Compiling reflections and feedback from my presentation, "Creating the Digital Variorum of Wordsworth's 'Nutting'" given at the Wordsworth Trust on March 6, 2019.

Link to presentation in Google

quoted from Dr. Roberts' email on 3/31/19

For Tuesday:
Everyone should prepare a 10-15 minute or so presentation to the class on where your project stands at mid-stage.

For when you are presenting: Use your Design Brief as the structure for your presentation. Share with us -
Your research question:
You should be moving towards how you present your research question to interested audiences. This involves not only stating your question, but constructing a narrative of how you came to the question and where it fits in the scholarly literature;
Your audience:
Share with us any insights about how the process of building the project has reinforced or challenged the audiences that you laid out for the project.
Your approach:
Here you should take us through what you have built thus far - using your digital projects as evidence of your approach. We know this is all work-in-progress! Our goal is to be helpful - not to add to the stress.
Your MoSCoWs:
Where are you in achieving these? Do you have to do any rethinking of them at this stage in the process?

When you are not presenting, you assignment is to be a reviewer (taken from the syllabus)
As a reviewer, your job is to observe and describe the project, to point to places that may need further elaboration or development, and to share what you'd like to know more about.

"Rethinking ICT literacy: From computer skills to social network settings"

"Accepting the challenges of social media research"

"Process Pedagogy and It's Legacy" by Chris M. Anson

"'our job is to produce better writers, not better writing'" (qtd in Anson 218).

Early process pedagogy refocused the attention onto the students' writing process. It was not enough to simply evaluate a finished product. Rather, by evaluating and facilitating peer review throughout the writing process, students are able to address weaknesses and seek support from their instructors.

People became more interested in composition as a field of study. "Whatever its driving source, the process movement soon generated intense interest in the empirical investigation of writing" (220).

"Hardly a well-informed composition program exists whose curriculum, teacher-development program, and daily routines do not engage students in the activities of writing and help them to become more conscious of themselves as writers and the strategies they use to produce text" (226).

Subject: Nutting Variorum: ideas for an application in archival description contexts

Dear Taylor,

As I told you in our first conversation via Instagram, I was completely mind-blown by your Wordsworth editions project. Beyond Wordsworth himself, what caught my attention was the use of a version-control environment for the "representation" of a complex object --the poem. By "complex" I'm referring to the fact that it is hard or impossible to determine which is the ultimate, definitive version of the poem, and this approach, as far as I can understand, allows for the "object" to maintain its "identity" or "singularity" while at the same time being able to be represented distinctly depending on the version that is accessed in the proposed digital flipbook.

Just to give you some context: I am Argentinean-Chilean and I work as an archivist in the context of the visual arts in Chile, and I've worked in the organization, description and cataloging of a few pretty straightforward institutional archives (in contemporary art museums), which could be fairly well represented with a combination of ISAD-G descriptions for archival fonds and series and a custom-made but rather simple database for the description of individual documents. I should add that most of this was done with proprietary software --a choice determined by the ease of access and by the severe limitations of our public and private museums regarding the implementation of IT departments within their workflow and, most importantly, their budgets. I've worked with these limitations for a few years, and I've developed some methods for collecting, crunching and recycling data with an open-source mind in a non-open-source environment. (Data recycling is an issue I'm passionate about, ours being a context in which many archival organization and description projects use very limited technology or just plainly lack a data-driven approach to archival processing, and also because these projects are very short-lived, mostly because of lack of funding.)

Mind you, I'm not at all versed in coding; I do most of my work in a very sui generis, home-made style, combining and recombining spreadsheet software formulas, bits of code found on the internet (mostly SQL) and some open-source text analysis tools. I warn you of this in case my coding ignorance transpires in my interpretation of your project.

Now, though, Jennifer McColl, a colleague of mine has presented me with a very interesting cataloging problem, way more complex and idiosyncratic that those usually found in institutional archives. It concerns Ronald Kay's personal archives. Ronald Kay was a very interesting and unorthodox Chilean visual artist, video artist, poet and philosopher. He was the first to introduce the fundamental texts of Walter Benjamin in Chile in the 1970s, and he was very much a Benjamin- or Aby Warburg-like sort of author/artist. His archives are full of notebooks with later-added sticky notes, newspaper clippings, photographs and all sorts of other textual and visual atachments wich have been very consciously added to the pages as a sort of hypertextual composition. These objects shouldn't ever be separated from the notebooks themselves, since they are loaded with meaning; with bits of information in at least five different languages which complement, reveal, transform, displace, or alter in some way the meaning of the contents in the underlying page, establishing the most amazing connections among these fragments and between them and the overall notebook/project.

