Poetry, Appropriation, and the “Avant-Garde”

For my data project (and perhaps leading into the final project), I’m interested in finding a way to map, graph, or visualize a set of linguistic / formal trends in contemporary poetry. Based on a set of inter-connected issues and ideas, I’ve arrived at the following question, which is probably still too large: what is the relationship between “appropriation,” race, and gender in poetry of the “avant-garde”?

In coming up with this question, my first idea was to use digital tools to see how certain words or trends in language have been appropriated (or repurposed) in poetry. How much is “creative” (i.e., original) and how much is “uncreative” (i.e., stolen), and where is the line between the two?

As a writer who has almost always used other texts to generate my own, I know the politics, practice, and implications of this question are complicated. It’s certainly not a question that can or should be cleanly “solved,” but perhaps that makes it fertile for a digital project. And a number of recent course readings (e.g.,” Topic Modeling and Figurative Language”), workshops (Web Scraping Social Media) and blog posts (Matt’s on “Poemage”; Taylor’s on “Hypergraphy”) have lead me to believe there are some tools I could explore to attempt this kind of “close”-and-“distant” reading.

But what do I mean by “language,” “appropriation,” and “contemporary poetry”? Which text(s) do I want to analyze, and how?

I thought of looking at poems in the most recent issue of Best American Poetry, if only because of the controversy surrounding a particular poem by a white man named Michael Derrick Hudson in that anthology. Hudson submitted his poem 40 times under his own name, and then 9 times under the pseudonym of Yi-Fen Chou, hoping that by posing as a Chinese woman (“appropriating” a particular name and identity), his poem would be accepted. And eventually, it was. According to Hudson, “it took quite a bit of effort to get (this poem) into print, but I’m nothing if not persistent.”

(The idea of “persistence” lead me to a (possibly) related question: how often do men, women, and POC submit the same piece of writing for publication, and how often are they published? Is this even a type of data that I could find?)

On a language level, an analysis of “appropriation” in a selection of texts could look something like this: take a set of poems (perhaps from that same issue of Best American Poetry), and use tools like Poemage or Topic Modeling to identify certain language trends: words, phrases, or perhaps bigger-picture patterns, like syntax, formal constraints, or rhyme. Then, scrape the web to see how and where these language and formal trends have been used prior to these poems: in literature, and / or in other places (blogs, social media, etc.). And if this dataset is too unmanageable, perhaps just look for how language from non-literary texts gets “appropriated” into poetic texts. This doesn’t relate to “appropriated” language to race and gender yet, but I’m getting there.

Another idea I had for the dataset (which I originally thought of as separate, but now seems related), was to use language-analysis to ask: what “is” (or marks) the “avant-garde” in poetry?

It’s hard, and perhaps silly, to try to define or locate a set of poems that are somehow representative of the “avant-garde,” which is itself a problematic term: most likely only historical, and not really in or of contemporary use. But the reason I thought of this question was my interest in an essay titled “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” by Cathy Park Hong, almost a year prior to the Michael Derrick Hudson case, in the journal Lana Turner – a journal “of poetry and opinion” in which I have published often, and which might also be thought of as a home for the “avant-garde.” In this essay, Hong claims that “to encounter the history of avant-garde poetry is to encounter a racist tradition.” A second dataset would then be in service of documenting and support this claim (and those that follow) through maps, graphs, or even hypertexts.

To do so, I might first take the poems in (lets say, that issue of Lana Turner), and use (lets say, “topic modeling”) to see if any words, syntax, or forms can be constituted into a pattern that might be used to define “the avant-garde” (or at least, the machine’s perception of it). To be more specific by borrowing some terms from Hong’s essay: what are the “radical languages and forms” that have been “usurped” (appropriated) without proper acknowledgement? What are “Eurocentric practices” in poetry these days? How can I use digital tools to further define these terms, and then map them against the race and gender of their authors? How does this information relate to the “persistence” with which (these poets) tend to submit their work? Is this part of the same dataset, or related?

