In spirit of human e-zine potentiality, the committee for real culture and the revolution in everyday life proposes a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Situationist International, that non-conformist, non-consumerist social movement of détournement, social collage, and anti-capitalist imaginaries.

a non-situationist journal of the ministry of human potential

Enjoy!

Caveats and Disclaimers: As with existence itself and pandemics notwithstanding, the journal prefers its human potential to be under permanent construction. Your mileage may vary using any browsers other than Chrome; living links are not guaranteed.

In anticipation of our zine-sharing conference on Tuesday, I’d like to post some of the text found within the zine I collaborated on with the Crown Heights Collective:

Singular.

A friend and I wanted to collaborate on a longform poem, something along the lines of a lesser quality “Desolation Row” or “The Wasteland.” But they said they didn’t want to create any art that was “Covid-related,” seeing as how they believed it’d be in “bad taste.” So, naturally, we didn’t collaborate. Not all are granted the morbid possibility of commenting on history as it is occuring–you and I now shoulder this burden.

The pandemic is all I can think about, and it’s a multi-faceted thought process, including a difficulty in quantifying the thousands of people being hospitalized or dying on a daily basis, a complete unknowing of when this will end (“Nothing ever ends, Adrian,” says the godhead, Dr. Manhattan, to the off-brand Rameses II, Ozymandias, in the latter moments of Alan Moore’s Watchmen), and what the new world will look like, because, let’s face it, the old world, the world we were residents of several months ago, is gone, and it isn’t going to come back.

“It was a matter of time, I suppose.”

What follows are pictures and words from the old world, before the Pause, and some from the In-Between, within the womb of the Pause, compiled with the help of the friends with whom I am confronting history.

In the second section of his essay “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” [1] (entitled “The Flaneur”), Walter Benjamin presents a literature that could not appear in a setting other than the nineteenth century Paris. This panoramic literature, of which “the inconspicuous, paperback, pocket-size volumes called physiologies” are but an instance, is mean to be sold on the street [1]. According to Benjamin, “these works consist of individual sketches which, as it were, reproduce the dynamic foreground of those panoramas with their anecdotal form and the sweeping background of the panoramas with their store of information” [1]. It is when examining the question of what is the flaneur Baudelaire’s relationship with those works of a literature that I wandered into the site “Paris: Capital of the 19th Century” [2] for the purpose of obtaining a better understanding of what panoramic literature really is.  

The website is painted mainly with the colors of brown (#4a2e2b), gallery (#E2D8CC), stonewall (#7B7367), crab apple (#853830) and copper rust (#914d43) according to a color analyzer. On each webpage of the site, a navigation sidebar menu is located on the left column whereas the main content is on the right. 

The page that I browsed while studying about Benjamin’s text presents an essay revised in 2005, entitled “Panoramic Literature in 19th Century Paris: Robert Macaire as a Type of Everyday” [3]. If you scroll down to the very bottom of the page, you would find that this student essay was originally written in partial fulfillment of requirements for a class in 2004. The introduction of the essay provides me enough information to continue to read Benjamin. The author of the essay wants to know what is special about the hybrid panoramic literature, why it could not have existed in any other time or place, and what does its exceptionality tell about the culture of Paris in the nineteenth century [3]. In the introductory paragraphs, what has also been briefly mentioned is that panoramic literature is a product of the mechanical age in which printing technology is prevalent, paper is cheap and new modes of marketing and selling aid the reproduction of a variety of materials from the first daily newspaper to physiologies.

The “Paris: Capital of the 19^th Century” site is a project of the Brown University French Studies and Comparative Literature Departments; developed and hosted by Brown’s Center for Digital Scholarship; constructed by PhD students and professors. As it claims in the “About This Site” page, the project aims at offering free access to the full texts and images of selected books and periodicals from the University’s Library collections – mainly, the Anne S. K. Brown Collection and the Starred Books Collection, so that researchers, students and faculty who are interested in history, art, literature of the 19th century Paris can use this site as a visual tool to facilitate their understanding of the complexities of this time-period [2]. Since the site offers a lot of ways to access the texts and images, navigating those paths towards data is just like navigating the streets of a city. Hyperlinks, search engines and filters are the available means of finding materials in which you might have an interest. 

For example, in the “BROWSE” section, navigation buttons would lead you to all images collected by the library. Those images are sorted into categories in two ways; you can browse them either by metadata categories (“creators and contributors”, “subject”, and “title”) or by thematic categories (“historical period” and “thematic category”). Although labelling the last one “thematic category” makes the broader term “thematic categories” sound redundant, the image collection pages themselves are very easy to navigate. 

