For my final project, I was originally interested in investigating new ways that publishers are “doing things with novels,” in particular, how they are trying to attract consumers of social media to narratives themselves as well as to the act of social reading. The New York Public Library, for example, launched in August a new series of InstaNovels—classics that have been repackaged for an Instagram audience. Their first offering, a two-part Alice in Wonderland series, was fun and light with some innovative creative design and a little interactivity, albeit somewhat forced. On October 3^rd, NYPL launched another InstaNovel, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” an 1892 short story that I hadn’t read. (I am truly embarrassed to say I hadn’t read it, given its status as a feminist classic and my enjoyment of Gilman’s novella Herland). So, I opened up Instagram and read it.

Gilman’s story is impressive—tight, short, unnerving. In it, a woman suffering from mental unease is brought by her husband to what seems a tranquil, private country retreat to recover. Far from curative, the place, particularly the bedroom with its visually disturbing wall covering, exacerbates the illness (or at least symbolizes the subjugation and social captivity that drives her closer to madness). Further, and particularly relevant to our DH720 studies, material text plays something of a character itself in the book: the narration is a first-person account relayed through journal entries (which the narrator calls “dead paper”) that the protagonist has been asked not to write to spare her mental health, and the wall-paper’s patterns at moments in the story become imposing, shifting lines behind which a spectral woman seems trapped.

It is a tale clearly born out of the era that brought America Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville. But it is also shockingly relevant in the era of #metoo and the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, with thoughts such as, “If a physician of high standing, and one’s own husband, assures friends and relatives that there is really nothing the matter with one but temporary nervous depression—a slight hysterical tendency—what is one to do?”

The InstaNovel of the story is highly disappointing, with a low-effort attempt at rendering the titular menace as section dividers and with virtually no interactivity. Yet, the story practically proposes its own interactivity: why not have the paper begin to creep over the words, requiring the reader to mimic the protagonist’s actions of trying to scratch and peer behind it, to liberate what is trapped there? Further, why not have the digital paper alter itself in some way, as the wall-paper does throughout the story?

Doing a little digging, I learned that the publication history of Gilman’s piece has been wallpapered over itself, with agenda-laden scholarship and significant misprinting and misattribution of the text over time. One particularly intriguing article comes from Julie Dock et al, in 1996, entitled “‘But One Expects That’: Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and the Shifting Light of Scholarship”—an article Dock followed up with a published book on the matter two years later. The original publication of Gilman’s story in the January issue of the New England Magazine is available online, so deviations from it are easy to spot. Other intriguing resources available during some of that publication history include a defense of the story by Gilman both in the Forerunner in 1913 in response to over a decade of negative reception by the medical establishment (whose methods are portrayed in the story as harmful) and in her 1935 autobiography.

This digging convinced me that “The Yellow Wall-Paper” is uniquely ripe for a digitized environment that could offer layers of both scholarship and simulation. For my final project, I’d like to research the story’s early reception and publication history and create an annotated and interactive version of the text. One that explores that history in a way parallel to the protagonist’s experience—perhaps where lines move within a fixed, barred space. For that, I’ll also need to do a little reading into simulations that mimic the psychological atmosphere of literary spaces, such as a recent VR game on Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” (also made into an InstaNovel, by the way).

For my platform, I’m hoping to continue working with Manifold. I envision a brief introduction to the story’s initial reception and publication history, an annotated, resource-rich version of the story that focuses on its publication history, and either links to home-grown interactivity or embedded content for visitors to experience in a provocative way the misprintings and publication errors. Given the constraints of time and my novice status with the text, I know that the product will be a little rough. However, I’ve already played around with some simple tools—just html, css, and javascript—to create a rudimentary scratch-off interface to force users to uncover words, and that’s a start. If the interactive tools fail me (or I them), I’ll create a companion to the annotated version in Steller that at least provides the shifting visuals described in the text.

Julia Bannon, Kelly Hammond, Patrick Grady O’Malley, Travis Bartley and I joined forces to create an annotated edition of “Benito Cereno” by Herman Melville with the purpose of examining critical responses to this novella from 1855 when it was first published to 2018 and seeing how digital tools inform and transform the annotative process.

