Future of the Book

Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer is, in many respects, an artist’s book that experiments with the material possibilities of print. It was published by Visual Editions in 2010, using the die-cutting technique to create a book that is sculptural and complex in nature. Each page cuts out various lines of text, leaving physical spaces in the paper through which the reader can see onto the next page, which then contains its own unique formation of text (see Figure 1). It reads like an experimental work since it very much occupies the grey area between poetry and prose. In actuality the text is from a book of short stories called Street of Crocodiles by Polish author Bruno Schulz. Foer then takes a pre-existing text and attempts to create a new piece by experimenting with the unique capabilities of the printed book and its encompassing technologies.

 Figure 1.

The practicalities of attempting to represent this text in code seem beyond the scope of the required skills of the course, but I still wanted to blog about it because of the interesting thought experiment it poses. The main issue at the heart of rendering such a text in code would be around representing the space or negative space within a printed text, versus the screen.

The problem then is that when you attempt to go down the path of encoding, the impulse is to focus on representing the content how it falls on the page using our traditional sense of what a page is. However the process of representing the text and space on any given page is not terribly different from marking up for regular prose, and the end result could easily be an accurate representation of the text but with its variety represented only in one dimensional space. The problem that then arises is that it leaves out the key structural feature of the book: the three dimensional space that is  created by the depth of the cutouts in the book.

The caveat of this book is really that it is an artist’s book, a book that is self-reflexive in nature and very much in conversation with the unique capabilities of print. Even its title reflects its dependency on paper. Rendering it in code would change the project completely. Trying to really stay true to representing the physical book in a digital format might then be more effective if it were to be simply photographed, and since I don’t have an e-reader, I wasn’t able to get a sense of how digital versions cope with this.

On the other hand, the title is also in conversation with our understanding of language as “code,” and one could imagine the possibilities of the new values it could take on through the process of markup. Attempting to represent this text in code would be engaging with much of the same processes that Foer engaged with when he decided to take a pre-existing text and make it something new by drastically altering its physical structure. Coding this text seems like natural next step in the process of experimenting with the reader’s perception of a single text in various artistic formats. My group has discussed using concrete poetry as being a challenge to code, which is of course, because of the challenge of representing the way poetry plays with word placement and space. Tree of Codes looks at the same problem in multiple dimensions and would be doubly challenging, and to consider how to cope with that would be an artistic undertaking in and of itself. For that reason we won’t be pursuing it, but I thought it presented an interesting conundrum for considering something like XML.

Bibliography

As Holly mentioned, she and I have chosen to work on a poem by the poet Robert Bringhurst for our encoding challenge. We have selected a poem from Bringhurst’s Selected Poems, published in 2009 by Gaspereau Press.

In an epigraph to the collection, Bringhurst notes that, “when conditions are right, it is good for poems to be spoken aloud. I mean that the poems themselves may benefit, not just the creatures who speak them and hear them. But in some of the poems in this book, two or three voices are speaking at once, contradicting or enlarging or refining one another as they go. Here, the overlapping voices are printed in different colors. Poems in which this occurs can be read in silence by one person alone or spoken aloud with one or two friends, if conditions are right. Which, in the presence of one or two friends, they just might be” (5). We felt that focusing on one of these poems with multiple voices was a great opportunity to explore what TEI allows us to capture of the experience of interacting with poetry. To begin, we looked at New World Suite No. 3: Four Movements for Three Voices:

If you’ll excuse the blurry photo…you can see perhaps that the three colours (black, blue, and red) represent the voice of the viola, the violin, and the cello, respectively. Bringhurst intends for the lines to be spoken simultaneously, at times, or in sequence. In some cases, the voices will finish each other’s sentences, or contradict one another. This sort of variety of reading experience immediately made me recall Prof. Galey’s example of his own work as part of his Visualizing Variation project, specifically his Animated Variants prototype (http://individual.utoronto.ca/alangaley/visualizingvariation/animated.html). Prof. Galey describes the project: “it was thought that digital editions could represent variants dynamically, presenting their ambiguity to readers not as a problem to solve, but as a field of interpretive possibility. Very few digital editions, however, have realized this possibility in their interfaces. One thing a digital visualization can do is make a virtue of ambiguity in ways that print cannot, combining the elements of time and motion to represent variants in ways that challenge the idea that texts are fixed and immutable.” This made me wonder if it would be possible to translate Bringhurst’s vision for a multi-vocal, performatory reading experience just as ‘dynamically’ as it is on the page, yet through XML. Exactly as Prof. Galey points out the potential for digital visualization, Bringhurst seems to be looking for the fluidity, the mutability, and the unfixed nature of this poetic interaction.

