Many of the  questions I had for Jeremy Dean, Director of Education at hypothes.is, had more to do with the mechanics of annotation online than the educational implications of such a tool, or with Jeremy’s particular trajectory as an alt-academic.  In preparing to annotate Roland Barthes this week, I familiarized myself a bit with the hypothes.is platform by watching some of the videos and reading the tutorials posted on their site.  One of the videos provided a talk that Dan Whaley gave at the Personal Democracy Forum in 2013 regarding the potential annotations have to democratize information.  Open Annotation was mentioned during the talk and I had not really heard of this before.  With a cursory web search, I discovered the Open Annotation Collaboration’s website and also wanted to know more about the early failures of open annotation on the web as a massive endeavor.  I located this article on The Scholarly Kitchen site.  It seems 2013 was a big year in online annotations (Open Annotation Collaboration completed the project in 2013 and the article I cited above was published in 2013 and the first iAnnotate conference was held in this year).

Using hypothes.is to annotate was an interesting experience and it was my first go at online annotation.  Writing in books and on printed articles using pen, pencil, highlighter, and post-it note has been my annotation practice, but I enjoyed seeing the variations of contributions from my classmates and can see the potential of this tool for scholarly discussion and collaboration.  Though, as Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirker point out in their piece, “Whipping Boys Explained: Literary Annotation and Digital Humanities” annotations could grow too abundant to really mean anything and plenty will get lost in the “noise” of it all.  However, isn’t this true of the web in general?  I am regularly in awe of the sheer abundance of knowledge and information growth in the world today, but I don’t foresee an end to the exponential growth anytime soon and it just because it won’t be found through a search engine’s algorithm, doesn’t mean the practice shouldn’t be undertaken.  Bauer and Zirker have used annotations in their undergraduate classes to increase engagement with texts, but strive to establish a framework for scholarly annotations.  As already stated in previous posts, this course is really my first opportunity to engage with texts at a level considered “close reading” and I fully continue to admit that it makes me somewhat uncomfortable.  I feared that my annotations weren’t making that great of a contribution or that I wasn’t really getting at the point in annotating a Barthes text.  Previously, my annotations were private and for me only, while now anyone on the web could see what I was thinking in the margins.  I’m interested to see how I engage with Melville’s text online: will it be easier to consider than a Barthe’s text? 

Some of the questions I had for Jeremy are:

• What is open annotation and how does hypothes.is embody it?
• What other systems are out there and what were their evolution?
• What problems has hypothes.is experienced along the way?
• What are the intentions of web annotation?
• What preservation plans does hypothes.is have?
• How is hypothes.is different from other platforms?  Inter-operability and Ubiquitous?  Data collection and sales?
• What is the existential ethos of hypothes.is?
• How does one find annotations outside of the hypothes.is platform?

I realize I am writing this post past its due date, but life got in the way this week.  So, while I did not get to ask Jeremy any of my questions this past week in class, he was gracious enough to encourage the class to reach out to him and continue the conversation.  And, he’s available on Twitter.  On which he shared a video of ours truly, Jeff Allred, discussing social annotation (where I must again admit, that I have great anxiety over engaging with “theoretically dense, philosophically rich, formally experimental text” like Barthes!).  Impostor syndrome?

After our chat, Jeremy shared a link to crowdlaaers, a site that generates analysis of commentary on hypothes.is. Pretty fun. You can play with it yourselves (just plug the URL of the Barthes into the cell in the upper right of the site), but here’s the tale of the tape from our most recent reading (go Jenna!):

The practice, history, and theory of annotation creates frictions between the form and practice of writing in margins as we approached it in Barthes. I found myself confronting a few issues: the first, is how annotation is organized hierarchically with the writing and philosophizing of a capital “T” Text; second, whether or not annotations themselves are Text. The complications with my questions come in with the issue of categorization and law both in Barthes and in Bauer/Zirker.

The author’s death is complicated by annotation; she dies as other voices speak over and around what she has written, but at once she cannot die when she is in constant conversation with annotations. Furthermore, the author and the writing change based on what rules are laid out for the annotation. I found that in our project with annotation on Barthes’ text, the annotations were laid out in an organized way but they were almost anarchic; we had no distinguished approach to the annotations and so we got a soup of responses and conversations int he margins of the text. Some people left short questions posed to the other annotators and to RB, others left comments of frustrations, others left analyses and thoughts, others left norton-style annotations that were geared towards helping the rest of us read (ex. Kat helpfully spotted an allusion to the Death of the Author and Barthes’ definition of “doxa”.) It seems that Bauer and Zirker would be concerned with the “trustworthiness and authority” of the text:

…questions of expertise and authority arise when a text is annotated. New forms of collaboration made possible by the digital medium sharpen the theoretical question of how explanatory authority is established. Conversely, our idea of how annotation becomes most trustworthy and authoritative will influence how we organize its practice.

