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.

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.

To emend the author’s text or not, that is the question, and for an editor the emendation opens a Pandora’s box of choices and decisions, especially when considering variations and versions of an author’s text, whether ancient, medieval, modern, for print, or for online. Regardless of place or time, the choices an effective editor makes depends on the audience or audiences for whom the edited work is intended, the publishing format the publisher or author has decided to use, and such factors as time, budget, legal, political, ethical, social, and other considerations. As an intermediary the editor may inadvertently or purposefully alter meaning which at the very least shapes current and future readers’ understanding of authorial intention. A famous case in point was made by Michel Foucault’s mentor, Pierre Hadot, who through imaginative and meticulous exegesis exposed the distortions by Neoplatonist editors of Plato’s notion of being as presented in the dialogue Parmenides, thus subsequently affecting the entire canon of Western philosophy (5-6).

Academic publishers along with some trade publishers and the scholarly reading community place a host of additional responsibilities on the editor in the service of advancing scholarship. According to Craig Abbott and William Proctor Williams, critical editors make choices based on a number of critical editing methods, including the “eclectic method”, the “best-text editing”, “stemmatic or genealogical” methods, and “historical-critical” editing (loc. 1622, 1626, 1725 of 4607). Abbott and Williams point out that the critical editor may also make editing decisions based on different perspectives regarding text, textuality, and technology, such as Shillingsburg’s “formal orientations” and McGann’s “socialized concept of authorship and textual authority” (loc. 1746, 1861 of 4607). Abbott and Williams nevertheless argue for a basic set of choices all critical editors make as they attempt “(1) to discover the relevant documentary texts of the work, (2) to identify variant readings among the texts and the sources of that variation, (3) to construct a text consisting of readings to be authoritative according to the standard the editor has adopted, and (4) to detect erroneous readings and correct them by conjectural emendation based on the adopted standard” (loc. 1746-1772 of 4607). The end result of making all these choices is a critical edition. For documentary editors, whose role is based on considering the edited work as a historical object, choices revolve around the preservation of all of the variations of a work and may result in a variorum edition.

The power of online publishing has brought with it a plethora of new choices for editors and, as Kenneth Price argues in A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, “the range of responsibilities for an editorial team has dramatically increased” (2008). Beyond decisions related to the ability to offer virtually all available textual versions and variations, which turn traditional editions into online archives, digital libraries, and electronic scholarly editions, critical and documentary editors confront choices related to data and metadata management as well as user experience design that incorporates choices related to interactions, visuals, and usability. The editor’s audience expands from well defined publishing markets to amorphous transnational readerships. As an example of one of the most consequential data-driven digital libraries for the field of classical studies, Tufts University’s Perseus Digital Library, edited by Gregory Crane, offers fully open sourced concordances and translations of the history, literature, and culture of the Greco-Roman world (2020). For the 21st century editor in the age of the Internet, Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web appears not so much wide as it does wild. The more choices the editor entertains the more the potential develops for greater understanding as well as greater misunderstanding.

Works Cited

Hadot, Pierre. 1995. Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Price, Kenneth M. 2008. “Electronic Scholarly Editions.” In A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, edited by Susan Schreibman and Ray Siemens, Part IV, 24. Oxford: Blackwell. http://www.digitalhumanities.org/companionDLS/

Tufts University. 2020. Perseus Digital Library, edited by Gregory R. Crane. Accessed March 10, 2020. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu.

Williams, William Proctor, and Craig S. Abbott. 2011. An Introduction to Bibliographical and Textual Studies. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Kindle.

