Description

Digital humanities has reached a point where its mere existence is no longer (or ought not to be) surprising, yet too often, digital humanities sessions wind up serving as apologia for digital methods of scholarship. As Ryan Cordell writes, “Only a few years ago, [digital humanities] was still a fringe field, mostly ignored by academia more widely. DHers felt not like ‘the next big thing,’ but like an embattled minority.” This defensiveness has meant that digital humanities sessions have often concentrated on explaining, teaching, justifying, or critiquing digital methods in general rather than on presenting the results of those methods: of the digitally-oriented sessions at the 2013 meeting of the MLA listed by Mark Sample, words such as “approaches,” “methods,” “modes,” “theories,” and “practices” abound. The proposed special session, “Things My Computer Taught Me About Poems,” explores how new digital methods can contribute to the study of poetry while at the same time deemphasizing method as much as possible. Conceived independently of and indeed prior to the publication of “Beyond the Digital,” Brian Croxall’s Association for Computing in the Humanities panel proposal for MLA 2014, “Things My Computer Taught Me About Poems” nevertheless proceeds from exactly the same impulse: to remind ourselves and the MLA community that, as Croxall puts it, “the output of digital analysis is not itself the goal; rather, it is a means to an end, and that end is the interpretation of a text or corpus.” We therefore propose a formal panel session composed of three fifteen-minute presentations by scholars of poetry who have adopted a digital method: these scholars will respectively discuss their new insights into particular cases of poetic influence, poetic style, and poetic time.

To begin, Dr. Amanda French (also the presider), will discuss intellectual and poetic influences on Edna St. Vincent Millay as revealed by her books. Scholars have not much considered Millay’s sources or influences, but when they have, the consensus has been that, as J. D. McClatchy put it in 2003, “Millay wrote from the bedroom, not the library” (52). Yet Millay did possess an library of more than a thousand books, and for all her reputation as an emotional rather than an intellectual poet, that very library shows her interest in classical Greek literature, socialism, Marxism, relativity, and astronomy. At the same time, analysis of the books Millay owned suggests that Millay’s most persistent intellectual influence came from the poets of her own generation, especially the lesser-known poets.

Secondly, Dr. Natalie Houston will discuss the poetic styles of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti. When scholars describe the style of a particular poet, they typically identify features that support their description within that poet’s own oeuvre; in this tradition, Christina Rossetti’s language is famously “simple” and EBB’s “complex.” Dr. Houston’s paper will present a comparative analytics of four features of Victorian poetic style: rhyme, enjambment, vocabulary richness, and repetition. Examining these features within the works of Rossetti and Barrett Browning, but also suggesting how their works might be differently understood when compared against the larger backdrop of Victorian poetic production, Dr. Houston will provide concrete measures for understanding the two poets’ relative simplicity and complexity.

Finally, Dr. Katharine Coles and Dr. Julie Lein will discuss their changed understanding of poetic time. It has been commonplace for critics and poets to refer to the “lyric moment,” to contrast the ostensibly typical “stillness” and atemporal “suspension” of poetry (most especially the lyric) with the action and (at times disrupted or multiplied) sequential movement(s) of narrative. As Drs. Coles and Lein will explain, their research has persuaded them on the contrary that poetic time is incredibly energetic and dynamic—characterized by at least as much multidimensional temporal movement as narrative prose.

All four scholars could say much about their respective methods, which in themselves differ widely. Dr. French is creating a online catalog of the intact personal library of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and her method might justly be called the “epistemology of building,” in Stephen Ramsay and Geoff Rockwell’s term. Dr. Houston pays attention to pattern: she uses text analysis tools to help identify such patterns and compare them within and across poems, sequences, books, and oeuvres, not only among the works of canonical poets but also at the significantly larger scale now available through digitization. Drs. Coles and Lein, funded in the US by an NEH Digging Into Data Challenge grant, are working with computer scientists to develop poetry visualization software. Whether the particular insights of these four scholars could have been achieved by non-computational methods is open to debate, and debate of that kind will be welcome in the question and answer period (which we intend to ensure lasts at least twenty minutes). Nevertheless, it is our hope that “Things My Computer Taught Me About Poems” will also (or ideally, instead) generate debate about subjects such as poetic influence, poetic style, and poetic time.

Cordell, Ryan. “Mea Culpa: On Conference Tweeting, Politeness, and Community Building | Ryan Cordell.” Ryan Cordell 26 Jan. 2013. 28 Mar. 2013. <ryan.cordells.us/blog/2013/01/26/mea-culpa-on-conference-tweeting-politeness-and-community-building/>.

Croxall, Brian. “Beyond the Digital: Pattern Recognition and Interpretation. A CFP for MLA 2014 from ACH.” 13 Mar. 2013. 28 Mar. 2013. <www.briancroxall.net/2013/03/12/beyond-the-digital-pattern-recognition-and-interpretation-a-cfp-for-mla-2014/>.

McClatchy, J. D. “Feeding on Havoc: The Poetics of Edna St. Vincent Millay.” The American Scholar 72.2 (2003) : 45–52. 2 Apr. 2013. <www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/41221118>.

Ramsay, Stephen, and Geoffrey Rockwell. “Developing Things: Notes Toward an Epistemology of Building in the Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Open-access. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. University of Minnesota Press, 2012. 28 Mar. 2013. <dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/11>.

Sample, Mark. “Digital Humanities at MLA 2013.” SAMPLE REALITY 17 Oct. 2012. 28 Mar. 2013. <www.samplereality.com/2012/10/17/digital-humanities-at-mla-2013/>.

Abstracts

Millay and Her Books

Amanda French

Scholars have not much considered Millay’s sources or influences, but when they have, the consensus has been that, as J. D. McClatchy put it in 2003, “Millay wrote from the bedroom, not the library.” Yet Millay did possess an extensive library of books, and for all her reputation as an emotional rather than an intellectual poet, that very library shows her interest in classical Greek literature, socialism, Marxism, relativity, and astronomy. At the same time, analysis of the books Millay owned suggests that Millay’s most persistent intellectual influence came from the poets of her own generation, especially the lesser-known poets.

What Does Style Really Mean? A Comparative Analysis of the Poetry of Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Natalie Houston

Until recently, our readings of nineteenth-century poetry have been largely directed by what Foucault termed the “author function,” the classification schemes derived from a biographical approach to literary history.   Today, the digitization of public domain materials and the development of computational tools for analysis can lead us to new comparative studies across the widest range of Victorian print culture, beyond the traditional academic canon. This paper presents a comparative analysis of the poetic styles of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti and suggests how their works might be differently understood when compared against the larger backdrop of Victorian poetic production.

When scholars describe the poetic style of a particular poet, (Christina Rossetti’s language is famously “simple,” and EBB’s “complex”), they typically identify features that support their description within the oeuvre of a particular poet.

Computational analysis can help us look more carefully at the patterns of poetic language both within a particular writer’s works and across a larger textual corpus.

Whether we are reading one sonnet or 100, a fundamental assumption in reading poetry is that the selection and arrangement of linguistic elements (words, clauses, sentences) bears an important relation to the meaning of the text. As Jerome McGann suggests:

In poems, however, “meaning” is mistakenly conceived if it is conceived as a “message.” Rather, “meaning” in poetry is part of the poetical medium . . . one textual level – Pound called it “logopoeia” – where the text’s communicative exchanges play themselves out. (The Textual Condition 15)

Our method, quite simply, is to pay attention to patterns.  Text analysis tools can help us identify such patterns and compare them within and across poems, sequences, books, and oeuvres.  Computational analysis is perhaps especially well suited to the study of poetry, given the mathematical elements always already embedded in poetic form.