This suggests that a “good” annotation would be structured and credible. They lay out their methodology for structuring annotations to prioritize organization and usefulness within that formula. This system requires a meta-thought about annotation, rather than an organic stream of interaction with the writing at hand. Their approach to annotation is one that distinguishes it as a genre of experts, and which is shaped by such an approach to the text. It counters directly with the style/feeling of our comments and interplay with the text of annotation we approached as a class and as individuals—my own annotations ranged from rhetorical analysis to memes—but I don’t believe the lawlessness of our annotations should negate them as serious and scholarly ones (okay, the Arrested Development joke was not serious or scholarly, but the New Yorker Cartoon was!) The actual heart of how I see annotation functioning in new web platforms and capabilities is not so much a new ability to organize and govern, but a means to make what is—and should always be—a playful and intellectual chaos in the margin accessible to any who chooses to be a writer/reader.

Especially when the nature of Barthes’ text is to demand a textured quality in “good” writing, and that good writing is that with Text, not necessary what is most elite. He specifically discusses how the laws of texts which give rights to the author limit the malleability of a text:

…literary science therefore teaches respect for the manuscript and the author’s declared intentions, while society asserts the legality of the relation of author to work (the ‘droit d’auteur’ or ‘copyright’, in fact of recent date since it was only really legalized at the time of the French Revolution).

This remark suggests that it’s only by human legal delineation that written works are granted singular authorship to their creator, and he differentiates this from the capital “T” text, which “reads without the inscription of the Father,” or rather is read instead through the inscription of the audience and context. Our annotations follow this same principal, imposed on top of Barthes, with tenuous connection to our physical selves behind account handles. Our random annotations are their own genre and performance of Text, a new interdisciplinary language, as Barthes might have it. It seems that in this capacity, the intertextuality embodied by our annotations makes them as important as the text itself. Laws and Texts don’t seem to coexist particularly well, so outlining best annotation practices becomes obsolete when there a serious text and serious reader meet.

Patrick Grady O’Malley

Considering the “Text” as a “process of demonstration” and not a “reduction of reading to a consumption” transcends how many people likely think of the reading process. With our recent discussions on audiobooks, I wonder how Barthes would react to this form of media as being consumed or if he would be open to the idea of an audiobook as something to be experienced.

To comprehend a work is to do more than merely interact with the words of that text but to be part of the “biological conceptions of the living being.” This largely paves the way for Barthes to make his argument of a text as a “network,” something to be lived and interpreted. However, it is also this reason that makes his statement “the Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed,” confusing. Networks are always computed, and he seems to be countering his own argument by saying the text is one but cannot be the other. What’s more is that if a text is a “process of demonstration,” than again why can it not be computed? Computation and demonstration go hand in hand with one another, and the work that Digital Humanists do with text mining and more, demonstrate more about a text than most comparative studies or close readings do, all through computation. There is a generational delay or two from when this article was written to the advent of Computational Linguistics and Digital Humanities, but by the 1970’s computers were already changing the way that so much work was being done, if Barthes, so profound, prophetic and wise, were really on top of his game, I don’t think he would ever make the statement that text not ever be computed.

I do appreciate Barthes’ distinction of “work” as a “general sign” and a “Text” as “the signified.” I say this because I like thinking of work and text as two different entities (even though as I argue below, they are a bit closer to one another than Barthes suggests), work is the sign that represents all that went into its production, and perhaps also its appeal to a reader, whereas text as signified works on a deeper level as something that is to be interacted amongst/with, or as Barthes puts it: “the Text is radically symbolic: a work conceived, perceived and received in its integrally symbolic nature is a text.” This element supports my first statement saying Barthes’ perspective could shift the way people perceive the act of reading and writing.

But my only question is if a “Text” is an “object,” what of a work? Is that also an object or is it always going to be a “general sign?” Can a work never achieve what a text does, and does a text automatically fulfill the requirements of a work? The “interdisciplinarity” of research leads me to think that the two work in tandem a bit more than Barthes would like for us to believe. Or at least perceive as we ponder over his writings. If we could attest literary texts as always being products of “linguistics, anthropology, Marxism and psychoanalysis” then I don’t see the harm in thinking of them as “works” at the same time.