In the Instagram post from the @wwnuttingvariorum account I read "In this project, I will transform an existing digital edition [...] into a fully linked, version-controlled, interactive website and digital flipbook which calls upon the various versions of the poem as potential paths for users to follow". As soon as I read this I thought this would be an amazing model for the cataloging of Ronald Kay's notebooks. Most notably, I think the very concept of version is a powerful way to describe the various instances of these heterogeneous documents. Instead of treating them as objects which operate as containers, the idea of them being conceived as environments which have different versions seems way more appropriate, or at least more akin to the idiosyncratic nature of these documents/objects. I hope this makes sense. I think of these objects not as the sum of n number of definite parts, but rather as a multi-faceted document in which every instance of the document (every combination/compostition) is a given totality (a version of the totality) of the document. I hope I'm not completely missing the point in your project, and if I am, I hope at least these loose ideas can function as a startpoint for an interesting technical and methodological/epistemological discussion.

I'd love to follow your project and to hopefully make a space for this discussion within the project's forum so that more people can chip into the discussion.
Are you in charge of this project? Is there any way I can learn more about this class and stay in touch? How can I learn more and get more involved?
Please excuse this very much without-a-point email. I am very much in the margins of this sort of projects but I really wish to learn more and hopefully get more involved in the broader field of Digital Humanities in the near future. Moreover, the Nutting Variorum project seems like exactly the kind of thing I must be paying attention to, re:the Ronald Kay and other "complex" archives. I'll sign up into GitHub so that we can continue the discussion there if it's pertinent.

I hope some of this makes sense and that you'll welcome my probably very foreign interests in your project.

Best regards,
Federico

Received January 28, 2019

Assignment Details:

Even if you do not know what form or structure your project might take, begin with the field in which you’re in conversation. What need is there for this project? Where’s the gap in current research that this project is addressing? (i.e., “Digital archives for x exist, but none of them adequately address y”).

Demonstrate the need for your project in a proposal draft that includes:

• the specific intervention the project is making,
• the theories informing your project idea,
• a prelimi­nary bibliog­raphy of at least 10 items – primary and secondary sources -- that seem relevant,
• and a more fully developed landscape scan (what similar projects exist, and how is yours contributing something new/different?).

What is the best way to present the edition in its "final" state? Begin with a standard presentation and tour of the repo, then demonstrate the flipbook?

Developing an Accessibility Statement

Creating a public digital humanities project often means asking questions completely unrelated to our own experience. The ideal DH project, at its core, is a collaborative, empathetic affair that prioritizes universal design. I have been privileged with a great deal of time and opportunities for revision in my classwork to establish the standards I want my project to follow. In recent years, The Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities and its graduate fellows, myself included, have become leaders in web accessibility. Graduate fellows Tyler Monaghan—now graduated—and Rebecca Parker planned and hosted, Digital Accessibility: Assessing, Amending, and Advancing Digital Content for All—a day conference at the Lake Shore campus on February 23, 2018. Since then, conscious effort has been made to make all Center generated web content compliant with current accessibility standards. I believe that any digital project, particularly those enacted and deployed publicly, must consider the greatest audience in its design practices. In some cases it may be impossible to literally design for everyone. Regardless, anyone could come across the public project so proper steps must be taken to anticipate those users' needs.

In this Issue, I want to compose and compile source materials for my project's Accessibility Statement. Once I have a good draft, I'll transfer it to the repo Wiki and later the site itself. I also want to use this Issue to work through specific accessibility hurdles. I would be grateful for any helpful contributions and thoughts regarding the accessibility of digital editions!

Readings for Professor Weller's TTH UCWR Class:

Weller_SynthesisChapter_2-21-19.pdf
NoNameWoman_MaxineHongKingston.pdf

Class Time: 2:30-3:45 pm
Location: IC 215

Lindemann_NoPLaceforLiterature.pdf
Tate_APlaceforLiteratureintheClassroom.pdf

Quoted from syllabus

A design brief is a short document (from a paragraph to a page) that articulates a problem and a general approach to addressing the problem (it sets the scope of the problem and the solution). In articulating the problem, the design brief highlights the facts of an issue that are most relevant.

• Research Question:
• Audience:
• Approach:
• MoSCoWs: must-haves (critical to project), should-haves (important but not necessary), could-haves (desirable but not necessary), and won't-haves (future "wish list")

Draft 2-3 Personas that represent the intended audiences for your project.