By using the button next to the label “historical period” and then the button paired with “1852-1870 (The Second Empire)”, the reader is able to get to the page where the first image presented is edited by Geirges Guillain, published in 1925 and titled “Le “bois” de la Salpêtrière et la chapelle”. This image is “a view of the chapel of the hospital, taken from the adjoining woods. The chapel was commissioned in 1669 by Louis XIV” according to the description [4].

Overall, the site is like a huge collaborative notebook; every text or image of the selected material is annotated with explanatory notes. In addition, it also provides researchers a long yet useful annotated bibliography which can be accessed by a content filter. However, some of the contents of the website, just like some of the city paths, are temporarily blocked. You can only access from one side but not from the other. For instance, I am only able to get to the Panoramic Literature essay page by googling the key words “panoramic literature” but cannot work out how to get there through the entrance of the home page.

Reference

[1]       W. Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006.
[2]       “Paris: Capital of the 19th Century,” Jun-2011. https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/about.html (accessed Mar. 20, 2020).
[3]       A. Zevin, “Panoramic Literature in 19th Century Paris: Robert Macaire as a Type of Everyday,” Paris: Captial of the 19th Century. https://library.brown.edu/cds/paris/Zevin.html (accessed Mar. 24, 2020).
[4]       “LE ‘BOIS’ DE LA SALPÊTRIÈRE ET LA CHAPELLE,” Paris: Capital of the 19th Century. https://library.brown.edu/cds/catalog/catalog.php?verb=render&id=1399399202590012&colid=6&view=showmods (accessed Mar. 24, 2020).

As an effort emanating from a graduate class taught by Dr. Gabrielle Foreman at the University of Delaware in 2012, The Colored Conventions Project: Bringing 19th-Century Black Organizing to Digital Life (CCP) is a website that “documents nineteenth-century Black collective organizing and highlights the many leaders and places involved in the convention movement, bringing them to digital life for a new generation of researchers, students and community scholars” (Colored Conventions Project, 2020). In considering the effort from a range perspectives including textual, literary, and media studies, the CCP serves as a model for the emerging field of Digital Humanities, particularly in its mashup of open sourced data that enables public do-it-yourself interpretation and curated content collections that engage the public with academic scholarship. In its combined use of internet media and in-person public research conferences and campaigns, the CCP successfully carries out its commitment to defending the social values and communities the project’s founders and contributors aspire to serve.

Foreman and the project’s co-founders effectively leverage a variety of new media technologies in order to bring about (1) improvements in the institutions of higher education, the humanities, and primary and secondary education; and (2) contributions to the social movements and social policy associated with the issues and social institutions surrounding the experiences and lives of African Americans. As a contribution to academic discourse, Foreman seeks to rebalance and recontextualise the agency of African Americans in the 19th century, arguing that the traditional emphasis on the abolitionist movement, the anti-slavery movement, and the underground railroad overlooks the self-organizing and autonomous efforts of African Americans. By publishing the digitized physical archives of the conventions to the Web, Foreman extends and in certain cases bypasses officially approved curricula and textbook editorial policies governing secondary and primary educational institutions that would otherwise omit the narratives, roles, and impact of African Americans in US history. As a contribution to public affairs and civil society, Foreman situates the digital project in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, thus explicitly aligning the project’s collective efforts with social and political activism, social mobilization, and social movements seeking economic, civil, and human rights, and the dismantling of institutions of racism and exclusion. What makes the CCP innovative and in a certain sense revolutionary is the degree to which the project, through is remediation of media, additionally resocializes the social action of the original subjects through the collective efforts of a team of digital workers–including researchers, archivists, librarians, teachers, and technologists–together with a public network of educators and online participants. It could be argued that such a recursive and generative process of social action parallels and in some sense recapitulates poststructuralist notion of interpretation as re-interpretation and Derrida’s notion of the mimetic nature at the heart of representation and by extension media production (Bolter and Grusin 1999, 53n, 56). The generative social action evident in the CCP additionally confirms Walter Benjamin’s proposition of the emancipatory potential of the technologies of mass media (Benjamin 1968). The CCP demonstrates how a careful curatorial balance between Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s notions of immediacy and hypermediacy can utilize artifice without sacrificing authenticity (Bolter and Grusin, 1999).