Written in 1971, Roland Barthes’ “Work to Text” is an argument presented in the era of the material book. Computers, up to that point, were merely giant number crunchers, albeit highly useful for calculating trajectories of rockets or missiles. In that print-centric context, the hard distinction between the titular terms is easy to see as he explains his first proposition: “the Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed.” He clarifies further still: “The difference is this: the work is a fragment of substance, occupying a part of the space of books (in a library for example), the Text is a methodological field.” Simple. The work is the product of the author, and the Text is what we make of it, academically, culturally, and personally—how it resonates with other readers, other texts, and in other times.

Barthes goes on to propose five more characteristics of the Text. It has no bounds (neither physical nor hierarchical nor taxonomical). It has a unique relation to the sign, mutating beyond the original signified as it moves in space and time. It is plural, nay infinite, in its forms and meaning. It is an object of play. And it gives us self-replicating pleasure that lasts far beyond the act of consuming the work. Barthes’ Text seems a radiant cosmic force, or perhaps a democratic one: of all, by all, and for all, expert and novice alike.

However, it’s hard to tell how pure his vision of the work is. Barthes seems to delineate it quite clearly as whatever the author originally offered as the finished work. He goes so far as to say, “It is not that the Author may not ‘come back’ in the Text, in his text, but he then does so as a ‘guest’.” Are choices made by editors, publishers, and book sellers the end of the work or the start of the Text? If an author provides explanatory notes—an introduction, footnotes, an afterword, or edits in another edition—has she changed the work or contributed to the Text?

His distinctions get hazier still when it comes to annotation. Certainly, scribbled marginalia fit the bill for Text—unlimited, interpretive, filtered through unique lenses, playful in their interactivity, and, for most of us, quite pleasurable. Similarly, in the digital world Barthes could not have imagined, exercises like ours on hypothes.is seem to be Text as well—an organic conversation of us all comparing our experience with the oued of his theory.

But annotation as scholarly commentary seems to buck some of these criteria, especially when codified the way Matthias Bauer and Angelika Zirker propose to do. Barthes lauds the expansive nature of the Text: “The Text, on the contrary, practises [sic] the infinite deferment of the signified, is dilatory.” Bauer and Zirker seek to constrict it, to narrow it with the aim of making it useful, seeing a “risk of the loss of information through the overabundance of information.”

Bauer and Zirker propose a brilliantly practical scheme: to identify categories or fields of scholarly annotation and to leverage the infinite space and hyperlinked nature of the digital realm to offer it at three different levels. Barthes may find that their linguistic, formal, intratexual, and interpretive fields are part of the work’s Text, springing, as they all do from the work itself and part of the response to it. But he might consider the contextual and intertextual fields too close to what he calls the “myth of filiation.” In fact, he may reject them altogether, noting that “the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas.”

Bauer and Zirker might argue back, claiming that their codification is intended to be heuristic—part of the seemingly open and democratic nature of the Text, allowing more to contribute to its plurality. They might also argue that scholarly annotation is one way to stimulate the vitality of the Text, to keep it alive, as they explain, ““[These levels] manage the amount of information presented, encourage plausible interpretation, and show the dynamic aspect of annotation. This aspect is seen in the digital format in particular: a digital annotated edition may become an ongoing working platform.”

With the elapsing of 44 years of technological development on their side, Bauer and Zirker are certainly able to counter Barthes’ first proposition, at least in part. By categorizing and leveling scholarly annotation on a digital platform, that segment of the Text can be computed. They offer, “The quantitative levels are not exclusively reader-oriented; they are also text-oriented, showing us, at the same time, a text that virtually speaks for itself (with just a little help from us) and that is situated in a network of many linguistic, cultural, and historical interactions.” In fact, computing the Text is growing easier and easier, from quantifiable, geo-mapped “likes” and hashtagged Twitter feeds.* But, while he may take issue with the idea that a text requires help to speak for itself, paradoxically Barthes may find that such computing, is actually part of the Text itself. In other words, while we weave the tapestry of the text, we can stand back to analyze or admire the patterns therein, which may guide where and how we place our next weft.

*I’ve recently been stunned by page-by-page analytics available to lay users on digital publishing platforms like issuu. Below is its reporting on how many readers headed to page 7 in a collection of poetry my students wrote over the summer.