First and foremost, annotating digitally made it possible to work collaboratively, showing not only how fluidly technology allows us to add to a text from many angles (and potentially from many fields) but also how easily shared enthusiasm generates compelling scholarship. We had a Google Doc and then Kelly started an email chain which felt effortless and flowed. Part of the reason why the collaboration worked so well was that we had chosen to work with Manifold, a new CUNY and University of Minnesota Project, for us an absolute delight. We had first considered Hypothes.is and then Medium, and would surely been happy working in either, but Manifold immediately outshone both.

Our choice to examine critical responses to “Benito Cereno” over time was interesting because it led us to approach the text from multidisciplinary angles. The historical perspective we sought engaged us in a form of distant reading in which we explored how critical thought chronicles political shifts and how these are reflected in responses to a text at given points in time.

“Thus science may implement the ways in which [a human] produces, stores, and consults the record of the race” (Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic, 1945).

Annotation as a tool for historical analysis could, with enough collaborators and time, get huge. The scope of our inquiry seemed to me to beg some qualitative analysis, and I wanted to download all the critical responses to “Benito Cereno” that we added to our annotated digital edition and then upload them to Voyant as a corpus that would quantitatively track how responses changed over time, then add the resulting word cloud and charts to Manifold to see what stands out. Unfortunately, I had to put this foray on hold because I spent an inordinate amount of time looking for 19^thcentury responses to “Benito Cereno” which I can confidently conclude are few and far between.

Looking for 19^th-century critical responses to “Benito Cereno” without physically going to a research library is a fascinating task because it shows how important the work of creating good searchable digital collections is, and how the choice of what to recover and include in these collections informs scholarship that is increasingly digital, with funding that is always scarce. Searching for something that is not readily there also shows a niche Melville scholars could fill: a searchable database of all of Melville’s correspondence would be amazing. A searchable database of Putnam’s magazine including letters to its editors would also be amazing. These may, of course, exist, and if they do, please share. For my part I found some awesome resources:

Melville Electronic Library (MEL)

Cornell University Making of America Project

Melville’s Marginalia

I also want to mention NINES (Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online) which looks interesting but you have to be a subscriber if you want to explore. Also, the login is insecure.

With the abundance of online material that can be added to “Benito Cereno,” it was at times a challenge for me to stay on track. But this is true in any research. As I worked on our annotated edition of “Benito Cereno” I had to keep stopping myself from adding resources that contextualized the story and instead tell myself to keep focused on critical response. I did upload a video of an Ashanti funeral, mainly because I wanted to see what an uploaded video looked like in Manifold. It looked great.

To say a few more words about Manifold, I love the fluidity and intuitiveness of its back end. I love what Manifold says when you delete a resource: “The resource has been destroyed. [Resource] has passed into the endless night.” Ha, too nice. Long live the spirit of play!  And the spirit of multilingualism; I found that Manifold detects French, which is really cool. Matt Gold told me that it detects many other languages too.

In terms of limitations in my use of Manifold, I would have liked to be able to format the annotations so as to paragraph, italicize, bolden and so on. I would have liked to be able to hyperlink to other Manifold resources and external websites in my captions for and descriptions of the resources and links I create in Manifold. For the purposes of our annotation of Benito Cereno, which looks at critical responses to Benito Cereno over time, I would have liked to color code annotations according to time periods (for example, 1855-1889, and then a color for 1890-1909, 1910-1929 and so on). I think, however, that I should be able to do a lot of these things and just don’t yet know how. I had a look at The Perversity of Things project and saw that things I wanted to do in Manifold, like embedding images in the text rather than adding them as resources whose icons would show up in the margin, or hyperlinking. Hyperlinking! I didn’t know how to hyperlink in Manifold and that really bugged me.

Our assignment was submitted yesterday, and instead of feeling that I never want to think of Benito Cereno, Melville or Manifold again, I’m back in Manifold playing with the text. That’s how good Manifold is. And Melville too.