This paper presents a comparative computational analytics of four features of Victorian poetic style: rhyme, enjambment, vocabulary richness, and repetition. Examining these features within the works of Rossetti and Barrett Browning provides concrete measures for understanding their relative simplicity and complexity.  I explain how the metrics offered by this analysis can contribute to a new comparative analysis of Victorian poetics, both among the works of canonical poets and at the significantly larger scale now available through digitization.

Turbulence and Temporality: (Re)visualizing Poetic Time

Katharine Coles and Julie Lein

In 2012 we embarked with computer scientists on a project to develop original poetry visualization software. This research, funded in the US by the NEH as part of a Digging Into Data Challenge grant, has led us to think about and approach poems differently than we ever have before. Most prominent among these new insights has been our changed understanding of poetic time. Each of us was initially drawn to the project in part by its promise to attend carefully to ways time is expressed and experienced in poems. But neither of us had anticipated how much this meticulous attention would transform our own views of poetry.

It has been commonplace to refer to the “lyric moment,” to contrast the ostensibly typical “stillness” and atemporal “suspension” of poetry (most especially the lyric) with the action and (at times disrupted or multiplied) sequential movement(s) of narrative. As we will explain, though, our research has persuaded us on the contrary that poetic time is incredibly energetic and dynamic—characterized by at least as much multidimensional temporal movement as narrative prose.

We have been working to visualize these multidimensional, multidirectional temporal movements via the metaphor of flow, adapting fluid simulation strategies to our perception of poems behaving as fluid (or fluids) moving via their linguistic elements, devices, and figures through a (self)defined space. This framework has helped us to articulate as turbulence places in poems where multiple flows (temporal, formal, affective, etc.) converge and interact to shape the poem as a whole. Focusing first on sound and then image, we will show how close readings, in conjunction with our collaborative research, directed us to ideas we would not otherwise have formed.

Panelist Information

Katharine Coles

Professor Katharine Coles’ fifth collection of poems, The Earth Is Not Flat, was released in March by Red Hen Press, which will also publish her sixth collection, Flight, in 2015.  Her poems, stories, and essays have appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Seneca Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Paris Review, among many other journals.  In 2009-10, she served as the inaugural director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute for the Poetry Foundation; on stepping down, she traveled to Antarctica to write poems under the auspices of the National Science Foundation’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program.  A 2012 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, she in on the English faculty at the University of Utah, where she founded and co-directs the Utah Symposium in Science and Literature and will receive the Distinguished Creative and Research Award for 2013.  She served as the Utah State Poet Laureate from 2006 to 2012.

Amanda French

Amanda French, a well-known figure in the digital humanities, is currently Research Assistant Professor and THATCamp Coordinator at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. In addition to her copious “meta” work supporting the digital humanities as an emerging scholarly practice, her scholarship on poetic genre has been substantial. Most recently, she contributed eight articles to the fourth edition of the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics; in 2010, she published an article in Victorian Poetry titled “Edmund Gosse and the Stubborn Villanelle Blunder.” Her dissertation is a comprehensive history of the villanelle, the poetic form of Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” She is currently at work on creating an online catalog of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s personal library at Steepletop.

Natalie Houston

Natalie Houston is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston. Her research on Victorian poetry and print culture has appeared in journals such as Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, Yale Journal of Criticism, Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net,  Essays and Studies, and Studies in the Literary Imagination, as well as in The Blackwell Companion to Victorian Poetry. She is the Project Director for the Visual Page, an NEH-funded project to develop a software application to identify and analyze visual features in digitized printed books. She is also a Co-Director and Technical Director for the Periodical Poetry Index, a research database of citations to English-language poems published in nineteenth-century periodicals.

Julie Lein

Julie Lein earned her PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Utah, where she also served as a poetry editor for Quarterly West and currently works as a postdoctoral research fellow. Her poetry, fiction, and scholarship have appeared in The Antioch Review, Best New Poets 2011, 100 Word Story, Colorado Review, Phoebe, Terrain.org, Modernism/modernity and elsewhere. She is a recipient of the Larry Levis Poetry Prize.

Tool Portals

• Bamboo DiRT – dirt.projectbamboo.org
• TaPOR – Text Analysis Portal – tapor.ca

Project Portals

• Digital Humanities Now – digitalhumanitiesnow.org
• NEH ODH grants – securegrants.neh.gov/publicquery/main.aspx
• DH Commons – dhcommons.org – narrow by “design,” for instance

Selected Tools and Projects

• Jason Mittell, Complex Television on MediaCommons mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/complextelevision/
  
• Scalar – scalar.usc.edu/scalar/showcase/
• ImagePlot (and Lev Manovich’s work in general) – lab.softwarestudies.com/p/imageplot.html
• ChronoZoom and other MS Research serious zoom projects – research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/aidsquilt/
• Omeka – omeka.org and omeka.net – harlemcore.com – exhibitions.europeana.eu/
• Gephi – gephi.org/ and chnm2012.thatcamp.org/06/26/o-rocks-tell-it-to-us-in-plain-images-a-thatcampbloomsday-visualization/

Finally

• Matthew Kirschenbaum, “So the Colors Cover the Wires: Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability in A Companion to Digital Humanities
• Matthew K. Gold, ed., Debates in the Digital Humanities

**

There is no Frigate like a book
To take us lands away
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of Prancing Poetry
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a human Soul.

–Emily Dickinson, www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19730

Alexandria is a port, the busiest seaport in Egypt. Of course it is: where else could the most famous library of antiquity have been built but in a city with a busy port? That’s almost a contradiction in terms, that phrase "busy port" — the safest, most sheltered waters are those that must inevitably be roiled by everyone’s embarkings and disembarkings. Such places earn the hubbub of a hub precisely through their initial state of calm repose.

And if books and pages are ships and horses in Emily Dickinson’s formulation, then libraries too are busy seaports and coaching inns and highways "without oppress of toll." Libraries and archives and museums, like ports, including airports, are still and primarily places we come to to get somewhere else, to be transported. And this is as true or even more true of digital libraries as it is of physical libraries: on the web, many sites are only as powerful as their ability to get you somewhere else as quickly as possible. Google, notably, does its utmost to get you off Google.com as fast as it can: Google accrues power by giving it away.

I have argued elsewhere — or, rather, elsewhere I have released a small balloon of an idea into the atmosphere — that the DPLA should or at least could be rooted in a physical space, a building. The genesis of that idea did not, in fact, come from my deep love of libraries as places, although that is a love that goes back to my childhood. Standing in a library, for me, is as heady as standing by the ocean, and in both places I always have similar vague impulses to escape to barely imagined islands just across the horizon. But no: the first notion I ever had that a digital library could be a physical library was sparked by nothing less than learning that one exists.

The National Digital Library of Korea (also called the "dibrary"), which opened in 2009, is, in fact, a building. It took seven years to build, at a cost to the Korean government of about $112 million dollars US, and by some accounts it contains over 116 million “pieces of digital content,” which would make it almost eight times as large as the Europeana digital library, which claims 15 million items. That 116 million number, however, is probably based on a definition of “pieces of digital content” that includes (say) database records, and is therefore not measured in the same units as most digital libraries. But reports also testify, more believably, that the dibrary has digitized 380,000 books, and that is a very respectable number.

