Hi, this is my photography zine “An Afternoon Walk.” I hope you like it.
Tian
Author Archives: Tian Leng
Digital Edition Review: The Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA)
Tian Leng
March 21, 2020
Link to the digital Archive: https://ecda.northeastern.edu/
The Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) is a digital archive platform for pre-twentieth-century Caribbean archival texts (colonial Caribbean cultures and literary histories to be exact). The Northeastern University hosts the website that contains the archive. Most of the team members of this project are professors and students of Northeastern University’s English department, although they have backgrounds in cultural studies, history, digital humanities, network, and Caribbean studies. Nicole Aljoe and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon received a grant from Northeastern University to develop this digital archive. Aljoe and Dillon realize that many of the early Caribbean texts are collected in Europe and the United States, but some are still scattered across the globe. In order to make these materials more accessible to students and scholars, they found this digital archiving project necessary.
The several collections in ECDA categorize and store photo scans of texts as PDF. Careful digitalization and metadata curation of these texts enable the user to search keywords and even words in the documents. The scanned images are transformed into “editable texts,” in which the user can search and copy characters from the texts. Therefore, the texts in ECDA are capable of electronic search. In the site’s contribution page, it is written on the contribution form that digital images of texts should be at least 300 PPI so that the submitted images can be considered of high quality. In the essay “Electronic Scholarly Editing” of A Companion to Digital Humanities, Martha Nell Smith points out that “high-quality color images of a writer’s manuscripts offer a more ample sense of their textual conditions, including the conditions of the writing scene in which they were produced.” The color scans of ECDA faithfully preserve the extratextual physical details that are required for documentary editing.
Each text in ECDA has its page, which contains its metadata, file link, copyright information, and an abstract. However, some of the texts have an additional scholarly annotation that introduces the cultural and historical settings of the text and the author describes its different editions throughout history and gives a brief literature review. This scholarly annotation makes it a critical edition. The “exhibits” section of the website also serves as an introduction to some specific groups of texts in this archive. Being different from a scholarly annotation/introduction, the opening of an exhibit is more a map for a group of texts: it starts with a short introduction to the collection and continues with introductions to the individual texts with hyperlinks that can direct the reader to pages in the archive. The editability of the digital archive also allows the collections to expand, not only in the quantity of texts, but also in scholarly annotations. However, this digital archive has not fully explored its multimedia capability. The exhibitions of music have only texts and scans of notes but no music files at all. If any contributors can find related music files in the public domain, they should add those supplemental materials to the collections and provide users with a multimedia experience of the pre-twentieth-century Caribbean history. In the “classroom” section of the site, two featured student projects, instead, use Google Maps to visualize literary history.
This site is for any students, teachers, and researchers who are interested in literary arts and history of this period. The digital archive is more accessible than a physical one, and it is able to draw materials from many different sources across the world. The “classroom” section offers various kinds of resources for them, especially syllabi, bibliographies, exemplary student projects. Although this archive is open-access, contributors to these pedagogical materials (not many in fact) seem to be limited to the faculty and students of Northeastern University.
The team claims to challenge the pre-established knowledge in a European colonial framework and decolonize the archive through “remix and reassembly.” They seek to dig out hidden materials, and review, question, and revise the existing knowledge structures in Caribbean Studies. A digital archive is what they find to be the mean of decolonization. Other than remediation, the team believes that their “nonlinear” organization of texts, which is from a traditional archive, can create new structures to house knowledge and allow texts and images to collide, grow, and evolve, eventually disrupt the colonial knowledge infrastructure for pre-twentieth-century Caribbean literary history. However, they have a lot of work in order to “reassembly,” and that includes adding many more materials from old and new resources, annotating the rest of the texts, locating and creating multimedia materials for the existing collections and exhibitions, and finally, inviting researchers and students from institutions other than Northeastern University to participate in this project.
Editor in the new era working with multimedia
In Martha Nell Smith’s essay “Electronic Scholarly Editing” in A Companion to Digital Humanities, she mentions “digital scholarly editing,” which I find very interesting. It is the editor’s work to deal with literal and artistic components of scholarly publication tasks. She gives an example of CD ROM slipped inside the cover of a book. This could be an outdated example for many, but it is a good point on how an editor accesses information in multimedia formats, especially new media formats in the 2020s. In 1997, Chris Marker made his CD movie/book Immemory, which is a hybrid of book, video, audio, and game. Now, both the form and content of multimedia publications have evolved. Relating to Williams and Abbott’s book bibliographical and textual studies, documentary editing, (which is not the editing of the documentary film, but similarity could be found in both procedures), may involve new questions for editors in terms of fidelity and materiality. For critical editing, the editor has to rethink how to collect, evaluate, and present the evidence about the authority of the text(s). How to determine authorial intention when the editor works with other mediums and what measures he should take to present the result to the intended audience. The chapter “editorial procedure” in Williams and Abbott’s book is also connected with the idea of multimedia, especially in its discussion of collation. Digital imaging technologies and “editing” software provide the editor with possibilities to work with images, photocopy of text, or microfilm.