To preface this post, my group consisted of Lisa, Jenna, Lauren, Katharina, Raven, and myself. We divided the story into three parts according to Putnam’s Monthly installments in which it was released. Raven and I were tasked with the conclusion of the novella, so our concepts may radiate off one another. Upon starting the work on annotating the conclusion of Benito Cereno, I immediately found it very difficult to find ways to address the geography of the story, especially since we were the end of the tale and had a narrow stretch of time for working on this. During my extensive research into the trial the took place, I discovered the original story of Benito Cerreño (the name of the actual sailor).

Dr. Greg Grandin published an article on The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Who Ain’t a Slave? Historical Fact and the Fiction of ‘Benito Cereno’” back in December of 2013. He addressed the actual historical context of the voyage that Melville’s Benito Cereno was based on. The name of the ship was the Tryal, and it was docked in Valparaíso, Chile when 70 West Africans were shoved on board with the intentions to be sold in Lima, Peru. These were not the assumed locations based on Melville’s text, who wrote it was in Santo Domingo, Haiti in order to fulfill the context of the Haitian Revolution (Raven addressed the Haitian uprising in her post, it’s super interesting, check it out). However, as Melville accurately wrote, the control of the ship was seized. Their voyage was redirected to the country of Senegal so that they could be free once again. Babo orchestrated the plot, but it wasn’t he who was Cerreño’s right-hand man, it was his son Mori. Cerreño attempted to stall the voyage by sailing north and south, thats when they ended up near Bristol, where Delano joined the excursion. I could go into much further detail, but for the sake of word-count, I won’t overdo it. The link is provided in the title for anyone interested.

Since our section was not heavy with the geography, I did find it helpful to create a very basic map of the actual voyage titled “Journey of the Tryal,” using ArcGIS. I’ll provide an image, but it is purely for the sake of a visual to understand where it was supposed to go versus where it ended up:

Map of the Tryal’s Voyage in 1805

If you go to ArcGIS, you can click the paths and symbols and it’ll tell you what they represent. As far as what I chose to annotate, I focused mainly on the court case and depositions of relating to Babo’s tragic fate. Right around the time Benito Cereno was published (1855), two of the biggest cases in terms of slave liberation came about. In 1853, the Robin Holmes v. Nathaniel Ford case took place in Oregon, and in 1857 the world renown Dred Scott v. Stanford case arose. I took the contextual backgrounds of these individual cases and used them as a scope in regards to viewing Babo’s treatment by the judicial court system as well as Benito Cereno himself.

All in all, I found that understanding the original voyage experienced by Delano and Benito Cerreño was a unique way of understanding Melville’s intentions in writing Benito Cereno in the manner that he did. Also, seeing what was happening around the world politically in terms of the slave revolts and court cases provided an interesting perspective on his view on the treatment of enslaved humans.

Staying in the language of mapping, I can say that I took quite a bunch of detours until I arrived at the idea I finally realized for this week’s assignment. Thinking about Benito Cereno in connection with maps reminded me of how I first learned about slavery and colonialism in high school: by being introduced to maps displaying the so-called “triangular trade”:

These maps and their textual descriptions displayed slavery as an historical fact that can be displayed and understood by placing an arrow on a map, from the African continent to the Americas, the slaves being part of the “cargo” on ships following this line. It was not only until years later within my undergrad studies that I read more about how intrinsically linked the act of mapping has often been with colonialism, how the creation of maps has been used not only to display, but to create colonial facts and exercise power. And even though the display of the “triangular trade” is not the same as dividing a continent into actual zones in which different colonial powers rule, staying within this image helped me to think about mapping Benito Cereno. I decided to look at the novella as a form of adding a story to the objectivity of those forms of display—but whose story?

The question we decided to ask ourselves as a group was what is missing from Melville’s depiction in Benito Cereno. We agreed on applying this question as the overarching theme to our mapping projects. I therefore decided to look for accounts written by (former) enslaved people themselves—because their perspectives and testimonies are missing from Melville’s novella, and from an understanding of slavery as a mere part of the colonial “triangular trade”.

My search took me to the shelf in the library on which various (anthologies of) so-called slave narratives can be found:

I decided to look for reports that talk about what happened in places that are similar to the ones Melville chose as the setting of Benito Cereno: the coast, the sea, the ship. I soon found the testimony of Olaudah Equiano/Gustavus Vassa (ca. 1745-1797), who was enslaved and kidnapped as a child in today’s Nigeria, and who became an abolition activist later in his life. After he had been kidnapped, he was taken to the Carribean and subsequently to Virginia. In his autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life Of Olaudah Equiano (1789), he describes what he had to endure on the ship that brought him to Barbados.

