or whatever, but the internet access depends on there being a wifi network available, and the process is slower than just opening up another browser tab or a new window. Speaking of Cory Doctorow, he has an excellent podcast on this very subject: the unrecognized usefulness of the codex format for screening out distractions. The iPod doesn't quite screen those distractions out, but it does make it easier to focus on one thing at a time.

So: the iPod is a much better reading device than I'd thought it would be. Though I still wouldn't want to write anything longer than a Twitter update or a quick email on it, because tapping at the screen-keyboard with my thumb makes me feel like the world's clumsiest and slowest hunt-and-peck typist.

Life in the Twitter village

Various people have noticed Clive Thompson's New York Times article on Twitter, Facebook, and the ambient social awareness that these kinds of tools promote. He points out a lot of things I find interesting about microblogging, particularly the way small bits of information add up into a new kind of sense of one's friends' lives, "like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting." Also of interest: maintaining multiple levels of intimacy with public and private Twitter accounts; the potential danger of too many "parasocial" relationships with people you don't really know; and the way ambient awareness reproduces the social dynamic of living in a small village, where everyone knows everyone. Definitely worth reading the whole thing.

I've noticed something that may or may not be related. When I started blogging, lo these five years ago, I didn't know anyone else online. If my friends had online presences, I wasn't aware of it. My blog persona was a secret identity, and the people I interacted with on the interwebs were people I'd never met in person. (Parasociality ahoy!) I was a heavy user of e-mail to keep in touch with friends and family in the offline world, but the web, for me, was more for interacting with people I didn't know.

Now I suspect that friends from offline contexts make up a significant percentage of my blog readership; I've also taken to Twitter as another way to keep up with people I already know. In fact, I didn't really get into it until I started finding my existing friends on it. I also finally succumbed and got a Facebook account for the same reason. One of the perks of joining Ravelry was finding knitters in my area to hang out with on Saturday mornings (hi, New London Knit/Crochet folks!). And so on. In short, online life for me now is much more about ambient awareness than it used to be. Have any of the rest of you (friends, colleagues, people I know from the blogosphere but not in person, random passersby) noticed the same thing?

Google poetry goes...paper?

Actual book summary encountered today while I was selecting new books:

"Poetry consisting of found text from Google search results."

And I find myself surprised, not at the fact that someone would publish a book of found poetry from collaged text, or that they'd assemble it out of Google-fragments, but that the resulting poems would end up published in print. It's a little odd to think of an all-but-born-digital form jumping backward into older media. (Although not so surprising when you recall the various paper-based Dadaist experiments with collage and cadavres exquis.)

I'm kind of intrigued, actually, because I've always liked the found poem genre, and I'm curious as to how the poet put the found text together. One can always auto-generate Google poems, after all, but presumably these are assembled differently.

Confidential to the BSG fans among my readership...

... especially those of you on Twitter: I just learned (via Twitter, of course) that someone has set up Twitter accounts for a whole bunch of Battlestar Galactica characters. I'm currently following @billadama and @cylonhybrid. (But where's Laura Roslin?) And looking forward to getting cable in my new apartment when I move at the end of the month, so I can catch up with Season 4.

And, speaking of Twitter and things related, I've had a small epiphany: I've been deeply interested in the internets ever since I discovered the web circa 1995, but I've always thought of that interest as separate from my official research interests, even after I officially moved into information science land. But, I realized last week, why not consider internet cultures (and subcultures) as one of the things I want to write and publish about? I can add it to the ever-lengthening list, which now ranges from history of the book to humanities computing to assorted literary-critical topics from my dissertation to the spatial dimensions of information. At some point, I've got to find a writing group so I can actually get some of these amorphous projects into a somewhat more morphous state, and pin down which ones are feasible.

But, in the meantime, I've got to go update my Twitter status. Later...