The biggest issue with my proposal seems to be figuring out the scope of the project; how many and which texts to analyze. If I just use the most recent issues of Best American Poetry and / or Lana Turner, would I have enough, or too much data? And if I’m exploring these greater social issues, should I instead be mapping the controversies surrounding this discourse (on social media, for example), rather trying to analyze any particular text itself? How could I possibly choose texts that are representative of such large claims? One tentative thought I had was to analyze my own poems. This approach is appealing, not only because I’m most comfortable targeting myself, but also because it could offer the clearest dataset. That said, I hesitate to make this “critical” project about my own creative work, about which I may know or think too much, or at least, too much more than an algorithm or computer. And my poems are certainly not “representative” on their own.

That’s enough of this meandering post for now – – (I’m glad I can edit this) and welcome any thoughts or feedback – –

– – Sara

PS – and if this “dataset” proves too large or complicated with its various tools and politics (which I’m starting to think it very well might), another idea I have (not related!) is to analyze the language (again: words, syntax, and structural forms) that teachers (adjuncts and or full-time professors) use in their writing composition syllabi (lets say, within the CUNY network), as well as looking at the texts that they teach. I’m pretty sure that “official” student evaluations are made public (at CUNY, teachers need to agree to this) – but there is also the (problematic, but possibly useful) Rate My Professors, among other blogs and social media where student reactions might occur. It could be interesting to look at the relationship between how composition syllabi are written and how students perform and / or react. And I think this project could lead to the kind of “browsing” that Stephen Ramsey describes, where as my long, pervious proposal above might constitute too much of a “search,” and one that is overloaded, at that.

Other kinds of literary maps

Not as quantified and far more whimsical than Moretti’s maps, the drawings created by Andrew DeGraff (who’s described as a ‘pop cartographer’) cover a so-called atlas of literary maps. Check them out here, along with a time lapse video of his creative process. As he is quoted in the article, “These are maps for people who seek to travel beyond the lives and places they already know (or think they know). The goal here isn’t to become found, but only to become more lost.” I don’t know that Moretti would think his maps were that useful, and I don’t imagine that they would qualify as a DH project, but I bet DeGraff discovered these texts in new ways in the process of creating these visualizations. At the very least, he probably had to do some close reading.

New Cool DH Tool

I subscribe to the American Antiquarian Society blog Past is Present, and I receive all sorts of wonderful things in the emails from them.

After two years of DH development under the guidance of a DH fellow – Molly O’Hagan Hardy – the AAS now has a dedicated DH curator (same person) and an official DH component of their mission, which means (I hope) that even more of their resources will be available to lay-antiquarians like me who cannot slog up to Worcester, MA and noodle around in the archives just for kicks.

Their image archives are especially fun to peruse, and they offer a wealth of resources under the Digital AAS banner.

Anyway, this MARC records conversion tutorial just fell over the transom of my inbox, and I think it could be a very useful tool for one or some of us, if not now, then in the future. Putting your data into a CSV format opens up many possibilities, including data visualizations.

Lisa

 

Terrorism Data

Hi all,

I am interested in studying the history of domestic terrorism in the U.S., so I went looking for datasets to that effect. What I was hoping to find was a comprehensive repository that covered most, if not all of U.S. history, and included incidents like the Oklahoma city bombing, alongside attacks on abortionists, hate crimes, and lynchings in the post-Civil War era (In the best of all possible databases, the decimation of Native American communities and cultural practices would also be included, even though the FBI defines terrorism as requiring illegal acts, and often enough the crimes against these communities were legally-sanctioned). Additionally, I was hoping to find basic information on who the victims and perpetrators were (at least with regards to incidents from the last few decades), as well as historical context for each incident. Perhaps I went looking in the wrong place, but as of now it appears that such a comprehensive database doesn’t exist, which is odd and upsetting. However, I did find smaller, though still formidable, datasets that tackle parts of the problem. One of these is from the Global Terrorism Database, maintained by the University of Maryland, which provides information on terror attacks worldwide. Granted, their information only goes back as far as 1970 and it neither includes hate crimes nor legally-sanctioned terror against ethnic groups. That said, their dataset is still the most informative and usable of what I’ve found so far, because it consists of the raw data behind their charts (i.e. information on each and every incident counted). More often than not in my search I found well-meaning organizations that provided aggregate counts rather than the specific data that went into those aggregates, so I was very grateful to find Maryland’s GTD.