My first idea then was to create a map on which the arrow in “the south” of the “triangular trade”, displaying slaves being brought from the African to the American continent, is annotated with Melville’s story which is then again annotated with accounts from Equiano/Vassa. I looked into the possibilities Googlemaps, Neatline and Story Maps offer, and I found that all three applications didn’t provide the means I would need in order to visualize this twofold annotation process, or at least that I could not figure out how to use them to do so in the amount of time I had to complete this project.

Thanks to Raven’s and Lisa’s (who was my partner in annotating the first part of Benito Cereno) comments within conversations about the issues I encountered and Lisa’s reference to the notion that maps “don’t only depict space, they claim it”, I decided to interpret Melville’s text as a sort of map on which I would locate parts of Equiano’s/Vassa’s autobiography.

As Lisa has put it in her blogpost, I took the map as a “metaphor–whether a means of geolocation, of representing history, or conferring identity, or of claiming some kind of physical, psychological, political, aesthetic, or linguistic space, among many possibilities”.

In order to make an actual slave narrative visible and claim it’s space within Melville’s story, I therefore searched for passages within The Interesting Narrative of the Life Of Olaudah Equiano which correspond with passages from the first section of Benito Cereno and added them to Melville’s novella via hypothes.is. Additionally, in order to take my idea one step further, I copied Benito Cereno to a Google document and directly inserted parts of Euqiano’s/Vassa’s account into the story, using a different font in order to make the two different voices not only readable but also visible. My idea behind this was to not merely annotate Benito Cereno with The Interesting Narrative of the Life Of Olaudah Equiano, but to make the latter an integral part of the former, a part one cannot over-read by ignoring the annotations.

Admittedly, I had to stretch the idea and the concept of “mapping” quite far in order to pursue this idea and make it part of a “mapping”-process, but at least to me this was a very informative process, even though I would consider the result/product of it still very much a “work” or even still a thought in progress.

Special thanks to Lisa and Raven who gave me very helpful advise within my thinking about this task.

Annotating this project was a very intense experience for me. It really opened my eyes to the realities of the time the story was written in and the thematic representations of the characters. I have a much fuller and deeper understanding for Melville’s work, and I feel I learned a great deal about the nature of race and slavery in the 19^thcentury and today.

The mental illness piece hit home for me because I too suffer from this kind of condition. It was important for me to read that work carefully and look for ways people were othered because of their race, and thus, implied insanity. I thought that article was very thought provoking and had a lot to offer as commentary to Babo, Delano and Cereno’s story. “Crucial to these discussions were questions of obedience and rebelliousness, and the desire to set forth an “expert” language— mixing law and science—that would assure that these “different” subjects would not threaten the security of the community, and specifically the rights of its members to hold property,” (Reiss, 1996). This quote is highly symbolic of the nature of whiteness and slavery in the 19^thcentury. A threat to the “insane” property of white people was seen as more important than the humanity of the black individuals that endured slavery. Melville tries to illustrate this in his own clever, between-the-lines way (at least on a first reading). On reading it another time, it becomes much more clear what Melville is saying.

In terms of the article on queerness throughout the text, I did find some of the connections and comparisons a little less convincing. But nonetheless, there are apparent implications that  “Melville, in “Benito Cereno,” elliptically trope queer desire as both enabling and threatening the possibility of hospitality,”(Hannah, 2010). What is valuable about this aspect of the experience was still finding importance and value in what Hannah had to say despite my not necessarily believing or buying into the claims whole-heartedly. This was an interpretation and should be read as such. But I was inspired by the claims that I was convinced of that I wouldn’t have otherwise have connected on my own. Reading these claims and then weeding the story for examples was very fulfilling. It was a game in its own sort and I really enjoyed the process of getting into the mind of the characters in such a unique and intimate way.