The CCP effectively leverages the diverse, hybrid, and embedded nature of online digital media. Starting with primary sources from which the digital archive is derived and remediated, the project’s artifacts reference and reflect the thoughts, language, communications, biographies and events connected to formal and organized gatherings of African Americans. Housed in the University of Delaware Library Institutional Repository, the physical artifacts consist of official convention documents for nearly 30 national conventions and over 150 state and regional conventions held between 1830 and 1899 in over 30 states throughout the nation. In addition to the official minutes, proceedings, and reports, the archives contain other primary sources including periodical articles, speeches, letters, transcripts, and images.

In its application of new media technologies, the visual interface of the website consists of a series of exhibits and teaching modules, designed to create for its visitors an online hypermediated museum experience, which includes videos, photographs, narratives and contextual interpretations showcasing and contextualizing the events, individuals, and organizations associated with the conventions. The reach of the website material and data is extended through a social media presence, teaching partnerships, and a variety of public events organized by members of the team. Beyond digital renderings of these primary source artifacts, the website maintains an online database, offering browsing and boolean search tools of all digitized and searchable document images, which is powered by the Omeka open-source content management system for digital collections first released in 2008. Additionally the minutes and proceedings are available as a downloadable plain text and CSV corpus licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 International License. By making this corpus freely available to the public, the CCP contributes to the expanding initiatives of the movement for Open Educational Resources.

The CCP achieves its remediation of the archive’s artifacts and the resocialization of the colored conventions’ efforts through a team of seventy-nine current and former participants. In addition to executive, advisory, and general administration roles, the construction and ongoing development of the website and its associated programs and activities involve committees and roles related to communications, curriculum, databases, digital archives, digital exhibits, digital visualizations, grants, graphic design, meeting minutes, photography, research, social media, strategic planning, teaching partners, and website editing. While the digital project does not attempt to recreate conventions virtually or revitalize the specific goals of the conventions themselves, it nonetheless carries forward the social values and aspirations of the convention organizers and participants. In its embrace of the intrinsically collaborative nature of digital and visual media, the CCP affirms Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s notion following Roland Barthes that the individual voice is never fully alone (Fitzpatrick 11). The incorporation and sponsorship of public research activities illustrated by crowdsourced transcribe-a-thons and public searches for missing documents additionally affirms Fitzpatrick’s assertion that “technologies and cultures are mutually determining and thus must evolve in concert” (62), confirming the view that social life is neither technological determined by new digital media nor driven entirely by non-technical social action.

The data provided by the downloadable corpus, which consists of the text of the minutes of the conventions, along with the search functions offered through the Omeka online search interface, enables computer literate individuals with access the Internet the ability to undertake do-it-yourself research which resocializes the self-organizing empowerment the conventions themselves promoted, encouraged, and achieved. As Samantha de Vera observes in researching convention minutes for information about black women’s moments of resistance, social conditions, and the intersection of sexism and racism, many clues about the social contexts surrounding the conventions serve as a point of departure for further investigation (de Vera, 2018). The CCP thus represents a freely accessible resource for professional and non-professional researchers and demonstrates how generative digital technologies and data create opportunities to replicate learning and collective organizing in civil society at large.

While the CCP’s multimedia content (its diversity of media formats) and multimodal content (its diversity of modes of interaction) support Marshall McLuhan’s notion that “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium”, its greatest significance argues against McLuhan’s proposition that the “medium is the message” (McLuhan, 1964). McLuhan’s emphasis on the speed and scale of media as the determining characteristic does not correspond to the difference between the CCP as a digital project in contrast with its physical archives. Without the digital archives, the CCP would reach a world wide audience through traditional print publishing channels. The fact that the CCP is in the process of publishing a forthcoming print volume of the archives testifies to the value of technology regardless of speed or scale. Instead the CCP points to the socially transformative potentiality of media that Walter Benjamin identified for the role of film and photography (Benjamin 1968). Media reinforce each other and serve as conduits for transmitting and resocializing social values as the end point of symbolic mediation, picking up additional meaning with each mediation that may contradict authorial intention and values but cannot entirely subvert them.

The CCP and other online digital projects offer rich spaces for problematizing the the role of technology in global cultures and political economies. More specifically they provide the Digital Humanities case studies through which to theorize how we might disentangle the labor process in New Internet Media from their commodification in market dominated societies. Such an analysis might point to the critical importance and emancipatory nature of the Internet and digital media that might help accomplish what the Russian-American anarchist Emma Goldman called “a fundamental transvaluation of values. A transvaluation not only of social, but also of human values”, transforming “the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society” (Goldman 1924; Graham 2020).

