In anticipation of making this blog post, and creating a presentation for my group’s project, I was slightly concerned that I would not benefit from this project as much as my groupmates. However, to my surprise, upon stitching together the quilt of our experiences I’ve managed to create a cohesive slideshow that resulted in a unique experience of my own. Our group was very good at communicating right from the start, and over thirty emails later we accomplished something pretty solid. I was assigned to be the presenter. Patrick and Kat were the editors. Kelly, Raven, and Julia were the readers. That was established quickly, and we immediately started throwing ideas out there.

As the presenter, I simply asked everyone to make notes of the creative decisions we were making on a shared document. My groupmates went above and beyond in terms of the communication of ideas and creative choices made. I’d like to give a special thanks to Katharina for creating individual sound files for my presentation as well! What ended up making my role in the project so unique was my need to pick everyone’s brains about their experience. By having everyone express what they have encountered as they worked, it invoked their interest and passion within the text. It was almost enlightening to hear them discuss the different social issues of modern-day and how they were expressed in Melville’s piece published way back in the late fall/early winter of 1853.

Through conversations with my partners, It sparked my own interest and caused me to investigate the text myself. Like mentioned and depicted above, Bartleby exposes issues within the workplace between 1853, all the way up to 2018. He represents the working class in a way that makes him replaceable with a woman in the workplace, as well as with a person of color within the workplace. Prior to creating this audiobook and presentation, Bartleby was just another short story I had read multiple times across several classes. However, reading it with this new lens has given me a greater appreciation for the first time ever. As someone who is going through life as a biracial (non-white passing) male, I dig deep into race issues within literature, education, and the workforce. The narrator as we know him is an extremely condescending lawyer of high status, working on the well known Wall Street in the year 1853. He is the epitome of corporate American issues in the way he runs his office. He had a blatant disregard for the condition of his employees. For example, Turkey’s drinking problem. The higher up did not care as long as the work got done.

This also cuts into the issue of working conditions for marginalized workers by people in higher positions of power. Bartleby’s working conditions were less than ideal, but who was he to argue with the big boss? Overall, the audiobook assignment was a positive experience. However, I feel as though if the group had the opportunity to select a text of our own to create an audiobook for, it may have provided the class with a larger platform for discussion across several genres.

Going into this project, I couldn’t help but feel slightly insecure by the classes experience and knowledge with this type of literature. During my initial read, prior to this group project, I found the language and usage of words difficult to comprehend, which affected my ability to immerse myself with the text.

In thinking of one of my favorite librarian scholars, Pura Belpre, I constantly kept thinking of her words on how vital representation and seeing oneself in literature is so important to the immersive and imaginative experience of reading. As a librarian and archivist, it was her mission to provide books that reflected the experiences of Puerto Rican and LatinX children of the Bronx. When there weren’t any, she created them and made it her life’s work to change the perception of how language can he used to influence and inspire readers outside of the typical Westernized literary cannon. When I reflect on the Benjamin piece my heart goes back to writers like Belpre, who reach outside of the cannon to recover lost pieces of history and indigenous practices of visual knowledge in her work rather than compare the novel’s and audiobook’s origins in a Eurocentric linear perspective.

As a reader for our group, my insecurity persisted as I wondered how I would engage my own voice (and frankly enthusiasm) into a group of characters I in no way could identify with across the spectrum of race and gender. It was interesting to feminize these characters, and quickly I found myself enjoying what felt like a “disruption” of the common flow of the story. Somehow I had infiltrated the expectations of the demeanor and voices of these traditional characters, and I relished in the idea of being able to re-frame a story in a completely different context. The constant repetition that recording an audiobook requires also enabled me to immerse myself with the text in a way I wasn’t able to before. The thoughtfulness to the emphasis on each word alleviated the confusion I had in understanding many of the correspondences happening between the characters in what initially felt like a world with language that did not belong to me. It was influential scholars like Belpre that paved the way for me to gain these skills in deciphering literature across many genres, all starting with her classic stories such as Juan Bobo, a collection of folk- Taino tales which painted an illustrative literary experience I carry with me forever.

