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.

There are numerous choices an editor must make when compiling a collection. First, an editor must decide whether documentary editing or critical editing is best suited for their project. Abbot and Williams explain the distinction between these two forms of scholarly editing, writing that Documentary editing, “aims to reproduce a manuscript or printed text as a historical artifact.” (the text as a historical artifact) and Critical editing, “constructs a text that may incorporate readings from several documentary texts and may include editorial emendations that establish readings not found in any document.” (78) Critical editing is a process of perfecting or reconstructing a text to better align with an author’s intention or the work’s broader circumstances of production. (84)

The editor compiling a critical volume must decide how to present the text itself and any supplementary material including author annotations, translations, or footnotes highlighting historical context. These decisions affect how future knowledge is created. If an editor chooses to “modernize” a text for example (changing “old-spelling”, capitalization or punctuation) the possibilities for future scholars to analyze the text by looking at its older features will be lost. Furthermore, by modernizing a text, the editor is in a sense, ‘authorizing’ the position that these earlier aspects of the text are not of significance to the scholar. (104) Choosing to not-modernize a text, of course, limits the possibilities of non-specialists to read the text or gain anything out of it. Williams and Abbot also note that the decision of how and to what extent to annotate an edition has consequences for readership. Perhaps a fully annotated edition with notes on the editor’s process is more transparent, but may also be a burden for general readers.

An editor may also decide to present a scholarly edition in digital format, which creates further opportunities and challenges for future scholarship. As Ken Price writes, in “‘Electronic Scholarly Editions’ A Companion to Digital Literary Studies,” The open-ended nature of cyberspace, allows an editor to add as many annotations, context, history, supplemental material as they would like, and gives them many different options to present this material (toggleable annotations, etc). Decisions about what to include are financial, technical and critical. Editors will also have to make choices regarding how to market their projects and how open or closed to public engagement they want their archives to become. (Seems like questions around social media and digital archives might be an interesting question to explore..)

For my response this week, I watched Secret and Divine Signs: A Cinematic Ode to the Art of Cruising, a Capstone Project by Terrence T. Hunt. Hunt’s short film looks at the changing practice of cruising in New York City. The film is accompanied by an artist’s statement that elaborates on the film’s themes, its creative process, and its stated purpose.

In his artist’s statement, Hunt argues that film is the best medium to convey his thesis subject; cruising has a “close relationship to cinema” both in its many representations in film and the practice itself which shares certain “ways of looking” with film spectatorship (“film spectatorship echoes the desiring gaze”) (4). Hunt also uses film to highlight and celebrate the beauty of queer spaces. Throughout the film, Hunt shows footage of popular cruising spots, many of which are of nature enclaves within NYC (bucolic park scenes, the flowing water of the Hudson River). This footage is overlaid with audio from interview subjects, describing  their experience cruising in different locations. This footage is quite affecting and encourages the audience to think about (and maybe feel) the “erotic potential” of public space (6). 

Hunt also wants to use film to bring his work outside of the academy and reach a broader audience of “queer, gay and bisexual men of different generations” (5). The artist’s statement frames his research questions within a scholarly context of queer history and film and media studies, while the film itself attempts to explore these concepts for this broader audience. 

Although Hunt expresses the desire to show his film at festivals, perhaps an online/social media component to the project could have been an interesting addition (I understand given the still sensitive subject matter, this might not have worked). Further developing this project through a Youtube or public Vimeo channel could also have broadened his audience even more, and allowed Hunt to continue exploring the fascinating questions around class, sex and public spaces, eroticism and technology that he raises in this project. The questions he raises are maybe too numerous for the thesis film but could be creatively approached through film vignettes or interviews on an online platform. 

Since I first began writing during the computer age, I don’t have a felt sense of the difference in composing work on a typewriter. However, I do remember learning keyboarding in elementary school, and how liberating an experience writing and editing on a computer was. As a child, I struggled with spelling, and poor handwriting. I felt less judged handing in typed up papers that were identical looking to my classmates. Once my typing speed improved, I also experienced that typing could more quickly transfer my thought process on the page than handwriting (I never learned to adequately write in shorthand). On a computer, I could also transfer incongruous thoughts as they bubbled up and organize them later on. In this way, I relate to poet Kamau Brathewait’s statement, “The computer is getting as close as you can to the spoken word” (Kirschenbaum, 199). Typing quickly while in a creative, inspired mindset feels similar (although not as un-mediated an experience) to picking up a musical instrument and communicating some non-verbal feeling or affect. However, when writing more structured essays, word processing technology can create problems. 

Lately, I worry that  my writing is becoming increasingly fragmented as a result of overwriting individual sentences. I sometimes labor over individual words or sections so much (typing and re-typing), that I interrupt the flow of the piece as a whole. Maybe there’s some truth to the fear that word processing software encourages “overwriting” (a concern that, according to Kirschenbaum, was common in the early years of computer technology). The problem is compounded by the fact that writers today work on computers with numerous web connected applications and research tools at their fingertips. These can be helpful, but I’ve found sometimes these tools overwhelm me with data and with other writer’s voices. Automated text editors like Grammarly further complicate the process and increase one’s anxiety as a writer (i.e. There’s an objectively “correct”  way to write that’s and technologically vetted). 

To escape this data-overload, I often find myself printing out sections of a manuscript, organizing pages spatially, and even cutting up paragraphs and moving them around physically on the desk. Maybe I do this to regain some tactile feeling of my writing – so it’s not all in my computer/mind.

I was struck after reading Houston’s account of Gutenberg’s invention of the press, and Fry’s documentary, how the basic structure of books hasn’t changed all that much. Although the methods of printmaking have changed (from mechanical press, Linotype, to word processing software), the codex as a way of structuring writing has remained largely unchanged. It’s striking how instantly recognizable the Gutenberg Bible is as a modern book (it could easily be formatted into a PDF, or interactive eBook). 

Texts are certainly produced and printed at an exponentially faster rate today. Warner writes that printers in the early modern period produced an “average of 2,500 impressions” (or pages), a day. Furthermore, pages could not be printed sequentially, meaning that books could not be sold until the last unit was complete. The process of drying printed pages could also take weeks. (Warner, 18, 23). 

In the years following Gutenberg’s invention, reading (for those who were able), must have been a very utilitarian, religious or ritual practice reserved for the privileged few. The main purchasers of books would have been monasteries or universities. The way we read today seems quite different from the early modern period. The transmission of texts online involves parsing through huge amounts of continually updating information. Our internal repertoire of references, connections and linkages are much broader. We’re attuned to fast changing ideas and aware of changing notions of authorship (automated text programs further complicate this).

Learning about the history of print is valuable for better understanding the material ways in which knowledge is codified and disseminated. The ability to endlessly reproduce writing was clearly central to the development of the protestant reformation, renaissance, the European Enlightenment, and liberalism more broadly. The ability of scholars (restricted of course to white, male, European individuals) to develop and circulate ideas (or exercise their “reason”) in the “public sphere” required a robust and increasingly expanding print industry. Printing technologies created a greater democratization of knowledge, but also (maybe) increasing standardization, and the separation of the text from a religious context. It seems like there are numerous philosophical and political  consequences resulting from the development of the printing press (for instance the ways political power produces “subjects” through increasingly writing about them, or the way philosophical systems develop out of this print culture – i.e. structuralism — pulling this last question from Giorgio Agamben’s fascinating book, Infancy and History).