Engl507

Seminar Notes: Meeting 5 (Patterns and Surfaces)

A quick review of the workshops we've conducted thus far, with an emphasis on why:

• Markdown: we are using Markdown to give you a working sense of how markup languages work, without the need to dive fully into HTML5 or XML (which are, for better or worse, increasingly automated). Not only is Markdown growing in popularity across the disciplines (in part due to its simplicity as well as its conduciveness to interoperability); it is also a nice way to learn how markup differs from programming.
• Git and GitHub: for practically any digital humanities project (or writing project, really) knowing how to version and difference your work matters. Together with Subversion (SVN), Git is a popular revision control mechanism across the disciplines. It also gives you some experience with the command line, which (or so I assume) is an alternative interface for many of you, giving you another perspective on how textual production is mediated. While the command line is not somehow immediate, using it does underscore how graphical user interfaces shape epistemology, operator experience, and argumentation with computers. Additionally, GitHub is providing us with a concrete sense of how the "fury mode" of communication might unfold, shifting us away from one-to-one communications (e.g., between student and instructor) toward many-to-many communications, where the idea of the "original" text is less interesting than how that text has changed over time, across iterations and versions.
• Wget: As a command line application, wget afforded us the opportunity to explore how scholars might read (or scrape, or scan, or spider) the web with computers, in order to develop a stronger sense of the relation between memory (e.g., how things are compiled or assembled) and storage (e.g., how things are saved or inscribed). In so doing, we got a sense of how computers can read for what many people will overlook or miss, including source code and unreferenced files.
• MALLET: Some hands-on experience with MALLET should give us a specific sense of how distant or surface reading happen through hybrid methods (or human-computer interpretations). Additionally, topic modelling and machine learning can be compared with similar methods, including text analysis, in order to better understand how computational approaches spark conjecture or speculation (as opposed to either truth claims about texts or graphical expressions that make arguments on their own).

A few remarks, by Moretti, to consider:

• "Reading 'more' is always a good thing, but not the solution."
• "world literature is not an object, it's a problem, and a problem that asks for a new critical method: and no one has ever found a method by just reading more texts"
• "the ambition is now directly proportional to the distance from the text: the more ambitious the project, the greater must the distance be"
• "we know how to read texts, now let's learn how not to read them. Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems."
• "the modern novel first arises not as an autonomous development but as a compromise between a western formal influence (usually French or English) and local materials"
• "The one-and-unequal literary system is not just an external network here, it doesn't remain outside the text: it's embedded well into its form."
• "Trees and branches are what nation-states cling to; waves are what markets do."
• "you become a comparatist for a very simple reason: because you are convinced that that viewpoint is better"

A few remarks, by Best and Marcus, to consider:

• "We were trained in symptomatic reading, became attached to the power it gave to the act of interpreting, and find it hard to let go of the belief that texts and their readers have an unconscious." (1)
• "Symptomatic readings also often locate outright absences, gaps, and ellipses in texts, and then ask what those absences mean, what forces create them, and how they signify the questions that motivate the text, but that the text itself cannot articulate" (3)
• "For Jameson, interpretation is 'unmasking'; meaning is the allegorical difference between surface and depth; and the critic restores to the surface the history that the text represses (20)." (5)
• "The left-leaning literary critic thus need not add theory to the text or gather texts that exemplify his theories; it is enough simply to register what the text itself is saying." (8)
• "Price breaks completely with symptomatic methods by suggesting that we do not, and need not, read books at all. Ironically, she locates the authority for that research program in books themselves, albeit ones that tell stories about how books are collected, displayed, and exchanged; used, abused, and reused; toted, shared, and preserved—everything but read." (8)
• "[Cheng] suggest that we replace the symptom, which depends on the contrast between surface and depth, with a constellation of multiple surfaces understood as concealing nothing." (9)
• "A surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through." (9)
• "Surface as materiality. This kind of surface emerges primarily in two forms—in the history of the book and in cognitive reading." (9)
• "Surface as the intricate verbal structure of literary language. This understanding of surface produces close readings that do not seek hidden meanings, but focus on unraveling what Samuel Otter . . . has called the 'linguistic density' and 'verbal complexity' of literary texts." (10)
• "Embrace of the surface as an affective and ethical stance. Such an embrace involves accepting texts, deferring to them instead of mastering or using them as objects, and refuses the depth model of truth, which dismisses surfaces as inessential and deceptive." (10)
• "Attention to surface as a practice of critical description. This focus assumes that texts can reveal their own truths because texts mediate themselves; what we think theory brings to texts (form, structure, meaning) is already present in them." (11)
• "Surface as the location of patterns that exist within and across texts. This notion includes narratology, thematic criticism, genre criticism, and discourse analysis." (11)
• "Surface as literal meaning. What Sharon Marcus has called 'just reading' accounts for what is in the text 'without construing presence as absence or affirmation as negation.'" (12)
• "Just reading sees ghosts as presences, not absences, and lets ghosts be ghosts, instead of saying what they are ghosts of." (13)
• "Criticism that valorizes the freedom of the critic has often assumed that an adversarial relation to the object of criticism is the only way for the critic to free himself from the text's deceptive, ideological surface and uncover the truth that the text conceals. We want to suggest that, in relinquishing the freedom dream that accompanies the work of demystification, we might be groping toward some equally valuable, if less glamorous, states of mind." (16-17)
• "Computers are weak interpreters but potent describers, anatomizers, taxonomists." (17)
• "We are not envisioning a world in which computers replace literary critics but are curious about one in which we work with them to expand what we do." (17)
• "Sometimes our subjectivity will help us see a text more clearly, and sometimes it will not." (18)