Brief reasoning for the names:

Mateo means Matthew and Flores means Flowers, both extremely significant to the Wordsworth narrative. Wordsworth's male mentor was named Matthew and the poet described their relationship as one of mutual understanding and trust despite the distinct age difference. 🍃

Evelyn means Hazelnut (self explanatory here) and Peters represents Beatrix Potter's close knit connection to the Lake District. Beatrix Potter essentially reinstated the Lake District's native population of Herdwick sheep "and became the first elected female President of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association in 1943" (source). 🐑

Lucy is a significant character in the Wordsworth universe; frequently written into poems on Spring and innocence, Wordsworth casts Lucy as the ideal being whose life is cut down before experience creeps in. A Hangle is a hook from which a stew pot or roasting spit is hung in a fireplace. This has no particular Wordsworth significance, it just reminded me of the frugal Dame keeping watch from the cottage-threshold. 🌰

Whose Global Village?: Rethinking How Technology Shapes Our World
Woke Gaming: Digital Challenges to Oppression and Social Injustice
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism
Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
Memes to Movements: How the World's Most Viral Media Is Changing Social Protest and Power

The Digital Variorum of Wordsworth's "Nutting"

This description is way too long for promotional purposes so I will edit it and save this for longer prose later!

Description:

From manuscript to print publication to open source repository, the works of William Wordsworth have undergone countless scrutiny and editing at the hands of the poet and the editors dedicated to the task after his death. Though many editions of Wordsworth's poetry exist in both print and digital formats, for each the audience largely remains the same—a fractional academic community of scholars. In this edition, I have sought to trace the dynamic history of "Nutting" taking into consideration an audience more akin to those Wordsworth cared about. Children, the meekest and most innocent of all people though voraciously tethered to the rural tenements of Nature, claim some of the greatest roles in Wordsworth's poetry. "Nutting" stars a young William who came across a particularly bountiful bower of hazels ripe for the picking and, almost without hesitation, "dragg'd to earth both branch and bough, with crash/And merciless ravage." It is a children's story and its reemergence in children's perception depends on a remediation of its representation. My solution to this is a choose-your-own-adventure edition wherein readers select one era of composition of three—creation, publication, and adaptation—and from there encounter visual and audio transcriptions and illustrations of the poem as it existed and changed during that era.

“Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence”

Read the Variorum Wireframe Online:

https://read.bookcreator.com/iZGopFWH0qhFrrwFr9aFKfm61w83/7lbJzaHIQrO7Ek0WrU1CYg

Taking notes here because a lot of the info is central to what I'm trying to do in this project and I want my responses to be recorded and public.

Sakai Reading:
Leki Academic Literacy in a Second Language.pdf

GCP:
Matsuda and Hammill, “Second Language Writing”

• Cut together an MS Transcription Process Video to screen at the beginning of the defense.
• Finish outlining the Variorum Plot Graph for the section you will present.
• Finish wireframing the website.
• Map out one section of the flipbook that includes all interactive components.
• Assemble presentation materials - PowerPoint, Prezi, etc.
• Begin writing new documentation for this stage of the project.
• Record yourself reading the section you plan to present on.

Week 1 Readings

Proposal for 1940 composition course.pdf
Crowley_Week1_ENGL402.pdf
Kitzharber_Week1_ENGL402.pdf

taken from the DIGH 501 Syllabus

If you are working with an existing platform, tool, or content management system (CMS) such as Omeka, Scalar, Drupal, WordPress, Joomla!, Mukurtu, Jekyll, or Django, you’ll need to think about its affordances and possible limitations. A CMS is a system that allows an author publish content to the web via tools like a backend, with buttons and text editors. The “content” — the text, images, and other media you upload — is stored in a database, separate from instructions for styling and displaying the site.

Consider the following questions in your analysis:

• How does this platform distinguish itself from others?

• Who built (builds) the platform?

• For whom is the platform intended?

• What language(s) is (are) it written in?

• What kinds of sites or projects currently use this platform?

• What possibilities does it offer for display? For example, how easy is it to reconfigure the form of a project? How many options are configurable?

• Does the platform seem to assume that you want to display content in a certain configuration? If so, what is it?

• How easy is it for a layperson to install this platform? To use it?

• Who can modify the platform’s source code?

• What kind of database does the CMS use? Can you tell anything about the format of data contained in the database?

• Can you attach metadata to the content you enter? If so, what kind?

Once you’ve answered these questions, let’s think about some ethical and intellectual implications for doing scholarly work within your platform. A framing question might be, “If we chose this platform for our project, what would our implicit message be?” You might consider:

• the philosophy of the platform toward the relationship of form and content

• the attitude the CMS adopts toward the flow of information

• the ethical implications of the platform’s assumptions about organizing (or not organizing) content

• its assumptions about who should have access to and modify information****

Determine the format of your presentation. Will you use a PowerPoint? A Prezi? A simple tour of the Repo and Website?