By the end of my recording, I had gained a new appreciation for Bartleby, and find myself making new connections to how the story connects with many social themes we could relate to today. I empathize with the narrator in many ways, and have had moments I feel myself unraveling under the constant “respectable” expectations of what is considered intellectual and respectable in an academic setting. The unspoken assumptions of etiquette, and expectation to perform under a specific cannon of knowledge. This assignment overall has helped me re-think what can be possible in engaging different audiences to texts through the use of collaborative audiobooks, and using this platform as a way to re-appropriate literature in the academic cannon.

Patrick Grady O’Malley

Editing raw sound files in order to contribute to a cohesive project such as a complete audiobook was very fun and fulfilling. My role was largely taking everyone’s individual reading files and putting them together into one large, usable piece. This was a bit cumbersome as there were many different files, as well as some retakes that needed to replace other bits of audio already recorded. This entire process jogged my memory rather quickly on the ins and outs of using Audacity successfully. It has been a long time since I used that software, so there was a rather steep re-learning curve, but once I got used to what I was working with, the how to’s of usage came back rather quickly.

As I mentioned, I was more in charge of putting the files together to flow nicely, I had less creative decisions than say Kat who was more in charge of putting effects within the sound. However, I still had to come up with some executive decisions on my own. These included how long certain pauses were between paragraphs, how loud or quiet to adjust the volume and getting the fades right that we used to transition between readers.

We all agreed we wanted our audiobook to be as experiential as possible. In order to do this, we felt like we needed our book to come off a little quirky and unique, and I tried reflecting this spirit in the way I spliced and added audio files to one another. The readers did a great job in staying true to the essence of our project and also Melville’s story. My job was to see their (the readers) commitment to the well-being of the project was not lost and that the sound reflected the readers distinctive styles of storytelling.

I felt we challenged the notion of providing a “Reading” and a “reading” experience that Rubery distinctly defines [61]. Since we wanted our book to be experiential, it had the qualities of a public “Reading” in that we hoped the user felt like our readers were almost performing the text. However, it is still a private, “reading” experience. Hearingthe text brings Bartleby new life, and it was fun to consider the ways I could alter that as I manipulated the sound files to make our project consistent with itself. It is my belief that the digital voice we left behind is there exclusively for the reader to encounter Bartleby and his world.

“Voice characterization” was something to listen for while editing. This helped me choose when to start a certain passage or how quickly to make a conversation begin and end. Thankfully, the readers were very creative with how they presented themselves in the reading, so editing their files was very meaningful. The narrator of the story’s voice was always distinct, especially in comparison to the other characters, so it was especially enjoyable playing around with how he came off.

Overall, this was a great collaborative project. Everyone worked really hard and I think our finished product is something we can all be proud of.

Face Cry Robot Artificial Intelligence Sad Woman https://www.maxpixel.net/Face-Cry-Robot-Artificial-Intelligence-Sad-Woman-3010309

I was not expecting that we’d actually complete the entire audiobook rendering of Bartleby in two week’s time with just short class meetings to discuss our strategy and each of us having demanding jobs and difficulty working on the project on the same days, but like Jenna, Travis, and our other group mates, I am proud of the accomplishment.  Although our audiobook might not sell for top dollar on Audible, it might definitely get a listen (or two) on librivox!

To give you an idea of where we started, after class on September 13, we drafted this document to organize our thoughts.  It’s evolved since the original creation, and we did our best to contain our thoughts to the doc, but we often veered into long email strings of conversations (continuing even as I write this blog post), going back and forth about creative ideas and varying interpretations and directions we should take the audiobook in.