I am going to use it to a) mine its listings of domestic terrorism in the U.S. and b) to compare incidences of terror – both domestic and international – in the U.S. with terror in the Middle East. Over the course of this semester, I would like to work towards making animated visualizations of what I find in here. I am excluding events from the rest of the globe outside these two areas just for the sake of manageability.

— Ashleigh

Hypergraphy as a Garden of Forking Paths

In zeroing in on a specific data set to begin with in my building-up-toward a more fully-conceived project for next Spring, I’ve found it necessary to first demarcate my chosen subject matter. To work backwards so to speak.

The prefix “hyper” refers to multiplicity, abundance, and heterogeneity. A hypertext is more than a written text, a hypermedium is more than a single medium. – Preface to HyperCities

Hypergraphy, sometimes called Hypergraphics or metaGraphics : a method of mapping and graphic creation used in the mid-20th century by various Surrealist movements. The approach shares some similarities with Asemic writing, a wordless open semantic form of writing which means literally “having no specific semantic content.” Some forms of Caligraphy (think stylized Japanese ink brush work) also share a similar function, whereby the non-specificity leaves space for the reader to fill in, interpret, and deduce meaning. The viewer is suspended in a state somewhere between reading and looking. Traditionally, true Asemic writing only takes place when the creator of the asemic work can not read their own writing.

Example work:

GrammeS_-_Ultra_Lettrist_hypergraphics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergraphy#/media/File:GrammeS_-_Ultra_Lettrist_hypergraphics.jpg

Jorge Luis Borges was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet, translator, and librarian. A key figure in the Spanish language literature movement, he is sometimes thought of as one of the founders of magical realism. He notably went blind in 1950 before his death. In his blindness, he continued to dictate new works (mostly poetry) and give lectures. Themes in his work include books, imaginary libraries, the art of memory, the search for wisdom, mythological and metaphorical labyrinths, dreams, as well as the concepts of time and eternity. One of his stories, the “Library of Babel”, centers around a library containing every possible 410-page text. Another “The Garden of Forking Paths” presents the idea of forking paths through networks of time, none of which is the same, all of which are equal. Borges goes back to, time and again, the recurring image of “a labyrinth that folds back upon itself in infinite regression” so we “become aware of all the possible choices we might make.”[88]

The forking paths have branches to represent these choices that ultimately lead to different endings.

Borges is also know for the philosophical term the “Borgesian Conundrum”. From wikipedia:

The philosophical term “Borgesian conundrum” is named after him and has been defined as the ontological question of “whether the writer writes the story, or it writes him.”[89] The original concept put forward by Borges is in Kafka and His Precursors—after reviewing works that were written before Kafka’s, Borges wrote:

If I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have enumerated resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. The second fact is the more significant. In each of these texts we find Kafka’s idiosyncrasy to a greater or lesser degree, but if Kafka had never written a line, we would not perceive this quality; in other words, it would not exist. The poem “Fears and Scruples” by Browning foretells Kafka’s work, but our reading of Kafka perceptibly sharpens and deflects our reading of the poem. Browning did not read it as we do now. In the critics’ vocabulary, the word ‘precursor’ is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotation of polemics or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.”