The Craft of Research Chapter 3, "From Topics to Questions"

Without focus—or a well researched and thought out argument—any evidence you compile will seem unlinked or arbitrary to readers and users.

Questions may raise problems—problems are questions that, left unanswered, have greater consequences than the answer itself.

Narrow down broad topics to avoid intimidating yourself: try to look into topics other researchers find interesting, then see what they are talking about in their research. If there a gap you could fill? Be careful, however, too narrow a topic will restrict the amount of information you will be able to find.

"If a writer asks no specific question worth asking, he can offer no specific answer worth supporting." (39)

"...the best way to begin working on your focused topic is not to find all the information you can on it, but to formulate questions that direct you to just that information you need to answer them." (39)

What is your topic's larger developmental context? What is its internal history?

Find both contradictory and complimentary arguments and research related to your focused topic and attempt to expand on those conversations with your findings. You may be able to answer questions raised by other researchers.

Once you ask all your questions, narrow them down to the really important ones.

The greatest question of all: so what? What greater impact does my research or focused topic have on the world?

"So what? vexes all researchers, beginners, and experienced alike, because when you have only a question, it's hard to predict whether others will think its answer is significant." (43)

Three Important Steps:

1. Name your topic
2. Add an Indirect Question
3. Answer So What? by Motivating Your Question

Week 2 Readings

Intro to Guide to Compostion Studies.pdf
GraphicGuidetoWriting.pdf
Fleming_Chapter.pdf
Lindemann_Chapter.pdf

Following a successful presentation and opportune encounter, I linked up with Jenny Dickinson, @spinninjenny—illustrator of children's books and historical narratives currently living in the Lake District—who will be contributing her talents to the "Nutting" Variorum Project! I've opened this issue so we can throw around our ideas for the illustrations as well as discuss the poem together in a public close reading.

Statement of Topic:

In this project, I will transform an existing digital edition—of my own creation—into a fully linked, version-controlled, interactive website and digital flipbook which calls upon the various versions of the poem as potential paths for users to follow.

Methodological Questions:

1. Is Textual Studies work suitable for or, at least, adaptable to a public, developer platform such as GitHub?
2. Will it be advantageous to markup the versions of the poem in TEI-XML? Will there be enough time to transform that markup into something that invites users into the site?
3. Is Book Creator the appropriate platform to construct the digital flipbook? See project four, Animate Poem for notes and links regarding Book Creator.
4. Will a simple GitHub Pages site be enticing enough for users to want to visit?
5. If I am not permitted to use the manuscript images of the poem, will a variorum edition that doesn't have facsimile images of the manuscripts be appealing to anyone?

Interpretive Questions:

1. Is a digital edition of Wordsworth's poetry useful or desirable in today's academic and political climate?
2. Can a poem about one boy's experience be universally transferable?
3. Is a flipbook too childish? And, if so, is the complexity of studying versions too much for an application that only attracts young users?
4. Every edition has an argument, so what's mine? Universally: we all exist in many versions, and only in reflection do we see how those versions make up the people we are today. Pragmatically: we learn and retain information better when we feel as though we have some part in its creation or its ordering.
5. Is calling it a "Digital Variorum" already overly presumptuous of audience and, therefore, pushing potential non-academic users away?

I'll do this using Adobe Illustrator. I want to turn the forest scene into a sort of blurred watercolor-esque scene to place behind the main "Nutting" logo.

Adding images of Hazel section for social media.
Link to Google Books

Two readings in the GCP and one on Sakai.

PDF Reading from Sakai:
Hairston.pdf

"Language Worlds" pg 25. Shipka

"examining the communicative process as a dynamic whole" pg. 28 Shipka

"Specifically, DePew suggests researchers attend to the artifacts as well as to the composer's intentions, the audience's responses to the artifact, and to the local contexts shaping the artifact's production and reception" pg. 29 Shipka

"Tracing the processes by which texts are produced, circulated, received, responded to, used, misused, and transformed, we are able to examine the complex interplay of the digital and analog, of the human and nonhuman, and of technologies, both new and not so new" pg. 30 Shipka

"I am equally concerned with how a narrow definition of technology fails to encourage richly nuanced, situated views of literacy_" pg. 31 Shipka

"...an activity-based multimodal framework requires students to spend the semester attending to how language, combined with still other representational systems, mediates communicative practice" (pp. 87-88 Shipka

"rhetorical sensitivity" pg. 89 Shipkpa

"Lost and Found" Assignment pg. 91 Shipka