As the online conversation and email correspondence was not getting us any closer to important decisions, we decided to meet before last week’s class (in the new MADH lounge) in person to discuss and finalize our strategy for rendering the audiobook.  It took us one more meeting after class to finalize our strategy.  There were still some creative back and forth, but we were able to settle on a division of labor:

• Travis would mark up the script and color code the different voices/characters in the text (in addition to drafting the presentation) so that
• Lauren could make a text to speech rendering of each character’s voice (using Mac’s accessibility functions) and then pass on the files to
• Lisa who would string them all together using Audacity, but who would also get human read files from
• Jenna (Bartleby’s voice was intentionally left as a human voice) & Sabina (who would identify parts of the text where the character’s humanity outweighed their inhumanity).  The final edit would be completed by Sabina which included the human voice overs and other sound effects.
• Jenna & Travis were the point group members for working on the presentation and for keeping us all on track!

Creatively, we decided to “read” the text using a text to speech approach where all the voices of characters, except Bartleby, were rendered as female robot voices (Jenna narrated Bartleby).  As Lisa pointed out in her post, we were interested in a feminist approach to the text which, for me, has been inspired by a heavy load of reading texts authored by men and written about men (mostly) in addition to being in a collaborative group with a majority of women.  Also, I remember discovering in the ITP Core I course last fall that most of the automated voices used on our devices (GPS, Siri, Alexa, etc.) are female which may have evolved from the traditional role women played in assisting with administrative tasks over the last century.  We also had lots and lots of discussion about the humanity and inhumanity of the characters and our various interpretations.

I am new to reading texts closely like this.  My relationship to reading has mostly been for enjoyment where I find pleasure in the stories authors tell.  I’m still grappling with the interpretations of the text, but have found our in class discussions enlightening.  Rendering the text as an audiobook has provided me with an opportunity to think non-traditionally about reading and the mere experience of enjoying the material.  As a group, we had to impose interpretation of the text and represent that interpretation which has been manifested as a somewhat techno feminist approach.  Nonetheless, we all agreed that we also wanted to represent the many varied interpretations of the character’s humanity, so we experimented with both machine and human read voices.  I’m impressed with the quality of our accomplishments, but there may be a few moments where the interspersion of the audio files may not run so smoothly.  As a group, we created over 100 separate audio files that needed to be edited together!  Quite a task, but maybe in future iterations of this course and this assignment, students can be given another week perhaps or be asked to submit a more polished version at the end of the semester.

Finally, I’ll conclude with saying that with our audiobook, it’s also quite interesting to hear the machine readings of the text.  For our previous audiobook assignment, it was important to me to find a book that was read by the author so that I could hear their voice and their interpretation of the text.  With our version of Bartleby, the automated and human read voices do not match the voices in my head of the character’s!  Nevertheless, that’s part of the interesting nature of audiobooks which Matthew Rubery has discussed in his writing: Canned Lit After Edison & Play It Again, Sam Weller.  I also don’t think I could regularly rely on being read to from a robot voice.  Despite there being a few different voice options, hearing the robot over and over might drive me a little mad and if I had to read texts this way, I might just have to say “I would prefer not to.”

After last week’s work, I had begun to agree with Rubery that audiobooks had the power to turn us all into listeners. Turns out Rubery might be right about the their second capacity as well: to turn more of us into narrators. While listening brought the text from the page to me, creating an audiobook brought me back to the page, deep into the page.

As our group prepped for project, the mere act of imagining the audio brought out elements of Melville’s text that I’d missed such as frequent alliteration and hilarious slapstick. Our attention was largely on Bartleby himself—how we might represent him as both passive and powerful. Our idea of layering additional narrators to his spoken lines as the story went on seemed both promising and wonderfully menacing, especially when he is ultimately silenced in the Tombs.

But, treating the text as a script and re-recording passages forced me to explore more profound possibilities. I found myself (I hope) doing what both Liu and Rubery had described as co-authoring—interpreting to offer something new.

For example, the story seems, by virtue of its title and eponymous, enigmatic character, really about Bartleby. And given our class discussion of parallels between Bartleby’s occupation and Melville’s life, that reading makes sense. As the oldest and weariest of our group, I’d volunteered for the first two and last eight pages–the times when the narrator himself is his oldest or weariest. In those pages, I found equally significant the disintegration of the narrator—of big business—in the face of Bartleby’s unmoving movement. Melville’s punctuation and fragmented sentences suggested an almost dissociative disorder besetting the narrator on page 27—a Poe-esque one—as he argues darkly with his own conscience and desire. Trying to voice that split, that unraveling, I felt the fever brought on by the what the narrator subconsciously sees as the contagious disease of Bartleby’s passive defiance—one fatal to an industry reliant on unthinking workers—which explains the absolute and dark necessity, in the narrator’s mind, to cure himself of the scrivener.