The National Digital Library of Korea is an eight-story building (five of those stories underground) that seats 550 patrons, and it runs 300 TB of server space. The physical space and the equipment are so advanced as to seem almost fictional. On the main floor there are touch-screen help kiosks. There are 3D monitors that do not require viewers to wear 3D glasses. There is a Global Lounge running PCs in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, and Vietnamese. There are multimedia viewing and creation and editing spaces as well as meeting and café spaces. There is a permanent art installation that “displays customized videos based on a user recognition function.” There is an enormous screen reserved only for 3D text, including “user messages.” There is a Laptop Zone, and there is a “Productivity Computer Cluster” whose desktop computers have large monitors and multiple monitors. There are more touch-screen kiosks, these dedicated to the sole purpose of reading digital newspapers. There are electronic tables with touch-screen surfaces, and on those tables you can see digital surrogates of historic Korean books as they lie open flat before you, seemingly in the table rather than on it. There is a connecting bridge called the Way of Knowledge that connects the National Digital Library of Korea with the National Library of Korea, and projected on the walls of the Way of Knowledge are “motion-sensitive interactive contents.” And, of course, there are are D.to, N.to, and U.to, the dibrary’s adorable mascots.

Regardless of whether the Digital Public Library of America ever realizes itself in a building, it is important, I think, to remember two things. First: library, archive, and museum buildings are no longer the only gateways to culture and ideas — but the new gateways are also physical. To put it in a sound bite, hardware is the new harbor. If nothing else, libraries, archives, and museums can provide everyone, especially "the poorest," access to these new "transportation" devices; the Gates Foundation has already recognized this truth in its support for putting public computers in public libraries. Second: digital libraries do bring people to physical places, especially when those places have unique originals of digitally ubiquitous representations. Putting digital content online, as many of you doubtless know, increases rather than decreases visitors: representation is no subsitute for presence.

I’m pleased that the DPLA seems to be leaning toward being primarily an aggregator of metadata and content for this very reason: the DPLA is likely to drive traffic to libraries, archives, and museums in both the digital and the physical spaces. And the DPLA is also likely to launch more than a few ships, some going exploring, and some returning home.

***
To Whom It May Concern,

As a humanities researcher, I am vitally interested in policies resulting from your discussions about public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications. The policies you adopt will very likely have repercussions for all scholarly research, especially that which is supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and most especially that which is supported by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities. Other federal agencies, too, support humanities research: the Department of Education, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, and the National Archives should all be included as you formulate answers to the questions you pose in your request for information.

You ask, “How can policies for archiving publications and making them publically accessible be used to grow the economy and improve the productivity of the scientific enterprise?” Substituting “scholarly enterprise” for “scientific enterprise,” I can certainly speak to the latter point: policies that ensure that federally funded publications are open will improve scholarly productivity in all fields. The fact is that scholars often communicate among themselves using the same communication tools that the public uses: e-mail lists, Google Groups, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and so on. In order for research to be shared in these media, it must be shareable, and to be shareable, it must be open. If scholar A’s institution subscribes to a particular journal and scholar B’s does not, a link send to scholar B by scholar A will not work. Even within a university, scholars will find that a link they send their students or graduate students often does not work if those students are off-campus. The “paywall” puts significant obstacles in the way of spreading information, which is the heart of scholarly productivity. Scholars who do not learn about relevant information may spend many months or even years in futile pursuits.

Those of us who work in the digital humanities are particularly aware that public access to our research makes our work more widely known by other scholars as well as by the public. The digital humanities researcher Melissa Terras has also written about the importance of public access in raising a publication’s profile among other scholars and the public: in her piece “What Happens When You Tweet an Open Access Paper,” she traces the increasing popularity of a peer-reviewed paper that she posted in an open repository: “Prior to me blogging and tweeting about the paper, it got downloaded twice (not by me). The day I tweeted and blogged it, it immediately got 140 downloads.” The downloads only increased, and, ultimately, she wrote, “This post was mentioned in the Times Higher [Ed] last week, and the paper has now been downloaded 805 times in total.” Note that open access to her paper, and her ability to link directly to the paper from social media such as her Twitter account and her blog, ultimately led to reporting on her work in a major newspaper.

In 2011 at the Modern Language Association annual meeting, I gave a paper with the tongue-in-cheek (but true) title “Your Twitter Followers and Facebook Friends Won’t Read Your Peer-reviewed Article if They Have to Pay for It, and Neither Will Strangers,” in which I related the experience of discovering that several members of my social network, both scholars and non-scholars, were interested in reading my arcane work on Victorian poetic form if they could gain access to it freely. That (very short) paper is freely available at amandafrench.net/blog/2011/01/07/twitter-facebook-article/ should you care to read it. In that paper, I cited a study by Jason Priem and Kaitlin Light Costello presented at the 2010 meeting of the American Society of Information Science and Technology titled “How and Why Scholars Cite on Twitter.” As I wrote,

It was one of my most clicked-on links for the year, with 118 views—many of the links I tweet to news articles and so on get only thirty or so clicks. The authors studied a sample of 46,515 tweets from twenty-eight scholars — seven scientists, fourteen social scientists, and seven humanists — and reported that “In our sample of tweets containing hyperlinks, 6% were citations. Of these, 52% were first-order links and 48% were second-order.” By this, they meant that 52% of the links went directly to peer-reviewed work, while 48% were links that went to non-peer-reviewed work about peer-reviewed work: blog posts and news articles, for instance.

One of the main reasons that scholars tweeted these “second-order” links was that they worked for everyone: “[S]cholars may prefer to link directly to the article when it is open access but will resort to second-order links to bypass paywall restrictions. Participants were attracted to open-access articles for Twitter citations; Ben said ‘I would certainly be much more likely to link to things if they were more readily available.’ ”

That study, as well, is openly available at mail.asis.org/asist2010/proceedings/proceedings/ASIST_AM10/submissions/201_Final_Submission.pdf. As I hope is clear, I frequently make use of (and share) conference papers for my research, and therefore, I give a decided “yes” to your question, “Should other types of peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally funded research, such as book chapters and conference proceedings, be covered by these public access policies?” The format in which scholarly research is published should make no difference to its public availability.

It is true that the scholarly work I have mentioned so far has not been explicitly funded by the U.S. government. However, I reiterate that humanities researchers do indeed receive federal funding, and I am no exception. In 2009, a grant from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission, the funding arm of the National Archives, allowed me to work for a year on a project to update the curriculum of the Archives and Public History graduate program at NYU with department chair and principal investigator Dr. Peter Wosh. We were more than happy to distribute the results of this project publicly, online as well as through scholarly channels such as the annual meeting of the Society for American Archivists and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archives Conference. This work would certainly come under the aegis of the Issa Research Works Act, an act which troubles me deeply. For another example, I have applied for a Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress for the year 2012, and although the funds for this fellowship come from a private foundation, it is possible to likely that any work I produced while doing research at the Library of Congress would also qualify as federally funded research.

Finally, I work at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM), a humanities research center which has benefited greatly from federal funds, and which as a body is committed to public access to scholarly publications. The Center itself, which has conducted more than $20 million in grant-funded research, relies on a nearly $3 million endowment achieved with the assistance of two Challenge Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities. CHNM’s work, like that of any scientific research center, relies on both federal and private funding: CHNM’s work has been recognized with major grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Department of Education, the Library of Congress, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Historic Records and Publication Commission, and the Sloan, Mellon, Hewlett, Rockefeller, Gould, Delmas, and Kellogg foundations. Since 1994, CHNM has been a leader in improving students’ understanding of history and the humanities through digital media, in building digital archives and mounting online exhibitions, and in developing software tools for scholarship. In 2010, CHNM’s websites had almost 500 million hits and nearly 20 million unique users, and its software tools are used by more than a million scholars and students every day.