Given this was my first real encounter with Rolan Barthes, I was not sure what to expect. I had heard the name before with mixed opinions, but boy oh boy was I not anticipating this. Barthes is essentially a conservative if there were such a thing as “textual conservatives” (hey, maybe there is). He’s clearly a strong believer that the text is meant to remain a physical text and that we are not to trifle with its state of being. His whole essay almost felt biblical. I would go as far to say that Barthes thought very highly of himself and may have considered himself to be up there with the big man. However, by using this method of writing and expressing these “scriptures” on texts as a concept I almost hesitate to take him seriously. I am not sure if that is a result of us being in 2018 and the fact that he wrote this in 1971, but either way, there were clearly “heretics” that pushed him to write this essay. He even went and referenced Mark 5:9 writing “My name is Legion: for we are many” in order to prove his point, which I personally found preposterous considering this is an academic essay regarding the treatment of texts?

Aside from Barthe’s large ego, I feel as though his arguments resonate in those academics who refuse to accept digital humanities as an emerging field. At my undergraduate institution, my professor (who introduced me to DH and is the reason I am here blogging this today) was hired to create a digital humanities department at the school while being a member of the English department faculty. However, there was a faculty member in the English department who totally slandered her work in a department meeting, and the institution refused to fund her digital humanities lab. This gentleman made claims that using digital tools to alter texts was an offense to those who studied literature even went as far as to say that DH caused ADHD in young students (this flabbergasted me as well). For some reason (note my sarcasm) I think Barthes would support this notion. I mentioned in an annotation that Barthes speaks like someone who regards novels such as Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain to be some of the highest forms of literature known to man and will never be knocked out of the literary canon. Barthes states in his first point that “The Text is not to be thought of as an object that can be computed” (Barthes), he then proceeds to go on about how simply having the ability to hold the text and engage with it was an experience with language only attainable this way. Again, I know it’s extremely early on in the history of computation, but c’mon. Barthes isn’t even entertaining the possibility that maybe there’s more beyond these physical pages.

As a digital humanist, there is nothing more frustrating than reading that. Things such as text mining exist so that we can engage with these same texts he’s reading on an even deeper scale! When he states “…reading, in the sense of consuming, is far from playing with the text” (Barthes) I had to turn away. I feel as though even basic literary analysis that anybody who studies English does can be considered some level of “playing” with the text.

All in all, I am basing this opinion on how I interpreted this “From Work to Text.” Maybe his other works sounded entirely different, and maybe with current technology, he would have been more open to computational engagement with texts. That’s where the flaw lies with many theorists studied in academia, how much can we engage with their work when we don’t know what they would think of ours?

As we chew on the Bauer/Zirker piece on how to theorize and enact social annotation, I thought a few examples might be worthwhile, prior to our attempts to create our own texts. First, you might look at Bauer/Zirker’s own platform: here’s the beta version in which students have annotated Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper (obviously this is their test case in their article). Bauer/Zirker also mention the “social edition of the Devonshire Manuscript” on wikibooks, David Bevington’s editions of several of Shakespeare’s plays, and Whitman’s works at the Walt Whitman archive. Also see the Annotated Books Online and Digital Thoreau sites mentioned by Schacht: the latter was produced using CommentPress (see below). The Bevington and the Bauer/Zirker are the closest examples for what we might do: both add gloss to aspects of texts that might be opaque or challenging to students or  nonspecialized “lay readers.”

In terms of platforms, in addition to hypothes.is, we might consider:

• CommentPress: a theme for WordPress that the MLA Commons uses for the Bauer/Zirker piece and that has been used by high profile DHers like Wardrip-Fruin and Fitzpatrick to circulate prepublication drafts of texts for public comment.
• Medium: a proprietary platform (I’m sure you know it) that features bloggy presentation of a primary text and the capacity for readers to comment, like, etc., with a strong emphasis on social media promotion (and earning money). Here’s how to post on it.
• Manifold Scholarship: powerful tool for rethinking scholarly publishing. I’ve not used it myself so am not sure of the learning curve, but our program’s own Matt Gold is one of the founders of the project, so there are local resources to help. Perhaps prohibitively complex for this project, but very doable for a final project.
• Genius.com: like Medium, a proprietary platform that convenes a group of users around texts in which users can comment on the texts.
• Ed.: example of “minimal computing,” a movement that seeks to create maximally accessible texts by dispensing with bandwidth-heavy dynamic modes of presentation characteristic of Web 2.0 (including WordPress) and embracing more minimalist, static presentation of texts. This would be somewhat challenging from a technical standpoint (one must first install Jekyll using the UNIX “command line” and then install the Ed. template, before editing the text there), but would be by far the most interesting path in many ways.