Upon considering the reflection further, Holly and I looked to another example of Bringhurst’s polyphonic poetry, The Blue Roofs of Japan: Duet for interpenetrating voices:

In an introduction to this poem, Bringhurst notes that, “The Blue Roofs of Japan is a poem for two voices – in principle little different from a sonata for cello and piano, except that here the instruments speak; they don’t quite sing. The full text of the poem is printed on both the righthand and lefthand pages of the book, but since the two voices frequently overlap, the two parts are not always legible on any one page. The lefthand pages give prominence to one voice, the righthand pages to the other. Facing pages should be read not in sequence but together. Reading the poem aloud requires two people…one reader, in any case, reads the black ink on the lefthand page while the other reads the black ink on the right. Under his or her own lines, each reader can see the other’s voice in blue. Enough blue ink is visible on every page to allow both readers to keep pace with one another. There isn’t, and in my view musn’t be, a metronome. The only thing the readers have to pace themselves against is each other” (175). It is exactly this sentiment that we hope to capture in our encoding. A sense of flow, overlap, and cohesion. As Galey points out, “animated variants also drive home the simple yet unsettling point that textual transmission is more often a matter of change than fixity: texts sometimes change even when readers aren’t looking.” Bringhurst opens up this possibility to his readers. While we’re unsure whether or not we’ll be able to execute our vision, we love the idea of applying something like CSS transitions (see: http://individual.utoronto.ca/alangaley/visualizingvariation/samples/animatedVariants/animatedVariants_v02_sonnet129.xml) to give the poem movement, colour, and ‘voice’, just as Bringhurst intended.

Bibliography:

Bringhurst, Robert. (2009). Selected poems. Canada: Gaspereau Press.

Galey, Alan. Visualizing variation. http://individual.utoronto.ca/alangaley/visualizingvariation/index.html#using.

Stephanie and I decided on Karl Baedeker’s “Southern France Including Corsica: Handbook for Travellers” (1907) for the encoding challenge. Stephanie had previously spent some time in Nice and we are both fascinated by the format and content of the guide.

Here’s a little history: Beadeker’s guides set the standard for authoritative travel guides and introduced information on routes, accommodations and travel, an innovation at the time. Beadeker created guides that focused on the traveler and reader. The guides featured information regarding transportation, restaurants, tipping, sights, and prices for a variety of things, including taxi fares. In addition, the guides include “pull out” maps that are referred to throughout the tex. These guides were designed to provide maximum coverage of the destination so that the traveler would not be required to look for information outside of the guide.

Since these guides contain a boat load of information, they are very dense and detailed (see the image below). Some challenges we will face for encoding will arise when it comes to decisions on format and content. The guides were formatted to fit the most content in the smallest amount of space. This resulted in large paragraphs containing content that is better presented in a list format. Our challenge will be to determine if we want to focus on presenting a true encoding of the material, in both content and format, or if we want to focus our attention on presenting the content in a different format, like including lists.

Another challenge we will face is encoding the references to the maps included in the guides or the references to other pages in the book. It will be interesting to play around with XML tagging to find a way to adequately represent these cross references.

Both Stephanie and I are super excited to take on this challenge and can’t wait to see how it turns out!

My terrible photo below (low light + bad phone) shows two pages of Canadian poet Lisa Robertson‘s long poem, “Debbie: An Epic.”

To start, let’s just consider the left page. There are a couple of interesting features to consider if encoding this text.