I hope to have convinced you that humanities researchers and the federal agencies that support them are interested parties in the development of policies related to public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications. Please consider, too, the tremendous extent to which research done at institutions of higher education is made possible by the tax policies of the federal government: such research belongs to the public. Thank you for your work.

Amanda L. French, Ph.D.

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

John Donne. “The Sun Rising.” Poems of John Donne. 2 vols. London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1896. p. 7. Accessed 20 October 2011. HathiTrust Digital Library <http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b4112186>

The aubade is a lyric about lovers parting at morning. Its opposite and counterpart is the serenade, an evening song in which one lover greets another. “Serenade” has somehow become a more common word in English than “aubade” (they used to rhyme), but we are familiar enough with the scene of the aubade, as when Romeo and Juliet argue over whether that’s a lark or a nightingale they hear at the close of their night together, or when John Donne berates the annoying dawn in “The Sun Rising.” The aubade is a slightly inverted genre: it recognizes that in the world of work, the sun’s rising is a beginning, while for lovers, the sun’s rising is an unwelcome ending.

Those of us who love books, reading, and the library (three separate ideas that are associated but not congruent, of course) are now somewhat in the position of a lover tangled up in someone’s warm limbs at dawn. The unruly sun of the digital text is rising, and it is calling us to strenuous work, to the daily ballet of bureaucracy, when I for one would far rather snuggle down under the covers with . . . a book, or with my beloved ideals about books, reading, and the library. My love song for the library as we have known it would praise, first of all, the fact that the library’s favors cost me nothing. As early modern poetry would be the first to admit, it is perfectly possible that love can exist in a, shall we say, commercial relationship, but I am speaking here of ideals. Secondly, I would praise a library’s infinite variety, from Robert Browning to Nora Roberts, a plenitude that custom cannot stale. Thirdly, I would praise a library that will support me in my moods of contemplative repose as well as in my moods of raucous communion.

All these might be called aspects of the soul of a library I could love, of libraries I have loved. But my love is not platonic. As Donne writes in another poem, “To our bodies turn we then, that so / Weak men on love revealed may look / Love’s mysteries in souls do grow / But yet the body is his book.” We need proof of love. Entire coffee table books have been compiled with nearly erotic photos of gorgeous library buildings, cathedrals of culture. How will the Digital Public Library of America be embodied?

I think the DPLA must manifest itself as more than just a website. There must also be many largely hidden, quiet services, generous services to the public, to developers, to existing libraries. These must be both technical and social, and might include linked open data and metadata, APIs, persistent URIs / DOIs, reference and literacy services, preservation services in the form of an independent reliable repository, continual attention to accessibility and discoverability, and even policy work at the highest levels of government. A site that merely aggregates existing content without providing such services would seem to me like a Galatea, a lovely statue with no humanity other than what we project upon it.

I fully agree that “if it’s not online it doesn’t exist,” but I think that if it’s only online, it only half exists.

And. (So.)

I want a building. A public building, not a data center, not a warehouse. I do not need a building, but I want it with the irrational desire of a lover. I know that it’s not on the radar of the DPLA project yet, but I wanted to plant the seed of that idea today. A monument to the ideal of an informed citizenry, a culturally, intellectually, and emotionally enriched citizenry.

One important note about the aubade: lovers who plan to reunite in the evening of the very same day whose morning saw a reluctant parting are allowed to figure in the aubade. (You can look it up in either Wikipedia or the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.) The aubade is not just for lovers who anticipate a long, painful, and perhaps permanent separation. I am confident that ours is one such aubade, that our workday will end in a gleeful rendezvous with the soul and body of a library.

Imagine a National Digital Library: I Wonder If We Can

*****

Recently, unexpectedly, I’m completely keen on going to Korea. Why?

Because I’m dying to see these guys in their natural habitat. These are D.to, N.to, and U.to. They are the mascots for the National Digital Library of Korea, also called the “dibrary,” which opened its doors (yes, doors) in Seoul on May 25^th, 2009. According to the dibrary’s website, “Smart D.to is a digital knowledge messenger who searches for the information you require. D.to is blue, a futuristic color, and represents the messenger delivering necessary digital knowledge.” N.to, the green mascot, “loves nature and green ideas,” and “symbolizes the freedom of the world of knowledge.” And the red mascot is “warm-hearted U.to,” who “symbolizes the guidance to the ubiquitous world, who will be with us at anywhere and any time.”

You have to admire the charm of of ditching a dry mission statement for a trio of brightly-colored 21^st-century allegorical figures as rococo as any  be-draped nymph or undraped cherub in the Library of Congress.

You also have to admire people who would literally build a digital library with a sign out in front identifying it as such. The National Digital Library of Korea took seven years to build, at a cost to the Korean government of about $112 million dollars US, and by some accounts it contains over 116 million “pieces of digital content,” which would make it almost eight times as large as the Europeana digital library, which claims 15 million items. That 116 million number, however, is probably based on a definition of “pieces of digital content” that includes (say) database records, and is therefore not measured in the same units as most digital libraries. But reports also testify, more believably, that the dibrary has digitized 380,000 books, and that is a very respectable number, one larger than the 300,000 ebooks offered for lease by NetLibrary, for instance.

The National Digital Library of Korea is an eight-story building (five of those stories underground) that seats 550 patrons, and it runs 300 TB of server space. The physical space and the equipment are so advanced as to seem almost fictional. On the main floor, pictured here, there are touch-screen help kiosks. There are 3D monitors that do not require viewers to wear 3D glasses. There is a Global Lounge running PCs in English, Chinese, Japanese, French, and Vietnamese. There are multimedia viewing and creation and editing spaces as well as meeting and café spaces.

There are more touch-screen kiosks, these dedicated to the sole purpose of reading digital newspapers. There are electronic tables with touch-screen surfaces, and using those tables you can see digital surrogates of historic Korean books as they lie open flat before you, seemingly in the table rather than on it.

There is a permanent art installation that “displays customized videos based on a user recognition function.” There is an enormous screen reserved only for 3D text, including “user messages.” There is a Laptop Zone, and there is a “Productivity Computer Cluster” whose desktop computers have large monitors and multiple monitors.

There is a connecting bridge called the Way of Knowledge that connects the National Digital Library of Korea with the National Library of Korea, and projected on the walls of the Way of Knowledge are “motion-sensitive interactive contents.”

And there is, of course, D.to, N.to, and U.to. Get my drift? Feel a sudden longing to go to Korea?

But the Korean dibrary is not just about fancy physical spaces or symbolic cartoon characters: it’s very much about providing a whole set of national library services for Korea. In September 2009, just a few months after the dibrary first opened, Korean law was altered in order to give Korean dibrarians the authority to collect and indeed responsibility for collecting Korean data from the open web. Certain kinds of data were legally required to be deposited in the national digital library so as to enable not only preservation but also “the production and distribution of alternative materials for the disabled.” Now centrally coordinated by the National Digital Library of Korea are all kinds of digital services, from training programs to inter-library loan. The dibrary is even charged with creating a “one card system that gives access to 699 public libraries nationwide,” a system scheduled to go live in 2012. And once Korea has fully nationalized as many library materials and services as it can, it’s apparently not going to stop there: last summer a meeting was held to plan a China-Japan-Korea Digital Library, an Asian digital library or portal modeled after The European Library project. To me it sounds like the second step toward the single digital library filed contentedly away in the humming systems of the starship Enterprise, waiting to be addressed with a question: “Computer . . .”