In her thesis entitled “The Music in His Words: The Art of Sound and Folk in Louis Armstrong’s Manuscript for Satchmo: My Life In New Orleans, “The Armstrong Story””, Adriana Filstrup combines a number of textual genres and photography as a means to contrast Armstrong’s autobiographical and typewritten manuscript with the published book version Satchmo: My Life In New Orleans. Filstrup includes textual genres of academic prose, song lyrics, and memoir excerpts. Photographs depict Armstrong sitting at a table typing on a manual typewriter and a page of the typed manuscript. Following Bolter and Grusin’s formulations (Remediation : understanding new media, 1999), Filstrup’s thesis uses the medium of academic narrative as a contextual container within which to represent and appreciate the medium of jazz music. Music is remediated through the textual and visual media as a meta layer of meaning. The academic container offers an intellectual context for the appreciation of the sensory experience of playing and listening to music as well as the experience of typing out memories onto the permanent typewritten manuscript (or more correctly “typescript”). In this way, Filstrup uses text and photography to successfully claim that the published book form, as a form of hypermedia when compared to the manuscript form, loses the immediacy of Armstrong’s voice through the editing choices of the publisher. Armstrong’s manuscript serves as a more immediate remediation of his music.

Filstrup includes excerpt’s of Armstrong’s highly personalized musical text and language such as “Ump Ump Ump”, which corresponds, in a possibly mediated translation from visual poetics to aural poetics, to Drucker’s spectrum of texts between the personal expression of visual poetics including gesture, letterform, glyphs to mechanical formats imposed by the social system (Figuring the word : essays on books, writing, and visual poetics, 1998). In this way, we might ask if Armstrong was also playing the typewriter and if Filstrup is similarly playing the academic thesis, thus suggesting the notion that all media represent the repertoire of instruments mediating levels of both immediacy and hypermedia.

Finally, how would Filstrup’s narrative and argument have faired by using a comic strip format? While the combination visuals and text would indeed open up spaces for new ways of thinking and experiencing Armstrong’s music, as Sousanis argues (“Unflattening: Revolutionizing thought in Comics”, 2016), the question remains whether the reader could be better served by fully owning the generative imagination of text rather than the suggestive guiding of the comic strip.

As we complete the first third of our journey exploring texts in context, text making technologies appear to dissolve the text into its context. Is context everything? Writing, printing, and word processing combine with the author as merely a vessel to point to unreal (and virtual) language as the answer to that perennial question: What is the there out there? While we chase our tails in epistemologies and the linguistic and literary turns culminate another spiral from the inward turn, how do we morally evaluate these seemingly emancipatory technologies during the irrevocable descent into the precipice of a climatic dead end, in which Mars in a dozen or so generations becomes the new Earth. Perhaps it would not be so apocalyptic to see the missing irony in Matthew Kirschenbaum’s colorful narrative, in Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, of the first novel written with a text processor. Was not Len Deighton’s Bomber written using the MT/ST a clear example emancipatory text technology in the service of the glorification of violent aerial technology? Perhaps humans never figured out the self-sustainable uses of technology, blaming technology as if language itself was the cause of hate speech.

While much else could be said about the writer’s love affair with text making technology, it is perhaps a truism that most if not all technologies have some combination of benefits and drawbacks, upside and downside. A successful outcome in the use of a given technology comes down perhaps to achieving a net positive effect of benefits over drawbacks. To the extent technology places more power in the hands of the tool user, successful use of software tools would seem to depend on additional computer skills and proficiencies.

As the main work horse for writing, word processing software has relieved me of a considerable degree of mental recall and mental organization of text (defined as meaningful language) required to order my thoughts into a final sequential form. Similar to Kirschenbaum’s accounts of many writers’ experience with computers, word processing for me has enabled language to flow in an almost raw state onto the virtual page; editing becomes a matter of cutting and pasting with the keyboard and a pointing device, essentially trivializing the inserting, deleting, and moving of any amount of text. Spelling and grammar checking tools reduce the time needed to achieve levels of quality and correctness. These features have freed me to focus more on smaller units of language such as the sentence, clauses, and phrases. While experimentation, fluidity, and the malleability of vocabulary, idioms, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs are all possible without word processing, the paper approach to drafting and editing requires significantly more time and effort compared to the time and effort to draft and edit text in a software document. Thus for a given amount of time, more iteration, editing, and polishing can be achieved with word processing than with paper, assuming a proficiency with the software.