The dissociation became so intense (and I used GarageBand effects to capture the internal voices) that I entertained for a moment whether Bartleby was even real. I thought perhaps he may be a projection of the narrator’s psyche—a freedom he longed for in himself that he externalized and then murdered through neglect to protect the comfortable life of ease to which he had grown accustomed. (Farfetched, yes, but fun to kick around.)

That reading brought the truly baffling last two lines into greater clarity: they seem to be the reconciling of the dissociative mind. “Ah Bartleby!” the narrator cries just after blaming the Dead Letter Office for what seemed the scrivener’s predestined course for death—a course that, if truly predestined, removes the narrator from all culpability. “Ah humanity!” he adds, ruing the state of the very world that he feeds and that feeds him financially and necessarily sends all unproductive fluff to the flames.

While I value a recording that strives to be faithful to the text, this experience made me long for time to play around, like a jazz musician with a riff, to see what else “Bartleby” might yield—to try exaggerating the humor, to imagine Bartleby’s inner monologue, to see the story from Nippers’ or Turkey’s eyes. Ah the due date! Ah full time jobs!

I’m writing some of this host with this speech to text app in my excess ability settings on my computer. Since we worked with text to speech applications to render the voices in Bartleby the scrivener, I thought it would be interesting to try things the other way around.  I’ve never used speech to text before, just as I’ve never edited a few dozen audio clips together and end to end until this past week. Composing sentences in my mind first is much more difficult and composing them on a keyboard karma which in it, which enables me not only to correct mistakes, but to work with the language in a nonlinear way, and this seems to be the way my mind works with the language most of the time  Amo G

Okay, this is becoming too difficult and time consuming.

Just as the experiment of “writing” with my voice forced me to shift my approach to composing with language, our group experiment, using text-to-speech for every character but Bartleby, forced me to listen differently and to think about how voice shapes a reader’s perceptions, not only of character but of an entire story. Removing the expected reshuffled the story thematically; it produced effects/affects that more conventional strategies might not achieved for an audiobook listener; and it caused me to be more open-minded about robots. The following ramble touches on some of the aforementioned:

These days speech-to-text/text-to-speech most often brings to mind the “accessibility features” I was just playing with: tools to make both two-way communication and/or reading easier for some people unable to speak, see, or manipulate a physical text. But speech-to-text was once primarily a tool used in modern business practices—dictation. The “boss” spoke into a machine and a secretary—a copyist of sorts who was the human mechanism for rendering speech to text—listened to it and typed it out. In the 20^th century, the clerical workforce primarily comprised of women.* Without consulting any sources I’ll go way out on a limb and suggest that women still make up a large percentage of the white-collar workforce that is not “middle management” or above. Women added a gender differential to the workplace, and the way we perceive, define, and differentiate labor was forever changed. Automation is a form of apparently “workerless” labor; now that it surrounds us, could it be that the way we conceive of it is obliquely but intrinsically connected to the way we understand gender? Siri and Alexa, for example, have been discussed in this respect. (It’s also been argued that some voices are shown to affect listeners in a more optimal way than others, which is supposedly why people prefer women’s voices on their GPS.)

As we know, when Melville wrote Bartleby, the office worker and the copyist were traditionally male roles—women had not yet entered the public sphere as white-collar workers. It follows then that Bartleby, as both scrivener and refusenik, was rendered from the get-go as a rather robotic individual in every way, someone who becomes increasingly sapped of a humanity the narrator laments—or fears for?—in the final sentence. Ironically, this loss of humanity is also what seems to accelerate (or at least coincides with) his loss of functionality as a copying machine. Conversely, we like Siri and Alexa because they have the amazing functions of a machine, yet sound sort of human. (Although personally I can’t stand the sassy tone of the UPS lady.) Could it be that, in order for the world (as we know it) to work, robotic and  humanistic elements must coexist in our machines somehow? In us? I don’t think Melville had the cyborg in mind, but N. Katherine Hayles might agree. Marx might not approve.