 The 9/11 Commission Report article was very impressive. Here, slaves, as others were compared to the slave states the United States government still insist exist, to behoove their own interests. Terror suspects and the Muslim community as a whole was othered in much the same way the black individuals and slaves were during the 19^thcentury, and in the case of blackness, this othering still exists today. In this way, it is dissuading how little progress we as a society have made over the centuries but I have hope that all the hard work of race pioneers will pay off, as we are already seeing the benefits in certain elements of society, politics and culture. “Melville’s text invites a consideration of slavery’s role in the preservation of status quo politics, and reveals the means by which the disclosure of secrecy becomes a condition for the legal fiction of slavery to persist. In purporting to reveal the hidden plot of contemporary anti-US terrorism, the US government’s 9/11 Commission Report similarly manufactures an acceptable political fiction that compensates for a still deeper failure to promote democratic structures of feeling in response to national trauma,” (Traister, 2013). What I like about this quote is its reference to “national trauma.” Slavery was and continues to be wildly traumatic to those that suffered its injustices. 9/11 was nationally traumatic in a different way, as was coming to terms with the inhumane practices of our government of terror suspects in the name of finding answers to justify an inhumane war. There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and collectively, our nation has to accept our involvement there and the havoc we created. This relates to the text in that Cereno (especially) was affected and traumatized so deeply for what he had done. He manifests a national experience as one individual in a story.

Overall, I was moved by the connections I made between reading the critical responses to the story and the text itself. I would be interested in learning more about many differing points of views and look forward to delving more deeply into the research my colleagues on this project came up with as well. From this assignment, I realize the great value in interpreting texts through different, specific lenses. I am grateful I am more aware of literature being conducive to inferring diverse close readings. This also informs how I can more successfully perform distant readings as I become more aware of digital tools that allow for such work.

I realized two things as I began researching “reception history” of Benito Cereno: the first, that there is more critical reception of Herman Melville than a given person could ever attempt to consume; the second, that Melville was well-enough known that the reception of his work stretched beyond the typical discourse-based response to it. In the first vein, I initially attempted to read the text by thinking about how East-to-West migration of ex-slaves would have affects interpretations of the text, into criticism regarding homosociality and race, but I found a lot of this either predictable or as not quite connecting to the text in a way that I thought would be stimulating for the purpose of the project. This however led me to the second area of my research, which I used for my annotations, which was trying to examine how advertising, visual, and print culture “received” Benito Cereno.

I originally began combing through old newspapers in search of local reviews (in particular, a review I saw quoted in a different paper which compared Melville to Hawthorne.) My searches for “Melville” and “Benito Cereno,” did not yield results regarding my intended search, but they did pull a bunch of hits for advertisements for Putnam’s Magazine, and for The Piazza Tales. This led me to start considering how advertising and print culture was linked to the capitalist and imperialist critique’s held within the writing itself, and considering how the way the story was advertised—the visuals, rhetoric, and locations of these ads—laid the grounds for a more subtle effect on its reception. From there, I began to focus on interpreting more tangible aspects of the text itself. For example, finding where each of the 3 sections of the original text started and ended as they were printed in Putnam’s, and imagining how that would have affected a reader or critic’s reading of the text. I also considered how the other texts published around it in Putnam’s would have contextualized, and thus shaped the text. As we have been discussing the relationships of a given text to different mediums of reading/writing and the discourse around and upon it, this seemed like an important thread of reception that would, to an extent, form the basis for any other reception of it.

Ultimately, this alerted me to an advertising and print culture which Melville was writing directly into; it served partially as a reminder that one of the ironies of Benito Cereno is that it is both a political questioning of American capitalist preservation through slavery, as well as a reminder that his writing itself participates in the capital endeavor to fund his arts and free speech. Advertising also called into question whether or not the scholarly or critical reception I was searching for was mutually exclusive to these advertisements and listings. As part of the broader printing context in which Benito Cereno would have been greeted by the public—majority of whom I assume were not reading it critically—through these advertisements, which rarely include anything but a list of titles and a brief and vague comment. The advertisement below, which was published in tons of newspapers reads at the bottom, “A book of our author’s happiest style; it has been admired by all who read it as it passed through the press and we believe that it will be a favorite book.”