How has word processing impacted writing style? It is hard to tell. In addition to Kirschenbaum’s observations, it would be interesting to analyze or access analysis already undertaken to compare corpora before and after the advent of word processing using machine learning to see if software technology has changed the nature of written texts, especially if word processed texts could be labeled. To the extent more iterative editing smooths out awkward syntax, improves transitions, and achieves a higher level rhetorical effectiveness, I might arguably draw a couple of quick conclusions: (1) that readers and writers have benefited from software technology, and (2) that technology has enabled a larger number of people to achieve writing and composition competencies, echoing to some extent the democratizing impact of printing. Yet as we consider the writing of the first 3 quarters of the 20th century before word and text processing, perhaps software technology has merely resulted in a loss of one quality of writing and the gain of another. Perhaps, we have simply engaged in a pragmatic way with writing tools in the same way musicians become one with their instruments through exploration, adaptation, curiosity, sentiment, and, controversially, an overall ignorance of the consequences of these novel toys for humanity as a whole.

As the estimates of book production in Keith Houston’s The Book: A Cover-to-Cover Exploration of the Most Powerful Object of Our Time and Stephen Fry’s documentary The Machine that Made Us make clear, the technology of hand press printing that emerged in Germany around 1450 enabled the proliferation of written communication to an increasing number of people in Europe and its colonies. This proliferation of books was accompanied by an increase in population in Europe from 80 million in 1500 to 450 million in 1800 and an increase in the world’s population from 200 million to 1 billion during the same period. Looking back at five hundred years of printing as a whole, it is hard to imagine how the spread of libraries and bookstores (and even schools) into urban areas throughout the world would have occurred without mass printing, and in so doing printing delivered books and literacy to millions of individuals even as the absolute numbers of people living on less than $5 a day increased (quadrupling in the last 50 years) within the midst of degrees of wealth and abundance the world has never before witnessed.

The spread of printing arguably democratized institutions by giving new social classes access to the benefits of learning, literature, and education through an expansion of reading and literacy. Yet there is also an interesting correlation between the domination of the “West”, where written communications through printing to some extent scaled with the increase in population, and the subordination of other global regions, where written communications were constrained by traditional block printing and manuscripts. While it is clearly an exaggeration to claim that Gutenberg’s movable type and type mold printing was responsible for Western Imperialism, the rise of the bourgeoisie, or capitalism itself, there might still be some room for conjecture regarding the impact of printing on both the Protestant Reformation and as Robert Darnton argued in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History the spread of Enlightenment thought through growing networks of publishers, book shops, and readers. Additionally world literacy stood at around 10% in 1800 when hand press printing gave way to mechanized printing and in the space of two hundred years world literacy as a whole increased to 85%, an average inversion rate of 3.75% per decade.

We might also wonder about the extent to which we could attribute printing to the emergence of the “public” and the “public sphere” as Jurgen Habermas theorized in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. We could equally consider printing as one of the key enablers along with other communications technologies such as audio and (motion picture) video technologies of the integration of world cultures and the popularization of the notion of the “global village”. Finally, it would not be entirely unreasonable perhaps to consider that most of world’s written literatures would not have developed along the lines with which we are familiar through the evolution of literary genres such as poetry, the short story, the novel, and perhaps even history and our sense and understanding of the past.

Despite the increase in democratizing access to written communications, printing has along with other complex technologies created a minority of makers of culture and a majority of consumers of culture, resulting in the rise in social status of authors and writers as an elite intelligentsia of intellectuals, experts, and technocrats. As Sarah Werner shows in Studying Early Printed Books, the technology of early modern book making in Europe involved a team of specialists involved in a “series of decisions driven to both small and large degrees by production demands and economic pressures”. As a result, printing has allowed all of us to be readers of books but only some of us to be the makers of books. It could be argued that a social division between culture makers and culture consumers has emerged as community based traditions of story telling, music, singing, oral verse, and popular theater diminished. It remains to be seen whether the next sea change, reflected in the convergence of increasingly accessible digital media authoring tools and internet-based social media, will return to society the culture making capabilities that the market based application of printing took away.