I’m circling around 2 or 3 different project ideas:

  1. Close Reading/Qualitative Analysis: Hypertextualizd Borges poems/short stories with an emphasis on works created during his period of blindness, re-imagined as a garden of forking paths. Break down the works into levels of constituent parts. Create an engine to re-esemble them based on a methodological algorithm informed by his ideas surrounding non-linearity, and the morphology of his oeuvre.
    1.5 *Potential Visualization Component: Hyperagraphy Engine (simulated blindness) that interacts with the hypertextualized artifacts from 1.0.
  2. Distance Reading/Quantitative Analysis: Topics as “forms of discourse” in Borges and his precursors (Potential Candidates: Cervantes, Kafka, Schopenhauer, Quevedo, Gracian, Pascal, Coleridge, Poe.)
  3. …..(Running out of time, will continue this post tonight).

 

Taylor

 

 

 

 

 

The Museum of Modern Art

Hi everyone,

Searching around for interesting datasets to play with, trying to understand how DH can help my job, I found this interesting collection on GitHub about the MoMA.
I would be good file to play with for a project.

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) acquired its first artworks in 1929, the year it was established. Today, the Museum’s evolving collection contains almost 200,000 works from around the world spanning the last 150 years. The collection includes an ever-expanding range of visual expression, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, photography, architecture, design, film, and media and performance art.

MoMA is committed to helping everyone understand, enjoy, and use our collection. The Museum’s website features almost 60,000 artworks from nearly 10,000 artists. This research dataset contains more than 120,000 records, representing all of the works that have been accessioned into MoMA’s collection and cataloged in our database. It includes basic metadata for each work, including title, artist, date made, medium, dimensions, and date acquired by the Museum. Some of these records have incomplete information and are noted as “not Curator Approved.”

At this time, the data is available in CSV format, encoded in UTF-8. While UTF-8 is the standard for multilingual character encodings, it is not correctly interpreted by Excel on a Mac. Users of Excel on a Mac can convert the UTF-8 to UTF-16 so the file can be imported correctly.

Here is the link of the page to download the Excel format.

I hope this could be useful and interesting to open your horizons

https://github.com/MuseumofModernArt/collection

Nico

 

Graphs, Maps, Trees

I am a reader. Not exactly sure what it means by modern standards, but I call myself a reader because I like how books impact my brain. Be it a historical novel or Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, Trees, I savor words selected by the author and connections they create in my mind. Imagination is what I believe has been driving human civilization from the very beginning. To imagine is to be human. By reading, imagination ignites. I have a friend who prefers not to read interesting books while managing multiple projects at work since he knows it keeps his mind distracted to the point he hardly makes it to work. He says he loves to be in a different reality, but books sometimes imprison his brain in a very particular way. My friend confided to me that in his twenties he would sometimes call in sick and simply stay home with his book. It felt good, but also terrified him. Although I have never missed work because of a book, I often do not want to re-emerge from a different reality. The explanation to this phenomenon can be found in Moretti’s chapter three, Trees. Literature, especially novels, evolves and adjusts to the new realities of a certain generation. There is an innumerable variation of books to every person’s liking. If someone misses work because of a book, it means she found the one with the correct embranchment. Moretti’s tree schemes show there is an indefinite number of ramification in novels. If you were never enchanted by a novel you might not have found the right one for yourself yet. But if you did and you are totally immersed in a fictional world, maybe start analyzing why the book engages you this much. I think Maps, Moretti’s second chapter, would be the most helpful in this inquiry. Is it a circular or linear map of fictional reality that makes you want to come back? Having reduced the text to minimum elements, what geometric form arises by creating connections between the characters? Why is it happening and what meaning does it convey to you? Graphs, Maps, Trees provides its readers with an interesting analysis of connections between social/historical situation of a certain timeframe current to it novels, and with an interesting analysis of schemes novels unwittingly produce in human imagination. I think I received some of the answers from Moretti.