In fact, the first article lobbed into the recent discussion of a U.S. national digital library is titled “A Library Without Walls,” indicating that its author is using the traditional definition of a digital library, the one that defines a digital library as strictly digital. Robert Darnton, that piece’s author, is the director of the Harvard University Library. In October of 2010, he convened a meeting at Harvard of “42 top-level representatives from foundations, cultural institutions, and the library and scholarly worlds” to discuss how to create a national digital library for the United States — “That is, a comprehensive library of digitized books that will be easily accessible to the general public,” as he wrote on the New York Review of Books blog afterward. Darnton made no mention of a building, nor Korea, and user messages displayed on a large 3D monitor were apparently the farthest thing from his mind. He evoked instead “the Republic of Letters,” Voltaire and Jefferson and their Enlightenment ideals of widely shared knowledge.

Similarly, in an October interview with Jennifer Howard for the Chronicle of Higher Education, Darnton said, “One of the first things we discussed was the financial problem. It didn’t take long for people there to arrive at a conclusion, which is: We can do it. Everyone seemed convinced that this is certainly within the scope of a funding campaign by foundations.” Grant-making government foundations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation were probably included in that category as well as private grantors such as the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, but apart from that there seems to have been little hope that the U.S. government would step in directly to fund such a project. Nevertheless, what the group of research library leaders pictured sounded more like a public library than like a research library.

Said Darnton, “The agreement was very solid about the desirability of this thing, and then there was discussion about what ‘this’ was. In general, I think it fair to say, everyone thought the library should be one for the American people, by which I mean not an exclusive research library but a grand collection of books that could be used in junior colleges and high schools and institutions of every sort throughout the country.” Public librarians began to notice that they were being left out of the discussion of how to create this thing that sounded a good bit like a public library, and Darnton and his group began to make changes in response.

By December, when Harvard’s Berkman Center announced that it was officially taking on the planning initiative as a project, the National Digital Library had become “The National Public Digital Library of America.” Public librarians were also invited to participate in the discussions, and public library groups such as LibraryCity with similar goals began to join the general public dialogue in academicky forums such as the Chronicle of Higher Education. Initial meetings of the DPLA are still being funded by the Sloan foundation, and although it’s early days yet, there’s no talk of seeking Congressional funds.

Andrew W. Mellon’s father, Judge Thomas Mellon, whose financial success would eventually result in the formation of the Mellon foundation, would have approved of leaving governments out of it, as David Canadine reports:

In November 1881, Andrew Carnegie offered $250,000 for the construction of a municipal library, on the condition that the corporation [of the city of Pittsburgh] commit $15,000 a year to its maintenance. To meet this condition, state law would have to be changed, enabling the corporation to earmark public funds for this purpose. The Judge believed in reading, he was acquainted with Carnegie, and they shared Scottish ancestry, a devotion to Burns and Spencer, and a passion for free enterprise. But he was vehemently against this gift, fearing that any such statutory alteration would open still wider the floodgates of municipal profligacy, civic debt, and caucus corruption. He proposed an alternative scheme, whereby a library would be built and maintained by the public subscriptions of rich individuals, and for a time his plans carried the Select Council. But the Flinn-Magee machine was determined that the Carnegie scheme should prevail, and the ensuing battle would last five years. Eventually, in October 1886, the Select Council accepted Carnegie’s terms, with the Judge casting the only dissenting vote. Meanwhile, Carnegie had increased his gift to one million dollars, to finance not only a library but also more extensive buildings devoted to the arts, science, and technology. As a result, the city’s annual obligation for maintenance rose to $40,000 a year, confirming the Judge’s worst fears about municipal profligacy and waste.

It always surprises me a little, naïve fool that I am, that there can be any doubt that a library is a public good that contributes to a more informed and happier citizenry, and that it is therefore a legitimate expense of government. But of course, tax-supported public libraries as we know them today have really only been around since the middle of the nineteenth century, and in fact it was that same Andrew Carnegie who would do the most of anyone to create a national system of public libraries in America. Had the Judge prevailed, heaven only knows whether we’d have public libraries at all today – the Pittsburgh library under discussion was the very first of over 1600 libraries Carnegie would fund in the United States on the condition that local governments commit to supporting them. (Though Carnegie had built one library previously in the tiny Scottish town where he had grown up.)

And of course, governments have slashed public library budgets in both the U.S. and the U.K. lately, to the point where one group of library users in Milton Keynes checked out all the books in their local library as a protest against its planned closing.

So, then, Darnton is apparently wise not to seek federal funding for a National Digital Public Library of America, although leaders at the National Archives and the Library of Congress are indeed involved in the planning, and although appeals to Congress may yet be on the menu. Consider, too, that we have already had a “National Digital Library” initiative, and while it was not a failure, it was certainly not widely transformative. Some of you may even remember all the way back to 1990 when the Library of Congress’s American Memory pilot project began, ending in 1994 having digitized (and put on CD-ROM) some 200,000 public domain items related to American history. In 1994, the National Digital Library took over the same work, and beginning with $60 million over five years ($45 million of it donated by technology corporations) eventually digitized about 9 million archival items in the public domain for American Memory. One critique of this project, influenced by Michel Foucault and titled, unoriginally enough, Library of Walls, points out that it was very far from being in the American public’s interest: “[T]he ‘National Digital Library’ is anything but the ‘plain vanilla’ presentation of historical material,” writes Samuel Collins. “Rather, the entire American Memory project from its inception in 1990 to its continued development today shows [...] a careful selection and organization of materials designed to both highlight the institution of the Library of Congress and appeal to the Library’s ‘clients,’ especially Congress.” The Library of Congress, let us remember, is not de jure the national library of the United States.

And yet surely the largest problem with creating a Digital Library of America is the province of both Congress and the Library of Congress. Let me hear you say it: copyright. We saw in the case of the National Digital Library of Korea (which is physically linked by the Way of Knowledge to the existing National Library of Korea, a national library de jure) that the Korean government was willing to change its laws in order to better enable the digital library to do its work of preservation. Is our government willing to do that? Does anyone know how much it costs to hire a lobbyist, and does anyone know whether Mellon or Sloan can pay for that?

Well. Copyright. In any case, you might be asking yourself: What does this have to do with me, a humble Electronic Resources Librarian? A few things. First of all, pie in the sky, imagine an American national library consortium, and imagine the bargaining power such a consortium would have with STEM journal publishers. As it happens, Korea is again an illuminating example. In 2002, an assessment of a Korean digital library effort for university researchers called the Research Information Service System (RISS) discovered that 95% of its users were seriously frustrated by their inability to access the full text of foreign journal articles. Korean libraries simply could not afford to pay the permission fees. Four years later, in 2006, Korea had formed a consortium: the Korea Electronic Site License Initiative (KESLI), partly modeled on OhioLink, increased “the use levels of scholarly information to six times higher than average than before.” Imagine that.

More realistically, if there really does come to be a serious national initiative in which academic and public librarians actually partner on providing broad access to electronic resources, that’s a change electronic librarians in research libraries should to be aware of, too, and foster or resist as judgment suggests.