Such commentary does nothing to draw attention from the reader to the book’s content, but it does create a framework of excitement with which to approach the book. The self-creation of reception in this case still exists with literature, but with the lack of other contemporary criticism I wonder if the effect is felt more severely on the reader.

Working in a group and working on Manifold worked well for the purpose of this project. As a platform, Manifold was pretty flexible and leant itself as an excellent surface to annotate the text. I will say that a frustration I faced was in the separation of resources from annotations. While the resources could be given a long caption or analysis in itself, they existed very separately from the text, (it comes up as the icon of a box and when clicked opens a pop up of that resource, but when you re finished looking at the resource, it brings you to the very top of the story.) This was frustrating for me as I wanted to insert clippings from newspapers that I was finding within the text to bridge narrative and rhetorical analysis to issues subsisting in the visual print culture in which the text would have initially been read by the public. I also sometimes put my annotation as a caption for the resource, which made me unsure that my contribution would be understood as an annotation by a casual reader. The annotation side of Manifold is much more natural if a bit bare-bones; it does not allow for hyperlinks, images, italic or bold font, etc. which give scholarly annotations some life. I also couldn’t figure out how to see annotations by all authors besides scrolling through and manually selecting annotated passages. I felt like this made it harder for me to collaborate with my group members, because I had to work really hard just to see what and where they were annotating. Visually, the platform is beautiful, and easy to work with—especially in that everyone in the group could be admins and do work independently and with equal control on the text. I noticed that this project was collaborative on larger decision-making moments, but less collaborative on the actual getting-down-to-work part. Our email chain and google doc were really useful in re-affirming directions individuals were heading in, and creating an intertextual collage on the back-end of our final product, although at the end I felt like the annotations I created (as well as the annotations other group members created) were unique to their own lens of research and analysis. The synthesis of these things on a shared platform with collaborative background communication is definitely exciting to see come together on the Manifold Platform.

In terms of self-reflection, I feel like it took me a little while before jumping into the project as I spent most of my time exploring and learning the platform and then navigating how I wanted to approach researching and writing my annotations. My group took the approach of diving in and finding lots of different resources and compiling them into a word document, but I personally tend to work better when I have a specific lens or goal in mind. My initial approach in looking up traditional criticism of his work wasn’t very satisfying, and I wasn’t finding it very exciting to read criticism and then insert it into the text. This lead me into looking into the boundaries and repercussions of critical reception through the more everyday medium of visual print and advertising culture of newspapers. Taking the time and embracing the process of finding my way down this route over a week of research probably led me to have fewer annotations than I should have, because the time spent writing was spent instead working through archives and oftentimes hitting dead-ends. Regardless, it was a fun exercise in opening up a new area of inquiry not only for my reading of the text (and hopefully other people’s through my annotations!), but also into what I can considered “reception,” and why.

Our group set out to create an annotated edition of Benito Cereno using maps to situate it in social, historical, and postcolonial contexts, and to reveal what the narrative itself leaves “off the map”. As the project progressed, the concept of the map as metaphor–whether a means of geolocation, of representing history, or conferring identity, or of claiming some kind of physical, psychological, political, aesthetic, or linguistic space, among many possibilities–took over. We discussed using text to annotate a map, or using maps to annotate text. A map contains a multiplicity of meaning, depending on who made it and who is looking at it. It’s no wonder, then, that even with a central idea governing our project, we each have used “maps” as a jumping off point into different territories and concepts around what annotation is and what a map, or mapping, can be. Like annotation, mapping is a critical intervention. In some foundational way, is the text a map? What can a text map? What can’t it map? Benito Cereno was published serially. Does a text (or map, or annotation) have to exist in a centralized space, or can it be distributed across virtual and historical spaces? I think our multifaceted group project, in various ways, poses these questions, and attempts to answer at least some of them.