Most obviously, there is the overlapping content in the top right corner. (This is repeated on other pages – but it is specific to this poem.) What exactly would you tag the non-traditional text? Where would it be sequenced in relation to the standard column of poetry? Before? After? What about the issue of legibility? As discussed in class, the detail of classification of the tags – as well as the amount of effort one might put into specifying a particular feature – might depend on the audience. Another key consideration would be how much time a scholar has to encode a text. If this were part of a well-funded project that expects the most detailed possible encoding work, than more specificity and consideration could be applied to this feature.

Other notable features are the line numbers (which are specific to the poem, not the anthology) and the dagger footnote. For the line numbers, how would you make it clear that these are an integral part of the poem rather than an editor’s addition? For the footnote, is the shape important? Indeed, these are the kind of questions that make applying TEI as tricky as the text at hand.

Bibliography:

Robertson, Lisa. “Debbie: An Epic.” In The New Long Poem Anthology, edited by Sharon Thesen, 347-371. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2001.

Our group chose to tackle House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski for the encoding challenge. House of Leaves is a deeply complex novel, both in content and form. It is a description of a documentary film, written as a fragmented manuscript by a blind man named Zampano, which is compiled by a young man named Johnny Truant, whose own story unfolds in a series of footnotes, and the whole is commented on by nameless Editors. The documentary is about a bizarre house inhabited by a fictional Pulitzer-prize winning photographer, Will Navidson, and his family. After moving in, the family discovers new spaces appearing inside the house. The interior appears to be larger than the exterior. Passages lead into endless dark spaces full of branching ways, an enormous spiral staircase, and an ominous growl. Navidson and his brother take photographs and video of the phenomenon, eventually taking a documentary film team to explore the recesses of the house.

I always think about this book when considering form and format. It was the first book I read that really played with the link between form and content. Some of my favourite pages in the book arrange the text to reflect Navidson’s physical journey through the house while describing it.

However, those passages have too much form and too little content for this assignment.

There are several pages we considered for the encoding project, each having their own challenges. The pages below were an option that we didn’t go with.

Page 336 begins in the middle of a footnote to the main text, where Zampano is quoting another scholar’s interpretation of the documentary. Most of the footnote is struck out, and the main text itself on the next page has been damaged and burned, which is indicated by square brackets enclosing blank space. The destroyed text compares Navidson’s house to Minos’ mythological labyrinth, infamous home of the Minotaur. Page 337, meanwhile, describes the deaths of some members of Navidson’s documentary team, followed in the footnotes by Zampano’s scholarship and Johnny Truant’s reflections. The content of these two pages are in fact a complex web of referentiality, while the form is an equally complex mix of layout and design elements.

With any part of this book, the content is mostly nonlinear, which is a real challenge for encoding. While I have been treating Zampano’s manuscript as the main text in this post, this is really only my interpretation. Johnny Truant’s spiral into paranoia and madness could be equally or more important to some readers. Essentially, all parts of the book are equally important in terms of meaning, and so translating this into hierarchical XML requires implementing a specific reading of the text. Our group is currently figuring out an interpretation of our chosen passage, which is not as visually complex as this one, but is quite complex in its content.

House of Leaves is a novel that involves several layers of character narrative, a documentary film manuscript and editorial notes all mixed together to make a unique story. Though I have not read the book, from what I have seen of the novel is further complicated by an unusual presentation, orientation and purpose of the different types on the paper. It had definitely intrigued me and I look forward to reading it in the future.

Our group has chosen to do a page from the novel that involves markup regarding the multiple character stories and comments on footnotes. For this post I have chosen two pages from within the book that present an interesting challenge to markup in terms of the orientation and break up of print. Though it is the same speaker it appears to be a quote and a reflection of the quote.

Questions about it’s markup included whether the quotes and comments on the quotes should be separated or represented separately, as the comment breaks up the flow of reading the quote. Another question about markup is whether or not to markup both pages together as the quote transcends the page. Furthermore there was the question of the sentence breaks- though they go with the theme of the quote, they break mid-sentence and don’t appear to be important to the content.

Kali