Works Cited

Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Bolter, J. David and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

de Vera, Samantha. 2018. “‘We the Ladies …. have been deprived a voice’: Uncovering Black Women’s Lives through the Colored Conventions”, Archive 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 27.

Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. 2011. Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. New York: NYU Press.

Goldman, Emma. 1924. My Further Disillusionment with Russia. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page & Company.

Graham, Robert. 2020. Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas. https://robertgraham.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/3796/.

McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw Hill Education.

The Colored Conventions Project. 2020. Colored Conventions Project. https://coloredconventions.org/.

Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice (SNEEJ). 1996. Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing. Jemez, New Mexico. https://www.ejnet.org/ej/jemez.pdf.

The landing page of the Viral Texts projects immediately introduces any visitor of the site to the purpose of the project: “Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th Century Newspapers and Magazines”. The tagline or vision statement is displayed to the reader upon a remediated image of a 19th-century market-place, situating the reader immediately within the time and place of which this project is dedicated. This is further emphasized by the typeface used to capture the title of the project, which is written in a century gothic style font thus corroborating the underlying theme of the project which is based in texts of the 19th Century. On the same page, after scrolling down past a quote by Alexis de Tocqueville the purpose of project is outlined – the site provides a collection of “data, visualizations, interactive exhibits and both computational and literary publications drawn from the Viral Texts project”. (It is noteworthy to mention that each artifact indicated in this sentence is hyperlinked to enable easy navigation from the landing page. However, when I clicked the first link for “data” I was met with a 400 bad request message. All the other links worked, and took me to their respective pages in new tabs).

The site does not demand much from the visitor by way of discerning who, what and why the project exists, The project has been created for “scholars” in service of helping them to “understand what qualities” contributed to newstories, magazines, fiction and poetry texts “go viral” in 19th century magazines and newspapers. Due to the nature of “going viral” in 19th century magazines, the project sets out to answer a number of general questions about which texts ended up going viral, and how this then influenced political, cultural and social ideas among audiences of the time. From an introductory perspective the project does a good job of setting up its purpose, intended readership and how it will go about to achieve its mission. It also goes a step further in laying out what users can expect from the project by way of timeframes and additional content. The emphasis on the sponsors of the project provide an indication of who may be most interested in this – scholars of the digital humanities as well as those interested in texts, maps and networks.

The second tab following the “about” section directs readers away from the meta narrative – a description of the website and the project – into the actual content of the project itself. The first tab here describes itself as a blog and my instinct was to believe that the blog would have up-to-date, periodical updates about progress on the content development, current information from the authors, and an opportunity for the owners of the site to engage in dialogue with visitors. The headline at the top of the page “News, as well as pre- and post-print publications” validated that belief, however there were only three posts on the blog, one from 2015, one from 2016 and one from 2019. At first glance it is apparent that this is not a reliable place to receive news and updates about the project, though the most recent post does provide an overview of the coming book being produced by the team. The second post is from 2016 and blurs the boundary between blog and academic paper. The disclaimer at the top of the post informs the reader that it’s a “peer-reviewed but uncopyedited pre-print” of a forthcoming article and what follows is a periodical length post, following typical academic standards and citation style. Given the collaborative format of a website and the interactive nature of a blog there seems to be a missed opportunity here for the writers of this article to use the website as a space for open access, collaborative peer review. Given that the project is directed at a pretty niche group of scholars with similar interests this could have been a great way to invite interested parties to participate in a collaborative co-creation of text and to leverage insights from fellow experts who share a passion for the content.

The rest of the project is centred around four main artifacts: an interactive exhibit, a digital archive of poetry, visualizations and graphs. The actual structure of the website itself is rather circular, with multiple ways to access content on the site. For example, if you want to view the interactive exhibit you can access it from the hyperlink on the first page, from a hyperlink on the “Publications” page, or by accessing it directly from the drop-down menu in the navigation bar. Whilst this ensures that the content can be easily found from anywhere on the website, it also adds an element of redundancy. By being directed constantly to the same pages and materials I found myself wanting with regards to the content, and also was left questioning whether the project truly achieves the aims it set out to achieve, that is, to illuminate how and why certain texts became “viral” in the 19th century.

However, the rest of the content hosted on the website does a pretty good job in attempting to achieve that mission, or at the very least provide resources to scholars to begin to answer that question for themselves. Some of the other tabs on the site lead the view to an interactive map demonstrating how viral maps were shared, an index of network maps as well as an archive of all the scripts used to create the maps themselves. Whilst this content may seem daunting and inaccessible to the layperson, however it provides a wide breadth and depth into the topic at hand, for the audience originally highlighted – scholars who are specializing in data, maps and networks. The project provides not only the finished products for interested users, but also the nuts and bolts, scripts and layers it took to get there, thus introducing transparency and opportunity for replication.

