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.

Before thinking about the choices an editor needs to make, it might be fruitful to unpack wjoe the editor is. In the literary field the editor is typically the person who plans, coordinates and revises material prior to publication – be it for a book, collection, magazine, or web page. The editor might be responsible for ensuring clarity of language, consistency of tone and style as well as adherence to ‘[editorial] standards’. The role of the editor may also differ depending on the form of the object being edited – the book editor will differ from the editor working with multiple pieces for a collection of work. This is different from a copy editor who is responsible for standards of language, grammar and ‘house style’. In a sense, the editor is a selector, and the role of selection can have vast consequences on future knowledge in any given field. By choosing what to include, and by default what to exclude, the editor is in an authoritative role to determine what is worth reading, and what isn’t. 

I bring forward the example of the New Yorker – a magazine of cultural and political commentary. I’ve been a subscriber to the New Yorker for many years and one thing that always strikes me is the consistency in style and content that exists across issues and contributors. Through the inclusion of strict editorial standards the New Yorker has managed to create an artifact that plays a huge role in liberal and politically left schools of thought. This is further corroborated by their adherence to a specific tone – it’s easy to read a piece and know automatically that it was borne from the editorial offices of Conde Nast. By maintaining the invisibility of these practices, whilst simultaneously positioning itself as committed to “truth” “accuracy”, and “quality of prose”, the New Yorker establishes itself as a leader in its field, and by association helps to determine what is worthy of reading, and how people should think about different topics. A lot of that work and impact is determined by the editors – in a way they can be seen as the gatekeepers of what it worth thinking about and what isn’t.

https://www.newyorker.com/about/us?verso=true

Academia operates according to a set of hidden rules which uphold unexamined assumptions of academic power. One of these rules can be seen in the standardized and predictable structure of the academic thesis. The hidden power of standardization is its capacity to create a value hierarchy – a way of discerning good from bad, useful from useless. Nick Sousanis (2015) examines adherence to the academic standard of linear text as a “flatness” which contributes to the “narrowing of sight and a contraction of possibilities.” Rethinking the form of the thesis may create new avenues to tell stories differently and to transform academic thought into a wider dialogue with society.

I had a lot of questions while reading “Raised on TV: A Queer Teen’s Guide to Syndicated Personalities”. First of all, who is this written for, and why? Further, given the content of the paper (queer personalities) was it a missed opportunity not to queer the form of the paper as well as the content? Queer theory is a form of critical theory within the academy – one that functions as a praxis of resistance against widely upheld knowledge and norms. Would it be safe to say that one form of praxis could be to overturn the standardized format of the academic thesis? That is, to reimagine the identity of the academic paper outside of the normative standards which have been placed upon it?

What would ‘queering’ the academic format look and what purpose would it serve? Perhaps it would be a playful restructuring of the essay to mimic the flow of a TV show. Or maybe it could incorporate audio and visual to corroborate the content which is describing TV. Maybe it could have eschewed the typed, narrative linear format altogether and be written as a zine, combining handwritten text, images, drawings, sketches and uncensored thoughts.

What if a thesis looked like this? 

Queering the form as well as the content can serve to remove academic inquiry from being an elitist and inaccessible form of knowledge. By enforcing play, personality and difference we have an opportunity to invite a wider array of thinkers and perhaps transform academic impact into real social impact too.

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References:

• Eriksson, Emma Karin. “Summer’s Up.” Radical Domesticity (3), 2014.
• Sousanis, Nick. “Behind the Scenes of a Dissertation in Comics Form.” Digital Humanities, vol. 9, no. 4, 2015, http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/4/000234/000234.html.

It was interesting to read about Longyear’s experience of transitioning from his typewriter to his Wang and how that served to remove the “work” element of writing. I say interesting because what he deems to be work is what I covet as being integral to my creative process. There’s something about writing on my computer that feels formal and final. On it I compose business emails, serious essays and final drafts. It’s where the ‘real’ editing and refining happens. But the word processor often reflects the very last stage in the journey of writing for me.

The process of creation is often divided across multiple mediums. I carry around two notebooks – one notebook is a journal, but also a space where I can spew ideas free from even my own judgement. I’ve vowed to myself that I will never read the writing in those pages, and that promise frees me to write whatever I want, however I want. The second notebook is where I start fleshing out ideas. It’s the notebook I use to respond to writing prompts, jot down quick notes, and capture quotes. I use this notebook as guidance to inform a more complete piece. Recently I’ve also started relying on my phone as another writing medium. Oftentimes I’ll think of a great way to phrase something while walking down the street or on the train and the quickest way for me to capture that before forgetting is via the ‘Notes’ app.

Eventually I’ll be ready to start composing whatever piece of writing it is that I’m working on. True composition happens on my word processor. I’ve been favoring Google Docs because they synchronize across every machine, and I can easily invite collaborators and editors to read my work when I’m ready for a second opinion. On this virtual sheet I’ll start retyping the notes from my phone and notebook, I’ll start cutting, pasting and exploring the right words. In my document I can move text around, create parallel documents and create multiple versions of the same text. Typing on a  laptop is basically second nature – whilst I leverage other mediums to inform my writing process, the real bulk of the work takes place through the looking glass of my computer screen.

In pondering on how the history of print has impacted the way we read what strikes me most is how, as the world constantly changes, books have remained stubbornly the same. We still have front and back covers, (typically) we still read the page from top to bottom, and flip the pages from right to left. Much of the anatomy of the book, developed at the inception of print, persists even in online versions. What has changed the most has been the result of a relinquishing control in the publishing industry. Printing and distribution has historically been enacted by a specialized few. For words to be made available to wider readership they had to be reviewed, vetted and distributed by a (patriarchal) elite. Similar to how a lifted patent allows for a branded drug to be manufactured in a generic format, ironically, the Internet and the communities on it, have provided us with platforms to bypass publishers and print our own work.

I experienced this first-hand last year when the collective I work with ventured from digital to. Utilizing an online vendor we had total control over the printing process: We chose the works and photos, the layout, colours, paper quality & size, number of books printed and price per copy – we were the producers and contributors, designers and imaginers. The result of this shift in power is not on how we read, but what we can read. Printing and publishing is no longer controlled by the gatekeepers of books. Now, anyone can print a book, or a magazine or a zine. The content available is more obscure, more radical and more innovative than ever. The print industry has given way to a more localized, democratized version of printing. So whilst I still might flip pages from back to front and read pages from top to bottom, the words, authors and collectives that I have access to have evolved and multiplied as the opportunity to print has expanded.