I chose a fairly orthdox approach, using maps and images, for the most part as contemporaneous as possible to either the setting or the publication of Benito Cereno, to provide historical background for words, places, and other elements in the first-published section of narrative that are part of an unwritten subtext of trade, colonial occupation, and religious and cultural violence. Finding and vetting such material is time consuming; using it to annotate a text requires additional framing by way of explanation or analysis.  It was fascinating, however, to discover items like a hand-drawn chart of a mid-19th century voyage from Boston to San Francisco around the perimeter of South America. This very real ship made much of the same route as the fictional San Dominick was first purported by Don Benito to have taken. Although Captain Delano had most recently been trading in China, his ship was a “sealer” based in Boston; I sealing expeditions from Northeast cities often went to the areas around the Falkland Islands to hunt. That chart could easily reflect previous voyages of the Bachelor’s Delight. Maps enable a diachronic visualization of history, real or imagined; geolocating a point in time is also a form of annotation.

The second group assignment called upon the class to create an annotated edition of Melville’s Benito Cereno.  We had been informally practicing this over the last few weeks by publicly annotating the text using hypothes.is.  I’ve enjoyed the overall experience of social annotation and look forward to future exploration of using annotation to explore material more.  However, after this culminating annotation project, I don’t think I’m any closer to have contributing to a formal annotated literary text, but I do think I was able to explore and play with the affordances digital humanities tools provide, most specifically Story Maps provided by ArcGIS.

First, I want to address my role in the group work.  I was absent from class the day the assignment was first introduced, and missed the opportunity to share with the class any initial thoughts I had about themes or approaches to annotating the text, but I did receive the detailed instructions from Jeff and chose to join the group that was focusing on the mapping aspect of approaching annotations in Benito.  I took a mapping course this past summer and learned to use ArcGIS and Story Maps from a scientific approach and I was interested in seeing where I could take my new skills and apply them to reading of a text within a more humanities based discipline.

The group had some email discussion about how we would collaborate and what we would do with our text.  We settled on trying out Basecamp for our project’s management and I was an eager supporter of this because I had been meaning to identify an opportunity to use Basecamp for a project and am happy I got the chance through this project (thanks, Lisa for arranging this!).  There was some back and forth within Basecamp, but the group decided that as we did not have a unified vision for how to move forward, we should probably meet in person to discuss, so we met up before last week’s class.  We moved a little closer towards a shared vision, but we still left it very open to interpretation.  Essentially, we decided that two members in each group would take one part of the text originally published in Putnam’s Monthly in October, November, and December, 1855.

Segment 1: Kat / Lisa
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293020757120;view=1up;seq=359
Segment 2: Lauren / Jenna
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293020757120;view=1up;seq=465
Segment 3: Raven / Anthony
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=msu.31293020757120;view=1up;seq=639

We decided to continue using hypothes.is with the tag #BennyTheMap and address “what’s missing from Melville’s work.”  When annotating in the wild during the previous assignment, I was very interested in the context for where this story was first published: Putnam’s Weekly, so I annotated a bit about originally.  In retrospect, I wish I had pursued this more directly and mapped the missing context of the other items published in the same issues of Putnam’s that Benito was released in, but I really became obsessed with the mapping component of this and pursued identifying scholarship in response to Benito.  I found several articles through a Google Scholar search (as I wanted to find material that was available regardless of academic affiliation) and I thought that I would try and identify scholarly articles and use the map to geolocate where the scholarship was being published (i.e. which academic publishers) and where the scholars were located (i.e. academic affiliations).  After gathering this information and beginning to think about how I wanted to use different annotation tools, I revisited Story Maps (there was some early group discussion about each using different tools, but when we met in person, we decided for convenience to keep using hypothes.is, but when it came down to it, hypotehes.is was not going to work for me, so I deviated).

I intended to create my own map and locate the scholarly article and link out to them on the map, but when I started playing around in Story Maps, there were all kinds of freely available projects that mapped different aspects of the Slave Trade and I decided to use those as my annotations, while also including links to the scholarship I found (and I should mention that this scholarship was chosen purely on the ease of access through a Google Scholar search and has not been critically curated).  To stick with the agreement I made for annotating in hypothes.is, I have annotated the section I was assigned by linking out to my Story Map.

In summary, it seems I’ve deviated quite far from what the group decided, but I don’t think that’s too detrimental as we left it somewhat open to interpretation (besides, I got to use a new collaborative tool, Basecamp, so that’s a win for the collaborative process in my opinion) and I did use maps which was a very important part of the critical approach we decided to take.  Please check out my map below (hoping it embeds properly) or by going to this site.