Lastly, and most importantly, whether this ever winds up affecting Electronic Resources librarians, if it does come to pass, it will affect us as citizens.

It is therefore good to know that there are ways in which we can share our thoughts. The intrepid director of the Center for History and New Media, Dan Cohen, is ON THIS VERY DAY attending a meeting of the DPLA, and he is more than willing to receive the wisdom of the crowd via Twitter. Hashtag: #dpla.

NDPLA also has an open e-mail list that anyone can join, and a wiki that anyone can edit. I for one plan to follow this project closely as it evolves and share my opinions via the listserv and other means just as soon as said opinions descend voraciously upon me like a Cooper’s hawk diving for a mouse in the reading room of the Library of Congress. You should do likewise.

(And tell them you want the National Digital Public Library of America to have a cool building like they have in Korea. We can put it in Detroit.)

*****

Addendum: In the course of researching this paper, I put together a spreadsheet with some basic information about some large digital libraries – in that category I include commercial products such as NetLibrary and OverDrive and Audible as well as university and foundation projects such as HathiTrust and Europeana and government initiatives such as the National Library of Norway and Gallica, the national digital library of France. Feel free to browse and analyze. j.mp/lg-dig-lib

***

I’ve been hearing about Freebase for awhile now, especially from Jon Voss, who organized and ran THATCamp Bay Area, so I figured I’d go to that BootCamp session here at THATCamp SoCal. I’m very, very glad I did. It was taught by Kirrily Robert, who’s Skud on Twitter. As I said on Twitter, I had thought that Freebase was simply a place where people could upload their datasets, and it is that. But it’s also a rather amazing project that’s a bit difficult to explain if you don’t know what open linked data is. And if you don’t know what open linked data is, why then the rather charming animated video that Kirrily showed us might be of use (it’s about “Metaweb,” which is the name of the company that owned Freebase before Google recently bought it, but it gives the idea — www.metaweb.com will now resolve to freebase.com):

Kirrily is the developer liaison for Freebase, but I thought she did a great job of pitching the workshop to us non-developer humanist types, and I think that the actual developers who were there (including Joyce Ouchida from USC) probably also got a good idea of what Freebase is all about and what they could do with it. We started by looking at the Freebase page for William Blake:

You may notice (I did) that a good bit of Freebase content comes from Wikipedia; one of the things that struck me like a hammer about Freebase is how purely factual it is. And, later, how it’s the relations between things that constitutes Freebase’s “entity graph,” not prose — the video above even begins by evoking what a pain words are and how their meanings are contingent. It’s all very poststructuralist. I love it.

We moved quickly into editing, which wasn’t any harder (in fact quite a bit easier) than editing Wikipedia. I did a good bit of work on my pet go-to topic, the villanelle, adding several instances of “poems of this form” (Bishop’s “One Art,” for instance, for which I also had to create a page in Freebase, though others, such as Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” already had pages). We then looked at how to construct Freebase queries in MQL, Meta Query Language, and we talked about how to use Google Refine to clean up Excel data sets for use in Freebase. (That alone was a terrific tool to learn about.)

What I’m wondering now is whether Freebase might even be a better site to send students to for factual information research than Wikipedia; I’m not sure. In the session, I asked what Freebase is for: whether it’s a destination research site or a provider of structured semantic data for developers. Kirrily said that they had discussed that very question rather a lot at Freebase, and that their usage statistics show that the latter use is by far the more common. If I did more development, I can definitely see how I’d be all over Freebase’s linked data — so, so useful in building applications. Kirrily mentioned one example at conflicthistory.com. It made me think seriously about building something I’ve had in mind for some time: a site backed by a database of poetic forms are tagged with their forms (sonnet, triolet, villanelle etc.) and other features, and I can see that sucking in some of the existing Freebase data to that would save a load of work. I went out and registered poeticforms.org right away, in fact.

Anyway, thanks Kirrily and THATCamp SoCal — this was a great session.

***

The question before today’s panel is “Can social media help broaden the audience for academic work?” I’m going to talk about a more specific version of this question, namely, “Can Twitter and Facebook help earn more readers for peer-reviewed articles?”

The answer is “Yes, but those readers will not pay to read peer-reviewed articles.”

In December of 2010, I tweeted a link to a PDF of an article from the recently published proceedings of the 2010 meeting of the American Society of Information Science and Technology titled “How and Why Scholars Cite on Twitter.” It was one of my most clicked-on links for the year, with 118 views—many of the links I tweet to news articles and so on get only thirty or so clicks. The authors studied a sample of 46,515 tweets from twenty-eight scholars — seven scientists, fourteen social scientists, and seven humanists — and reported that “In our sample of tweets containing hyperlinks, 6% were citations. Of these, 52% were first-order links and 48% were second-order.” By this, they meant that 52% of the links went directly to peer-reviewed work, while 48% were links that went to non-peer-reviewed work about peer-reviewed work: blog posts and news articles, for instance.

One of the main reasons that scholars tweeted these “second-order” links was that they worked for everyone: “[S]cholars may prefer to link directly to the article when it is open access but will resort to second-order links to bypass paywall restrictions. Participants were attracted to open-access articles for Twitter citations; Ben said ‘I would certainly be much more likely to link to things if they were more readily available.’ ”

This article doesn’t study who exactly was clicking on the links the scholars tweeted, although it does report that scholars regarded Twitter as a way to share information with members of their discipline. Certainly this is one of the chief things I use Twitter for, myself: sharing and acquiring information from my colleagues in the digital humanities. In July of 2010, however, I used Twitter for a slightly different purpose: to let members of my network know that a peer-reviewed article of my own had just appeared: “The Summer 2010 issue of *Victorian Poetry* with my article ‘Edmund Gosse and the Villanelle Blunder’ in it is out,” I wrote, and included a link to the article’s landing page in Project Muse. Several friends, scholars themselves in entirely different fields, replied with congratulations on Twitter: one at least showed that she had read at least a little of the article, because she mentioned a word I used in the first paragraph. And one complete stranger, a follower named Robert Withers, wrote that he couldn’t “find Victorian Poetry on his local newsstand,” with what degree of seriousness I simply don’t know. I replied with a link to my (openly available) dissertation, on which the article draws, and we had a short exchange about poetic form.

I feed my Twitter updates to Facebook, and so my Facebook friends saw the tweet as well. There, two friends, one an anthropologist in Aberdeen and one a poet in New England, also expressed interest and congratulations: my friend Alex the anthropologist, however, complained that his university didn’t subscribe to the journal and that he therefore wouldn’t be able to read the article.

So this is six people, five of them my friends. Hardly earth- or academy-shattering. But of that small sample, two were not scholars, and they are terrific examples of a broader audience for peer-reviewed scholarly work. I haven’t spoken to my friend Leigh Palmer the New England poet in person for years, and I would never have thought to (say) e-mail her my article, but as you can see, she was very interested in and engaged with what I wrote. Robert Withers is a stranger to me, but I looked him up for this piece and discovered that he is an independent filmmaker by trade; he was interested in the article for its own sake, but could not read it because it was behind a paywall. The “broader audience” that is indeed reachable via Twitter and Facebook was in this case halved because the article is not openly available. I might mention, too, that when the article was accepted by Victorian Poetry, I negotiated with them to be allowed to post the article openly online, but I did not gain that right.