Tian Leng
March 10, 2020
Thoughts on a MALS capstone project
Terrence Hunt’s 2017 capstone project, “Secret and Divine Signs: A Cinematic Ode to the Art of Cruising,” is an interdisciplinary creative project that combines several disciplines, such as gender studies, film studies, and New York City studies. Its documentary/art film component serves as not only the audiovisual evidence and statements about “cruising” but also the analysis of related films and poems.
The documentary progresses from the definition of cruising slowly towards the positive advocating of it as an old art form in the new century, and Hunt writes in the paper that he shoots footage of four seasons in the different cruising sites. However, the montage of “cruising footage” and the repetitive use of the same music make the film cyclical or horizontal. The vertical depth of his interview questions, which are not revealed to the viewer but could be inferred from the corresponding answers, does not cohere with the repetition of montage that becomes a little one-dimensional at the end of the film. However, Hunt’s choice to explore the cruising issues using video as the tool is inspiring. His use of audio tools, video cameras, editing software enables him to record, edit, and share knowledge in a time-based medium. The paper provides the content of his research and the context of the production of this video.
One issue that Hunt should have considered is who his audience is. He uses it as a component of his capstone project and sends this film to some LGBTQI film festivals. His audience in academia may be very different groups of people from those who attend those film festivals. Does he intend to make this short film analytical, educational or persuasive? His project reveals the potential risks of research methods based on creative/artistic practice and compels us to rethink how university researchers can create works of great scholarships in the new digital era.
March 1st, 2020
Tian Leng
On Technologies of Writing
In the chapter “Writing System,” Robinson traces the development of many different writing systems in the world. It is fascinated to find that many writing systems supplement themselves through importing parts from other languages. Some of them have already become antique, some have survived, and a lot have evolved. I could not agree with what the author writes about “written Chinese” and “Mandarin” on page 15. The author mixes up the “Mandarin – Cantonese” relationship with the “simplified Chinese – traditional Chinese” relationship. Also, written Chinese is not completely based on Mandarin. Nevertheless, he provides us with keen insights into Chinese and Japanese writing systems that are worth further exploration.
In Kirschenbaum’s Track Changes, the author presents to us a 70s-80s history of electronic writing, which is associated with many important scientists, engineers, writers, entrepreneurs, and scholars in America and Japan. I clearly remember the Microsoft ad, in which Bill Gates holds a CD-ROM by two “trees” of paper: “This CD-ROM can hold more information than all the paper that’s here below me.” After reading the chapters in the book, I realize that it’s not all about storage. Electronic writing offers so many possibilities for writers, especially those who work on big writing projects and those with disabilities. Now, while I am writing this blogpost using Microsoft Word, I cannot help but notice the AI-powered Grammarly plugin on the upper right corner of this window, reminding me of errors and suggesting improvements. I, the writer, may not be the only one who is thinking now.
When I write in Chinese, I find the experience of handwriting is significantly different from that of typing using Pinyin (the romanization of Chinese characters based on their pronunciation). The separation of phonetic and semantic components, which Robinson mentions, represents some challenges for composition tasks like poetry. Many Chinese writers, entering the era of electronic writing, reluctantly switched from paper to computers but used touchpad to input handwritten characters. I personally enjoy the combination of paper and computer to compose an essay: write on paper and type/edit with Microsoft Word.
Week 4, From Bi Sheng, Gutenberg to eBook
A few years ago, I purchased some prints from the Stele Forest (or The Beilin Museum) in Xi’an. The texts were written by ancient Chinese calligraphers onto soft rice paper with ink that was made of animal glue and pine oil, and transformed to the stone steles, and copied to new paper through a process called ink rubbing. The background is black, and the characters are white. This was printing in China before Bi Sheng, who invented movable type. However, it is Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press that revolutionarily changed the way we read. More printing machines were invented after him to increase the efficiency and quality of printing.
Without Gutenberg, texts may exist on stone steles, bamboo, and silk for readers, but the printing processes after his printing press all demanded paper (not soft paper) until texts began to exist as digital texts. I learned from the documentary and the readings that the quality of the paper is essential to the success of Gutenberg’s invention. Vellum was proved to be unsuitable for printing. The soft paper became one of the obstacles to the development of movable type in ancient China. Now, environment protection leads many to switch to eBook to save trees. The eBook seems to further “separate” the book from the text: the book appears on a screen, while the text lives in the storage of a Kindle or a server far away.
The section in William and Abbott’s book demonstrates different stages in which a text is altered. The roles of authors, editors, compositors, printers, publishers, booksellers all affect the text and the book which the reader obtains. It is unsure whether the digital text makes the process simple or more complicated. Digital tools and media enable some straightforward and high-fidelity channels for readers to interact with the text but may downgrade or lose the text.