As we “wait for Godot” during this surreal epoch worthy of countless adjectives, I decided to explore and review the Samuel Beckett Digital Manuscript Project.

The site: https://www.beckettarchive.org/

For those not familiar with Beckett’s work, in short, he was an Irish-born writer whose works examined the strain the human condition bore on the shoulders of modern society.

Launched in 2011, the SBDMP consists of two parts, a “digital archive of Samuel Beckett’s manuscripts, organized in 26 research modules” and “a series of 26 volumes, analyzing the genesis of the texts contained in the corresponding modules.” The Series Preface is exciting, in that it promises various ways in which to approach the life and work of Samuel Beckett, including the ability to compare the interrelatedness of different manuscripts from different holding libraries. The latter is impressive to think about when compared to making such an attempt even thirty years ago, an attempt which would’ve been undergirded by correspondences via phone or mail. From a structural standpoint, the site is sparse and minimal, bringing to mind an empty stage from which actors and writers can engage in Theatre of the Absurd.

My initial inclination was, of course, to read the project’s stated goal, which is to “…reunite the manuscripts of Samuel Beckett’s work in a digital way, and to facilitate genetic research…” For someone as prolific as Beckett, whose works include plays, poems, prose, radio, and film, the mere undertaking of such a collaborative project is a welcomed undertaking for researchers in the humanities.

Beyond the swath Beckett covered, as a man who lived and worked through most of the 20^th Century, he maintained a wide roster of influences, friends, and contemporaries. The Beckett Digital Library, understanding this, offers a digital reconstruction of Beckett’s library as it appeared in his Paris apartment. The BDL currently offers “762 extant volumes, as well as 247 virtual entries for which no physical copy has been retrieved.” Included within the SMBDP’s “free features” is a sample of the BDL, which contains a selection of 25 of these books (one for every letter of the alphabet except, suspiciously enough, “x”). As we’ve learned throughout much of the semester, especially via the story of Sojourner Truth, the handling of one’s image is crucial. The existence of the BDL allows for researchers and fans of Beckett to construct his milieu via this expansive collection. Not only would one be able to view works he was engaging with (Kant, Isherwood, Molière, Joyce, etc.), but one can also view the inscriptions and annotations living within these books. The ability with which to be able to view inscriptions and annotations would prove a valuable resource to any researcher working on a biographer of a Beckett and students curious as to what Beckett’s analytical process looked like. Of particular enjoyment (for me, at least) were an inscription found within Theodor Adorno’s Noten zur Literatur, in which the famed critical theorist casually writes, “Für Samuel Beckett,” the front copy of Molière’s Théâtre Complet, Vol. 2 missing, and a sole page (395) have been folded down in Dante Alighieri’s La Divine Comédie. The BDL, along with the SBDMP as a whole, is also beneficial in that it preserves the integrity of physical copies by allowing researchers access to digital facsimiles.

While I am not yet familiar with many digital archives and their features, the SMDMP continues to impress by its allowing for a meta-study via a News and Updates page which functions as a timeline of add-ons and awards garnered since its launch nearly a decade ago.

The SMDMP contains a litany of information, but it does not come without issues. Firstly, though several wealthy organizations backed the creation and subsequent sustaining of this digital archive (the European Council for Research and the University of Texas being two of them), it is not free. There are both individual and institutional fees one must pay for full access to the archives. One, like myself, finds this out in an almost rude way, as the page one is scrolling on times out and reverts you back to the homepage. In the past, I may have avoided mentioning the financial obstacles, seeing as how they (seemingly) aren’t too steep and I’m a member of an institution that may grant me access. However, this isn’t the past, as I write within the crisis wrought upon by the rapid spread of Covid-19. Several organizations understand this, as JSTOR has allowed “access to all unlicensed collections at no cost,” “more than 25,000 books available at no charge,” and, most importantly, “26 journal archives in Public Health free through June 30, 2020.” The SMDMP’s News and Updates page does not mention anything related to Covid-19, as the latest press release was in reference to an award (MLA Prize for Bibliography, Archive, or Digital Project) from November 2018. Perhaps the curator in me saw an opportunity to reference our current crisis via the lens of Beckett.