Our group chose to use a chorus of female automatons for our version of Bartleby. This was in large part an effort to work against the text, this time to turn the entirely male world of the narrative inside out. One thing that occurred to me as I discussed this with Lauren, just before she began converting the text to speech, is that this approach also turns a typical feminist reading on its head. Not only were all the human characters rendered as robots and the most robotlike character rendered as human, but women occupied roles both of labor and power over labor. They were running the machine.

These three shifts in perspective produced a very alien/alienating experience of the story– but in a good way.  As other people have noted, listening accentuated aspects of the narrative that might have slipped by more easily in an unvoiced text. Listening to a text-to-speech rendering, with all of its imperfections, tone-deaf pronunciations, and incorrect “translations,” highlighted Melville’s language choices and the way we hear “authority” and force in individual words and phrases that could just as easily be deemphasized by “wrong” speech. Voices with the barest hint of emotion—as well as those with non-“English” accents—actually brought out the humor in the story, even in the mundane interactions of minor characters.

Not only did the humor become clearer to me, but oddly enough, so did the idiosyncrasies of Melville’s characters.  In many ways, Bartleby is the least sympathetic character, if only because he is the most thinly written character. There’s just not much of him there at all, which is part of the point. Although the narrator’s empathy was something our group had debated, and which drove us to make some unusual post-production choices, as a female robot, the narrator actually seemed a little more human to me. They all did. Melville’s characters are flawed and interesting, because humans are flawed and interesting.  Listening to the clips of “tape” I was ham-fistedly editing together, I found myself sympathizing more with these alien voices.  Forced to act out Bartleby the Scrivener, they resembled machines that were putting on a play, on the verge of manifesting human traits, but just shy of the kind of emotional capacity we believe draws a line between them and us.

* I’m thinking ahead to fantasy scene in Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think” (1945):

At a recent World Fair a machine called a Voder was shown. A girl stroked its keys and it emitted recognizable speech. No human vocal chords entered into the procedure at any point; the keys simply combined some electrically produced vibrations and passed these on to a loud-speaker. In the Bell Laboratories there is the converse of this machine, called a Vocoder. The loudspeaker is replaced by a microphone, which picks up sound. Speak to it, and the corresponding keys move. This may be one element of the postulated system.

The other element is found in the stenotype, that somewhat disconcerting device encountered usually at public meetings. A girl strokes its keys languidly and looks about the room and sometimes at the speaker with a disquieting gaze. From it emerges a typed strip which records in a phonetically simplified language a record of what the speaker is supposed to have said. Later this strip is retyped into ordinary language, for in its nascent form it is intelligible only to the initiated. Combine these two elements, let the Vocoder run the stenotype, and the result is a machine which types when talked to.

At the beginning of our foray into the world of audio-books, I was concerned about the possibility of limiting interpretations of the text. Reading about Dicken’s audience and its reaction to his voicing of Sam Weller in Rubery’s piece, I saw the inkling of an issue posed by the medium: by providing a definitive voice through an audio ‘reading,’ a text risked losing aspects of the ambiguity that fosters criticism. It seemed rather monoglotic, privileging a select set of voices over the multiple ones an audience provides in solitary reading.

Now, with our projects coming to completion, I admit that this hesitancy was rather unfair. If anything, our work on audio-books only exposed the sheer vibrancy of language and ambiguity at play in a text. Consider my role as scrip preparer. Going through the novella to color-code individual character voices in order to aid recording, I realized that my task was consequently making the text’s internal dialogism more explicit. With each character voice symbolized by a color, I could simply glance through the text and understand how narrative voice was being challenged in dominance by noting how its symbolic blue was fragmenting into a rainbow of color – coincidentally in tandem with Bartleby’s increasing obstinateness. Sharing this script with my fellow group members, I saw the text further fragmented as dubbings were inserted so as to expose elements of humanity that contrasted with the automated recording we used as a base. Thus, not only could one see external challenges to narrative voice develop but internal alterations of the character could be visually manifested.