Also, some responses to surface reading:

• "I do not dispute that the stultification Said described has occurred in some versions of symptomatic reading, as it does in every kind of reading. What I dispute is the attribution of this failure to Marxism." (Bartolovich 117)
• "The problem is that the aspiration to 'describe texts accurately,' which they privilege methodologically, cannot in itself decisively authorize one reading over another, since the same text will support many plausible ones" (118)
• "Surface readers propose instead that we should divest ourselves of any 'agenda' . . . They urge neutrality in relation to texts over what they call 'an adversarial relation to the object of criticism.'" (118)
• "As [Jameson] has repeatedly argued, we may ignore history, but it does not ignore us. And literature, like everything else in our world that is structured by inequality, is a site of struggle, whether we acknowledge the struggle or not." (118)
• "Given how similar surface readers' claims about their practice are to Fish's, it is surprising that surface readers seem disinterested in all forms of deconstruction; but the more important similarity between surface reading and Fish's project concerns the latter's relation to scale." (119)
• "It occurs to neither Fish nor surface readers that there might be a level of debate at which critics and texts are dialectically engaged in a quest for truth that exceeds them both—as well as the 'literary institution.'" (119)
• "The dialectic between theory and evidence produces results that we might not want or expect. . . . Also, of course, I began my interpretive work grounded in materialist, feminist, and queer theories that allow these questions to be asked. These theories can take us to unexpected places, but only if we allow the collection of evidence to gather its own momentum and force, and this force is not simply a matter of quantity—although the more one reads . . ." (Straub 142)
• "What I take away from Marcus and Best is that I must prepare to be surprised by what I find, to have my suspicions expanded rather than confirmed." (143)

A few remarks, by Klein, to consider:

• "The only reason this letter appears in the list of results for a keyword search on 'James Hemings' is that the editors of the Papers of Thomas Jefferson have noted that the 'former servant' refers to Hemings, and this information has been added to the digital version of the document as metadata. Because the default scope of a keyword search in the Digital Edition includes this extratextual information, as well as the text of the document itself, a researcher need not distinguish between textual content and editorial note." (663)
• "to call for a shift away from identifying and recovering silences in the archive to a new focus, instead, on animating the mysteries of the past" (665)
• "But rather than puth forth a rhetoric of Fordian potentiality—more efficient 'distant reading' or more effective 'macroanalysis,' to name two of the digital humanities' most well-known pursuits—the field must employ its tools and methods so as to produce humanities critique. Indeed, in its strongest instantiation, the digital humanities demonstrates, through a combination of technical, analytical, and theoretical means, not only what but also how we as critics come to know." (668)
• "Despite its importance, however, this letter does not appear in the results of a keyword search for James Hemings, as the editors have not marked it under his name." (670)
• "Indeed, among the greatest contributions of the digital humanities is its ability to illuminate the position of the critic with respect to his or her archive of study, and to call attention to the ethical and affective as well as epistemological implications of his or her methodological choices." (672)
• "To visualize this movement, rather than a record that is static or fixed, resists what Best (2011, 157) has described as the 'logic and ethic of recovery' that re-incscribes bodies and voices as lost. This image of absence challenges us as critics to make the unrecorded stories that we detect—those we might otherwise consign to the past—instead expand with motion and meaning." (675)
• "The implications of the visual rhetoric of the Notes extend from Jefferson's desire to assert the unequivocal nature of the evidence presented, to his attempt to enforce a unanimity of response among the book's citizen readers." (677)
• "As scholars, we do not see the labor involved in transcribing manuscripts into machine-readable text, nor do we think of the discussions—equal parts technical and theoretical—that contribute to the development of the encoding standards and database design that allow us to perform our search queries. We are not trained to ask questions about metadata or controlled vocabularies—questions that archivists and their technical teams ask every day." (683)