Link to the Viral Texts Project: https://viraltexts.org/

The Viral Texts Project is an online depository for cross-disciplinary research on 19th century newspaper publishing. The purpose of the project is to develop a resource for scholars to understand how and why certain texts proliferated throughout the population in the 19th century. The development of this project is guided by an interest in the material history of textual production that highlights the role of copying, exchange and networks of circulation to help scholars answer the question, “how did newspaper ideas disseminate through networks, and become ‘viral’?” This “bottom-up bibliography” (Smith et al. use this language in Chapter 4 of the their book proposal for Going the Rounds) approach privileges “texts” over “works”, focusing on content that typically goes unnoticed by literary scholars and historians such as love letters, vignettes, and how-to articles. 

The research is presented through data, data visualization, two interactive exhibits, several scholarly articles, and an (unfinished) manifold publication titled Going the Rounds: Virality in Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers. The project is a collaboration between computer scientist David Smith, Assistant Professor of English Ryan Cordell and two graduate students (one in history, and another in english). The project is supported financially by Northeastern’s NULab and the NEH. 

The interdisciplinary nature of the Viral Texts Project lends itself to some interesting results, however the open-ended nature of the project exacerbates existing issues with the  interoperability of the technology it uses. There are also interface issues with the website itself as well. These problems highlight the challenges facing scholars who wish to develop collaborative digital projects. 

The central achievement of the Viral Texts project is David Smith’s development of a “reprint-detection algorithm” that combs the library of Congress’ Chronicling America newspaper archive and the Making of America magazine archives and collects the most reprinted articles. This restructuring of data is valuable for the scholar by gathering in one place information spread across different databases. Popular articles reprinted during the antebellum era were usually amended slightly, or given different titles, making it difficult for scholars to find duplicates in the archives (this is further compounded by the fact that indexes are often different depending on the data-base). Smith’s algorithm accounts for these problems by using computational linguistics to detect certain duplicate words indicating a reprint. The data culled from this work is shared openly on a Github page linked to the project’s website; the page is unfortunately difficult to navigate, not easily searchable and requires digging through different .csv files to locate datasets. Although a scholar with technical knowledge may be able to find what they’re looking for, easily downloadable datasets are seemingly not available. 

On the site, scholars also have access to a wide range of “network-graphs” to visualize the data collected by Viral Text Scholars researchers. These graphs visually represent the linkages between newspapers. The project also provides graphs demonstrating the path of particular texts during the time. Although one can drill down into the data a bit, one can’t quickly pull up the articles most shared. Few annotations or editorial notes accompany the data. What annotations do exist point to internal language. Although, this data alone is of tremendous use to scholars and computer scientists interested in mapping the passage of texts, to be of use to non-scholars, additional context annotations could be interesting. 

The interactive exhibit portion of the site  allows users to browse a composite “front page” made up of the most commonly reprinted texts. The “Love letter exhibit” is the facsimile of a commonly reprinted poem, “A ‘stunning’ love letter.” Lines of the text are able to be clicked on to bring up annotations that reveal lines to be themselves reprints or near copies of other commonly reprinted articles. The project’s researchers write that these annotations provide a “portal into our larger dataset.” This exhibit is a fascinating look into the composite nature of texts produced in the 19th century and is a potentially valuable teaching tool, encouraging students to think about texts produced within networks. 

The Viral Texts Project is a good example of how digital publishing “expands the toolset” of scholars (Fitzpatrick, 84). Rather than presenting a simple database containing facsimiles of antebellum texts, researchers at the Viral texts project, are expanding the notion of what a “text” is through computational tools. Literary scholars have much to gain by exploring the material context of textual production, the quantity of reprints and the path of texts through networks. In Going the Rounds, Ryan Cordell (and co-authors) explain how their research demonstrates the “industrialization of knowledge” during the 19th century. In this way, the project is a good example of what Bolter and Grusin call “remediation”, the way in which a new technological medium improves or remedies the failure of an earlier one (Bolter & Grusin, 59). The material history of the text is demonstrated through data visualization, where it was previously hidden (therefore a “fuller” picture of the text emerges). There is a wonderfully materialist aspect of this, as text is also an object (the “medium is the message”). This is a valuable way of teaching text as well. To have access to data that shows the path of a text or meme allows scholars to teach texts with an easily visualizable bibliographic information.

Viral Texts demonstrates the value of computational tools for getting the most out of the digital archives that exist, and reconceptualizing the role of the literary scholar to include quantitative analysis, data restructuring and modeling. The difficulty is to develop a project that is bounded and not endlessly open-ended. No aspects of the Viral Texts Project are tethered to the codex form of organization, and the website itself is not fashioned in a way that creates a legible narrative, or an easy to follow structure. This is not a failure so much as a testament to the challenge of working collaboratively on digital projects.