Of even greater interest was what the audio-book added to the text. An issue that impeded our work was deciding on how to ‘read’ our audio-book. Each group member had their own understanding of the text and we wanted to ensure that the project retained a collaborative nature that could accommodate this. However, as literary interpretation is a holistic phenomenon, we could not merely pick and choose which readings remained by mass agreement: the result would be schizophrenic. Rather, we had to decide on a format that allowed individual readings to prevail while also allowing them to yield to a holistic reading. That is, our individuals readings generated an alternate reading due to the demands of the audio-book itself.

This result reveals a flaw in my thinking about audio-books: I concentrated on the interpretation of the product, not the process. As in any collaborative activity, the audio-book involved a ‘circuit’ that incorporated multiple ideas and thoughts into the media artifact by sheer consequence of production. Having the opportunity to participate in this circuit, I feel as if my understanding of the authorial role, regardless of medium, has been altered. Where I considered the author as an ‘arranger’ of the language and ideas of his society, I now question whether he is better understood as a ‘negotiator’, developing techniques and forms to best accommodate all ideas that mediate through him.

In thinking of our upcoming audiobook assignment, I was most struck by Mathew Rubery’s “Play it Again, Sam Weller: New Digital Audiobooks and Old Ways of Reading” reading for this week. Particularly, I am most interested in his notion of “cumbersome formats” (63) and how the notion of the audiobook has gained momentum with technological advances and the elimination of cassette and disk form audiobooks. Despite the small gains in the usage of audiobooks Rubery states that “… while relatively small in comparison with conventional book sales, (audiobooks) still account for a substantial number of readers as well as an upward trajectory. As the number of overal readers continues to decline, audiobook use is among the minority of reading continues to decline, audiobook use is among the minority of reading practices found to be increasing general literacy.” (63) It is fascinating to think that the increase of audiobook use comes down to more about convenience in an advancing technological world, versus reshaping how literature is absorbed or documented. Rubery describes the Victorian era ideal of the novel as a “..’talking book’, capable of preserving the voices of eminent Victorians” which now seems so far-fetched to the current reality of audiobook use. When I imagine the average person purchasing an audiobook off their phone I imagine it as an alternative to having to swipe page by page while commuting on the train/bus and listening to the book to tune out the hectic noises of daily life. In college, any audiobook I may have purchased was also out of more convenience or frankly laziness to to want to have a more passive experience of absorbing knowledge that required minimal following of texts on a line by line basis.

This generalized notion of the purpose of the audiobook however, goes entirely against my own exposure to audiobooks during my adolescence.  This group assignment has been a wonderful opportunity to re-engage with a series of audiobooks my mother created with me about 19 years ago of The Royal Raven by Hans Wilhem and The House on the Hill by Christin Couture, at around the age of 6 when I was learning how to read. With only a cassette player, tapes, and a recorder my mother thought it would be a sort of time-capsule/motivating project to inspire me to read knowing that my words would be documented to listen back to in adulthood. I’d like to say that I was able to have that moment of nostalgia and self-reflection once I finally found those tapes in my childhood things and was met with a very serious problem. I had no cassette player to listen to my audiobooks! I can’t quite express the disappointment in being so excited to listen to your childhood self and be denied it through lack of access to analog technology. I never realized how I took these forms of tools for granted. I’d like to think that platforming these audiobooks into more modern forms of technology to avoid this problem would be ideal, but now I find myself conflicted. When I think of Eurocentric models of learning like the Victorian era, my first response is to turn away and look instead to the indigenous values of oral tradition and preservation of knowledge through the passing down of ancestors. The form in which my mother chose to engage me with my imagination through reading became a bonding experience in which not only my reading skills improved, but my general sense of self was instilled through an oral tradition passed on through ancestral generations. In summary I’m conflicted as to how modern technology is a force moving us away from oral tradition or more towards it?