The audience for an article on Edmund Gosse and the villanelle, of course, is small to begin with – the link that appeared on Twitter and Facebook was clicked on only twenty-four times. How many people might be reading the article through Project Muse or in print, of course, I do not know and have no way of telling: my article is as yet uncited (unsurprisingly, given how recent it is) by anyone else writing about the villanelle or a related scholarly topic. But it’s also clearly the case that Twitter and Facebook can indeed help earn more readers for peer-reviewed articles, as long as those articles are openly and freely available on the web.

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO)

centerNet: An International Network of Digital Humanities Centers

National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities

Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory

Meetings

Digital Humanities Annual Meeting

THATCamp

Journals and “Journals”

Digital Humanities Quarterly

Literary and Linguistic Computing

Digital Humanities Now

Books

Blackwell Companion to the Digital Humanities

Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web

Talk

HUMANIST listserv

Digital humanists on Twitter (Dan Cohen’s Twitter list)

Digital Humanities Questions and Answers

Tools

Digital Research Tools wiki (DiRT)

Guides

A Day in the Life of Digital Humanities

arts-humanities.net

*****

Plato’s allegory of the cave is an extended metaphor put in motion for the purpose of convincing us that everything we perceive and believe may be no more real than a shadow. It is an explanation of why regular people think philosophers (e.g., Plato and Socrates) are crazy: the regular people are stuck on the notion that what they think is real is in fact real, they can’t appreciate the reality that the philosopher appreciates, and the philosopher finds it very hard to explain this other reality to them and anyway is not very motivated to do so. The allegory of the cave is a thought experiment, a parable, a myth, and a theory about the nature of reality, and it’s also just an enduringly intriguing scene to try to visualize, as the terrific short film we’ve just watched shows.

But it’s also a story, a narrative, and as such it has a form, a structure: that two-thousand-four-hundred-year-old structure, I’d like to point out, is an extremely common one in the contemporary genre known as fantasy. And, of course, if that structure is common in fantasy, it’s common in science fiction as well.

When you think about it, it’s a bit odd that bookstores lump together science fiction and fantasy. Science fiction is very much about technology, and generally involves the construction of a future or alternate world whose chief characteristic is advanced technology; the accompanying narrative usually explores the problems and opportunities of that technology. Fantasy, in apparent contrast, involves the construction of an alternate world that more or less resembles the Middle Ages, a world entirely without technology. The universes of the fantasy genre, however, have magic, and, as Arthur C. Clarke famously said in his 1958 work Profiles of the Future, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The common factor in fantasy and science fiction, of course, is that creation of an alternate world, a world that is recognizably not this one.

Plato’s allegory of the cave, like science fiction and fantasy, also posits an alternate world, a world that is recognizably not this one. In its narrative structure, there are two worlds, and the hero is the only person (or almost the only person) who can travel between those two worlds. I have named these worlds World One and World Zero, names which correspond to the visible world and the invisible world. We need to avoid the term “the real world,” because it’s often precisely the question of which world is more real (not to mention which world is better) that is at issue. In Plato’s allegory, the dark cave with its flickerings is an image of World One, the visible world, the world of limited ordinary perception; while the dazzling world of sunflare and shadow is World Zero, the nonexistent, absent, invisible world, the exotic extraordinary other world of pure thought, which the philosopher hero tries and inevitably fails to describe to the chained inhabitants of World One.

There are plenty of sci-fi/fantasy narratives that have exactly this structure: ordinary World One, exotic World Zero, and a hero who travels between them. I’ve listed some, but I’m sure you can name others.

In these narratives, the alternate world might be an island, say. Or it might be another planet. Or it might be an alternate dimension accessible through a portal in this world. Or it might be an alternate time, either in the present or the past. Or it might be a spiritual realm. Or it might be a dream, or an illusion — this often turns out to be the case for narratives in which the hero is a woman, as for instance The Wizard of Oz and (the original) Alice in Wonderland, stories in which women can have adventures only if they are not real adventures. World Zero, in short, is a secret or hidden or inaccessible or invisible world constituted by its apparent non-existence. Some sci-fi/fantasy narratives not listed here, of course, simply set up an alternate World Zero and allow whatever world actually surrounds the reader or audience to serve as the visible World One, and we ourselves become the hero who has experience of both. But here I am concerned primarily with narratives that explicitly represent two worlds and are explicitly engaged with the contrast between them.

So if that’s the case, if Plato’s allegory is in many ways a sort of proto-fantasy/sci-fi story, what does it all (as they say) mean?

Well, one question worth pursuing is this one: Which world is the digital world?

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes worry that I spend too much time looking at screens: computer screens, smartphone screens, TV screens, movie theater screens, and (of course) screens on which slides are projected. Am I cutting myself off from the real world? Am I insufficiently mindful and overly mediated? Am I, in short, watching “shadows of artefacts” all day long, just like the prisoners in Plato’s cave? There are plenty of people who would say Yes, yes you are, you and all those other SXSW attendees. Get out of the dark cave of your parents’ basement, nerd, and get some sunshine. Stop with the fantasy already. Writers like Andrew Keen and Nicholas Carr and (most recently) Jaron Lanier bring us a version of this message, a version which is often more complicated and careful and sometimes even caring than I’ve made it sound here, and their books do well here at SXSW. These thinkers seem to fit neatly into the role Plato ascribes to the philosopher: he who stays with the cave-dwellers in order to do the hard work of convincing them to cease investing so much in mere shadows of artefacts, the hard work of “turning the mind as a whole away from the world of becoming, until it becomes capable of bearing the sight of real being and reality at its most bright” (Waterfield 245).

Yet Plato’s allegory of the cave need not be a touchstone only for anti-mediationists. That philosopher figure, trying vainly to explain the workings of the unseen world to those who do not understand, is also a highly resonant figure for the technologist. Anyone who’s done even the mildest form of tech support can relate to the communication barrier that Plato’s philosopher experiences, that sense of trying to explain sunshine to the benighted, whereas even the Luddiest Luddite can’t accuse any of the screen people of never once having experienced the Luddite version of unmediated reality. But if you’ve coded, you’ve experienced a world of pure logic that others haven’t. Similarly, a Twitter fan like me certainly feels that there’s a reality to that world that people who “don’t get” Twitter (and have therefore never used it) have no access to. Plenty of popular World One World Zero narratives simply scorn the Muggle World One and meander through the luxurious specs of its own particular techno-magical World Zero.

World One World Zero narratives, including Plato’s allegory of the cave, often turn out to be perfectly flexible on the “is tech good or is it bad” question. The most popular and enduring narratives are always those, I verily believe, in which we get to have it both ways: we get to enjoy our technology and our fears about technology at the same time, just as, in the Wizard of Oz, we get to enjoy Dorothy’s adventures while ultimately being assured that her true place is at home. Anything else is probably too simplistic to hold our interest for long. Only those who might arguably be spending too much time with screens are interested in horror stories about spending too much time with screens.

Some of the most quintessentially geeky fantasies have an apparently anti-fantasy moral, The Matrix being certainly a much more interesting example than Surrogates. In his talk yesterday, Jaron Lanier recommended a 1909 sci-fi story by E. M. Forster, “The Machine Stops,” as a story with exactly the same message: it is bad to live in the mediated world, however pleasant: it is good to live in the real world, however difficult. (This, by the way, is not precisely Lanier’s argument in his recent manifesto You Are Not a Gadget: he is, after all, the father of virtual reality. Much of his concern about today’s Internet is that it is insufficiently fantastic, that it lacks the fluidity and weirdness it once had, that the mediated world is now a suburb where it was once a phantasmagoria.) It’s always remarkably easy for fantasy to be anti-fantasy without, apparently, causing us much cognitive dissonance. Plato’s allegory of the cave, that remarkably imaginative story, is only one small part of the utopian narrative The Republic, elsewhere in which Plato famously banned the poets, the dramatists, the imagineers from his ideal community.