Link to digital archive: https://coloredconventions.org/

The Colored Convention Project (CCP) is an online archive that highlights early black mobilization and organizing, in particular the understudied aspect of the 19th-century reform movement that is black conventions. These were meetings held by African-American men and women between the 1830s and 1890s in the United States and Canada to discuss their civil rights. The online project was founded by a graduate class at the University of Delaware and is supported by grants from National Endowment for the Humanities and the Mellon Foundation. Its digital archive houses a collection of the minutes, letters, transcripts, proceedings and newspaper articles of the conventions. The website offers a usable interface and full access to primary sources. It is very easy to navigate the site as it is structured into five major parts that feature information about the people behind the project, a general information about the history of the conventions, a digital records site, digital exhibits of scholarship research that use these records, teaching materials for educators, and an overview of the project’s news. 

The massive digital collection of the project can be found on the Digital Records site. Its start page provides historical information about the conventions, with links to other digital editions and resources, enriching research possibilities. The user can either explore the project’s huge database by searching the conventions by year, or by looking through the national as well as state conventions. It is possible to either browse the records or conduct a specific search through an advanced search option. In the browse option, the site is interposing informational text with images of the related documents, resembling a map of the files, which makes it very easy to navigate through, and is inviting users who have no prior knowledge of the history and want to learn about it to ‘take a look’ through the collection. The latter provides users with specific research needs and projects with a great number of search options. The database is fully searchable through all its digital documents. For example, users can search for persons, buildings, etc. When a convention is selected, the user is redirected to a new page that presents the record and all the information about the event. All documents are provided in high-resolution in a document viewer as well as being offered as a PDF-download. They have not been edited, and in a lot of cases are provided with a transcribed section on the site. Researchers have added metadata, as for example the creator, publisher, date, source, type of the convention, the region etc. In addition, they provided a hyperlink of the specific collection the document belongs to. The project’s endeavor of digitizing the collection and making it accessible to the public while preserving its original intent exemplifies the process of remediation. 

One major interdisciplinary accomplishment of the project is its digital and interactive exhibits section. These exhibits of scholarly research are created by professors and their undergraduate or graduate students, using primary documents of the CCP’s collection to draw attention to a specific aspect of the Colored Convention movement. For instance, the graduate student Samantha de Vera built one exhibit to highlight Black women’s contributions to these conventions, which was made possible through the CCP’s effort of digitizing and transcribing not only the minutes that explicitly mention the male delegates, but newspaper articles, proceedings and other materials that document the conventions. Here, the Colored Convention Project specifically aims to include researchers and students to become a part of the scholarly conversation and to produce narratives from its archival records that have been invisible in the academic and public discourse. In addition, these exhibits utilize several different forms of media to visualize and achieve a greater understanding of the provided information. 

In its teaching section, the project offers classroom teaching modules that include  research-based teaching materials, sample writing assignments, research guides and educational resources which were curated by CCP scholars and librarians. The site provides links to additional information on instructions as well as an online tutorial on how ro build a CCP exhibit from the research that was conducted in the classroom. Additionally, they have designed the Seeking Records Classroom Module that invites participating faculty and students to join the project in conducting archival research and locating historical documents that are related to the Colored Conventions. Here, the project’s purpose is to establish collaborations with teaching partners throughout the country.

On its website the CCP underlines its mission as a “scholarly and community research project dedicated to bringing the seven decades-long history of nineteenth century Black organizing to digital life.” Not only is the archive intended to provide information about the movement that remained invisible in popular history that highlights black agency and black leadership, it also creates a dialogue between the past and present of black organizational activism. Many of the issues that are of topics in the primary sources speak to ongoing issues like state violence and police brutality that current movements such as Black Lives Matter are focused upon. Thus, the site very capably puts the project in the context of the sociopolitical discourse of today. Aiming to bring interdisciplinary scholars, students, teachers, researchers and the public together, the Colored Convention Project presents a valuable and creative research platform. 

Viral Texts: Mapping Networks of Reprinting in 19th-Century Newspapers and Magazines (2017) is a digital project by Northeastern University’s NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. In concept, it seeks to capture news, prose, poems, anecdotes, and other texts widely shared between different newspapers in the 19th century and map the path by which they were shared.