Impediments to Digital History

Dr. Stephen Robertson’s essay, “The Differences between Digital History and Digital Humanities” engages many thought-provoking points, foremost in my mind, the challenges surrounding access to information. For all of the debates concerning what it is exactly that DH is doing, what unique qualities it brings to the table, if the table is locked away, we’re left standing. That intellectual property, digital or otherwise, is often protected as a commodity is an intuitive reality. Access to both print and digital subscriptions to academic journals, by and large, entails substantial fees. Some of the fully digital tools have locked-down APIs. That being said, the academy has a unique responsibility, even an existential one, to facility open access to ideas and information. Instead of going into the reasons why, I wanted to write a quick conversation starter that might point at one of many potential solutions.

Piggy-backing off of a recent development in New Media reporting, I can envision a mainline channel into the second largest repository of intellectual property in the world (although at this point, not the most technically agile – a separate problem) the Library of Congress. The Story Corps audio archive has been preserved at the Library of Congress for years. However, the Story Corps mobile application is new, and potentially trans-formative. Although in the past, reporters from Story Corp would sit down with interviewers and interviewees to help them record their stories, this was time-consuming, costly, and largely inefficient. The SC application allows users with smartphones to record and upload interviews that will be digitally preserved at the LoC, instantly, at the push of a button.

My question: How can the Library of Congress, a tax payer-funded institution be used from the outset to facilitate open access to new, digitally-born intellectual property? Can we look toward partnerships with a current, or yet-to-be-created government entity, and privately-funded organizations like Story Corp as a model for guardianship of ideas? What would such a partnership look like? What would we call it?

Response to Impediments to Digital History (forum post)

See Taylor’s forum post

There are some models for open-access peer-reviewed work (that I mentioned in a forum post last week), which, if they became the “standard practice” for humanities publishing, would address some of the issues you bring up. In the sciences, Plos One seems to have achieved the tricky balance of maintaining open access to intellectual property and its status as a forum for sound, “legitimate,” research.

But, as Taylor points out, it’s not just about access, it’s about money. What are viable funding models for open-access publishing? PubMed is a publicly-funded (NIH) clearing house for research in the health sciences. But it’s highly unlikely that public funding would sustain open-access publication in the humanities. 1) public money is scarce (even for the sciences these days; 2) public money isn’t necessarily managed or spent well, and spending decisions are often highly idiosyncratic, depending on who’s making them (exemplified by the Library of Congress controversy); 3) unlike scientific research, the humanities doesn’t have the promise (at least in theory) of a “final product” that can be marketed for profit. Its only product, other than scholarship and scholarly engagement, is experiential: this requires interactive public engagement, which requires that the public is interested, which requires that public is aware of its existence. Which is the only outcome that is justifying public (or much of private) funding in the humanities these days. Put another way, how does a Kickstarter campaign to digitize an archive of crumbling, century-old Haitian newspapers with immense value to Francophone historians compete with a campaign to support an independent documentary feature film?

Possibly the LoC could connect with, or help to establish partnerships, with organizations similar to PLOS One. There are existing open-access humanities and multidisciplinary networks that were established in Europe, like the Directory of Open Access Journals, which is a non-profit that survives through corporate sponsorship and membership fees. Matt mentioned the UK’s Open Library of Humanities . It is also an independent non-profit, and presumably has both government and private sponsors.

It’s not really a “crowdsourced” publication model like those I mentioned above, but the Smithsonian/Folkways project is an interesting example. (The Smithsonian acquired Folkways Records after Moses Asch died so that this material would be preserved.) It operates as commercial-private venture, and receives no public funding. It’s not really a forum for hard-core academic scholarship, but it has a wealth of artifacts and information on ethnomusicology and music history. A good deal of its offerings are fee-based, but it also offers free access to playlists, podcasts, and teaching tools, some free downloads, and lots of information on American and world folk music. Its collection and archive are open to researchers; if these alone were made freely accessible off-site, they would be an invaluable public resource. In certain ways, it looks like a large-scale model of that used by the American Social History Project at the GC.