Similarly, James Cameron uses famously advanced cinematic technology in order to create narratives that apparently warn strongly against technology. Historically, the moral of the unsinkable Titanic has always been that man puts too much faith in technology, but the meta-narrative of Cameron’s movie Titanic is as technologically idolatrous as ever — so long as that technology is used in the service of storytelling. The story of Avatar is the story of a man who abandons a familiar modern mechanistic world in order to wear a loincloth and fly dragons, and yet surely not a single person who saw the film (3-D or otherwise) failed to discuss the film’s inviting technological innovation and exciting technological expense. To traverse the green jungle of Pandora is to become a part of the computational sublime. Stories such as Avatar and Dune and Star Wars (I’m talking about the original, the New Hope, here) that narrate a competition for protagonist mindshare between the futuristic technology of science fiction and the primitive mysticism of fantasy inevitably come down on the side of the spiritual, the ineffable, the magical. Neo discovers that he is the One. Luke turns off his targeting computer and scores a bullseye by trusting the Force. Jake Sully transcends the turbocharged tanning bed that puts him into the body of his avatar with the help of a mystical tree. It doesn’t matter. Through the power of metaphor, when magic wins, technology wins. It’s not so much that the technology is indistinguishable from magic as that the magic is indistinguishable from technology. For this reason, I think, even these apparently anti-fantasy, anti-mediation, anti-technology stories are beloved by we screen people, we people of the screen.

I am going to go out on a limb here (though not literally, like Jake Sully), and say straight out that Avatar is a bad movie. It was fine, it was entertaining, I enjoyed it, I went to see it with my brother and enjoyed spending that time with him, but without getting solemn or hysterical about it, I’ll still propose that it is a bad movie. It is a bad movie because it goes a bit too far over that “having it both ways” line, that line that separates the paradoxical from the hypocritical. Put it this way: if I take Jake Sully as my model, what sort of real-world action or belief does that translate into for me? Pandora’s jungle has a sort of real world visual equivalent in, say, the disappearing Brazilian rainforest, but Avatar is clearly not recommending that we go primitive. On Pandora, all creatures are designed with organic USB cables, and Pandora itself is repeatedly troped as a network. (“It’s a network,” explains Jake Sully.) The harsh truth is that computers are not at all “green” (Google the carbon footprint of Google sometime), and that by participating in the network we know, we are putting our own planet’s lush jungles in danger.

Better versions of the World One World Zero narrative have a legitimate and balanced argument that stands up to scrutiny once we strip out the allegory, the metaphor. Plato, for instance, is arguing both that regular people should trust philosophers when philosophers say that there’s a different way of looking at things and that philosophers should keep on striving to explain their different way of looking at things to people who have good reason for their lack of comprehension. That remains good counsel both for people who call tech support and for people who provide tech support.

But it’s not just a problem with Avatar; it’s a bit of a problem with the binary structure of the World One World Zero narrative itself and the egocentrism involved in relating to the single hero (or elite few) who can travel between those two worlds. The best science fiction and fantasy narratives, whether on screen or in print, often refuse or alter or complicate (or we might say, “deconstruct”) this compelling structure, just as Randall Bennett’s xkcd comic famously shows us the limitations of The Matrix‘s logic.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, for instance, not only alters the gender of the hero, but also makes sure that the narrative and the meta-narrative are in sync: we’re never allowed to forget that the Buffyverse is above all allegorical. The ordinary world and the extraordinary world are the same, in other words, not opposed at all. The demons, Joss Whedon repeatedly makes clear, are Buffy’s demons. We do enjoy it on the literal level, of course: there are literally kick-ass martial arts fights. But Whedon entrusts us to remember the metaphor, so that watching Buffy is always to be aware that you are watching a story that tells you baldly, if allegorically: women are strong, in all possible ways. The episode of Buffy called “Normal Again” posits with unsettlingly convincing logic that Buffy may simply be psychotic, schizophrenic, that the demons she fights are simply the product of her own disordered brain. But, ultimately, Buffy the heroine and Buffy the series firmly refuse the “it was all a dream” gambit that made the turn-of-the-century Wizard of Oz and Alice and Wonderland safe for popular consumption. And the series ended (at least on television, though it continues as a graphic novel) by happily robbing Buffy of her superhero singularity, distributing the special abilities normally reserved for a protagonist to a whole passel of potential heros.

Any why only two worlds? Why not many? The structure of the classic Star Trek posits dozens or hundreds or thousands or millions of different worlds, not simply two. Moreover, of course, it was a multiethnic team who visited these worlds: the clear allegorical meaning of Star Trek was always that different cultures are to be explored and understood, not demeaned and demonized. My housemate in graduate school was a linguist in the Anthropology department, and he often taught the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called “Darmok,” in which Picard attempts to understand the language of a radically different culture, a culture whose elliptical language could only be understood by learning their history.

Or why have a single hero at all? Why not many? If you like science fiction and fantasy, as I do (which I hope is clear), you may well love postmodern novels, some of which use the conventions of science fiction and fantasy but play with narrative structure. I highly recommend David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, for instance, which consists of six separate interwoven stories. As soon as one narrative is half-told, it breaks off and another begins. We begin by hearing the story of a doctor on a nineteenth century sea voyage to Malaysia, go through several almost unrelated stories until we arrive at a typically sci-fi dystopian future in which a slave clone tells the story of her spiritual awakening. Only then do we begin to get the end of every story in reverse chronological order, until finally we’re back in the nineteenth century, understanding at last just how all six of these worlds and their six trapped heroes are connected.

Or consider David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a novel that has a well-deserved reputation as a difficult masterpiece of postmodern literature, but which is also a highly readable tragicomic piece of science fiction set in a dystopian near-future America with herds of feral hamsters and giant fans blowing airborne pollution north to Canada. Infinite Jest‘s structure is famously complex, which is part of the fun of reading it: Michael Silverblatt once hesitantly remarked to the author that the novel seemed to him to be “written in fractals,” to which Wallace replied, “I’ve heard you were an acute reader. That’s one of the things, structurally, that’s going on. It’s actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidal fractal.” James Cameron’s movies pretty much suggest that mechanical technology (ships, tanks) is totally harsh while narrative technology (CGI, 3-D) is totally awesome, but David Foster Wallace’s writings suggest, much more delicately and persuasively and fractally, that narrative technology might be a bit of a problem — all narrative technology, up to and including the most basic gears and pulleys of narrative itself. To put it bluntly, Infinite Jest makes you desperately want to find out what happened and then refuses to tell you what happened. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick has put it, Infinite Jest strongly hints that “whatever answers we’re seeking won’t be found in the text, but in the world beyond.”

The world beyond: whichever world that may be.

We create worlds and universes so easily now: the blogosphere, the Twitterverse, Oz, Narnia, Middle Earth, Pandora. That term “information superhighway” sounds quaint these days at least in part because a highway traverses at the very most a continent, a laughably small territory to ascribe to the Internet. There are never only two worlds and there is never only one hero who has lived in both: that was as true for Plato as it is for us, if we can only remember it.