The project is quite comprehensive and detailed, including a collection of most widely-shared poems, a number of network graphs allowing users to see which newspapers shared items with which other newspapers, and a list of publications resulting from the work. The centerpiece and most interesting aspect of the work by far is the interactive exhibit “a Love Letter to Viral Texts,” where the authors have taken an oft-reprinted humorous love letter—in this instance lifted from the November 4th, 1868 front page of The Raftsman’s Journal, a newspaper from Clearfield, Pennsylvania—and linked various terms, quotations, and concepts from the text to bits and pieces of other newsprint, either viral texts themselves or simply contextual knowledge drawn from the Journal or other newspapers of the time. For example, a link from the phrase “a sea of glory” leads to notes on uses of that same phrase in a Shakespeare parody and an 1819 hymn repurposed as an anti-slavery anthem. “Under a glass tumbler” gives you an 1834 tarriff on the import of German glassware, a satirical report on the theft of a ridiculous list of items (including said tumbler), and a travelogue mentioning what now seems a whimsical idea: capturing fireflies in Jamaica underneath a glass tumbler and reading by their light. Each of these connected texts comes from some other newspaper, some also from Pennsylvania but some from as far afield as Vermont, Illinois, or Washington. 

Viral Texts serves as a kind of expanded historical bibliography, attempting to give a modern reader a picture not only of what a pre-Civil War Pennsylvanian might be reading in the newspaper, but also the context in which they might be reading it. By emphasizing the “virality” and spread of these texts, and providing them side by side with similar texts that mention the same content, the project makes the implicit argument that a reader in Clearfield in 1868 might have the same comparative context that the site offers the user in 2020. With texts shared between geographically disparate newspapers, it’s likely that readers in Ohio might read an almost identical copy of the love letter in question, and, having already come across the “sea of glory” in their Anti-Slavery Bugle, enter into a new understanding of the use of the phrase as it sits here in the midst of satire. If that same understanding is not quite conveyed to the reader of the site in 2020 (clearly there are other contextual and cultural knowledges not shared between the two readers other than what they have read in newspapers), it is at least a step closer to commonality than if the front page of the Journal had been carefully unfolded, alone, in a Pennsylvania archive.

However, despite the clear value of work like this to historical bibliography, the site itself has clear issues with reproducibility and preservation, as with a lot of interactive digital archives—ironically, as they often attempt to their content more transparent and accessible to a larger audience and, presumably, for a longer time than their physical counterparts. The “data” link in the About page is broken, as are several links in the interactive exhibit, making it difficult to go deeper than a surface level into the academic work being done here, verify that the information presented is accurate, or build upon the work here for related projects.

Considering the About page describes two phases of work, from 2014-2015 and from 2015-2016 (and the suggested citation lists the publication date of the project as 2017), it’s likely that the NEH and ACLS grants by which they are funded simply no longer provide support for a team to continue to maintain the website, or increase accessibility for larger audiences. This is a larger problem than just this project; the structure of grant funding for digital archives and the transitory nature of academics often leaves this work stranded, half-complete, or slowly deteriorating as links break and resources are lost.

On a less practical (and less depressing) note, the comparison to “viral” images and texts as the word is used now, while compelling, obscures (at least) one major disconnect between widely-shared content then and now that I think is worth mentioning: who, in fact, is sharing the texts. The editorial hand behind these newspapers is most clearly seen on the site in the list of “Fugitive Verses,” or viral poems, many of which were sent in anonymously (or from anonymous authors, or both) and contain editorial notes acknowledging such. But editors are the entire engine behind the virality of these texts. As the project explains, newspaper editors would subscribe to editions from other cities and even states, and crib content from their colleagues and competitors. Poems, jokes, and interesting factoids provided useful buffer to fill odd spaces in page layouts, which contributed to their “virality,” and it doesn’t seem a stretch to assume that some off these small odds and ends of text were shared more widely than others due to the particular tastes of specific editors. In modern parlance, whether or not it should be, “virality” is often equated to pure popularity, because the machine behind the spread of memes, tweets, and videos is individuals—a certain subset of individuals, to be sure (those on twitter, those with internet access, those with a certain sense of humor) but certainly a larger and less homogenous subset of individuals than “newspaper editors in 19th century America.”

I raise this last not as a criticism of this archive, necessarily, but as something to consider in evaluating the larger project of creating digital archives out of physical ones: there is curation that happens in the creation of a digital project, but first there is curation that happens in a Clearfield, Pennsylvania newsroom in late October of 1868, and part of the work of the second must be to acknowledge and understand the workings of the first.