"Song(s) of Myself": Flexing Leaves of Grass

In his monograph Radiant Textuality, Jerome Mc-
Gann reflects on the first decade of work on the Rossetti
Archive at the Institute for Advanced Technology
in the Humanities and regrets their “failure to consider
interface in a serious way….when we worked out the
archive’s original design, we deliberately chose to focus
on the logical structure and to set aside any thought
about the Interface for delivering the archive to its users.
We made this decision in order to avoid committing
ourselves to a delivery mechanism.”1 Accordingly, the
site’s design editor, Bethany Nowviskie, predicts that
the interface will “always have something of a tackedon
quality.”2 Such an outcome, Matthew Kirschenbaum
argues, is consistent with the standard workflow of Digital
Humanities projects: “Too often put together as the
final phase of a project under a tight deadline and an
even tighter budget, the interface becomes the first and
in most respects the exclusive experience of the project
for its end users.”3 This assessment suggests that future
editors and directors should consider making interface
design a preliminary stage in the process of constructing
electronic editions and archives.
In 2004, Professor John Rumrich and myself, then a
graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin
(UT-Austin), decided to reshuffle the priorities of the
Digital Humanities in two ways: by considering interface
design before text encoding and by privileging
pedagogical applications over scholarly ones. Noting
that most electronic editions and archives have either
deliberately or unreflectively adopted the standard windows-
based interface design of non-literary Web sites,
we resolved to make our digital classroom edition of
John Milton’s Paradise Lost (hereafter, PL) resemble a
book lying open on a table. This approach, we hoped,
would increase readability for students and appeal to
bibliophile instructors. But we refused to rely solely on
visual usability—we wanted to integrate an audio track
of the poem with our electronic text. To this end, we
recruited several colleagues at UT-Austin to make a recording
of one of the epic’s twelve books. From 2005
to 2007, with the support of a UT-Austin Liberal Arts
Instructional Technology Services (LAITS) grant, we
developed a prototype “audiotext,” which we demoed at
the 2007 Digital Humanities conference (DH07). In our
abstract, we offered the following rationale for the edition’s
synthesis of audio and text:
Whether students run through excerpts from PL in a sophomore
survey or pore over the entire epic in an upper-division
course, they famously find Milton’s poetry difficult
to follow. Instructors usually assume that this difficulty
owes to its unfamiliar ideas and Milton’s intimidating erudition—
and surely these are part of the problem. But we
have found that when students hear an instructor declaim
passages from PL as they follow along in their textbooks,
the thrust of the lines suddenly becomes plainer. Recent
research on multimedia learning indicates that distinct,
additive cognitive pathways mediate the aural and visual
reception of language (Mayer 2001). Reading and listening
to the same text demonstrably improves understanding
and recall.4
The prototype uses Adobe Flash technology to synchronize
the audio playback with a karaoke-style highlight
that moves over each line as it is spoken. Since the conference,
two more books have been added to the project
Web site at http://www.laits.utextas.edu/miltonpl. The
PL audiotexts are used by several instructors each semester
in a range of British literature courses at UT-Austin.
Student survey data and instructor comments have
been overwhelmingly positive.
In 2007, Professors Coleman Hutchison and Michael
Winship, Americanists intrigued by the interface concept,
applied for and received an LAITS grant to create
an audiotext of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,”
arguably the best-known long-form poem in American
literature. The rationale they stated in their grant proposal
was not overcoming a syntactical barrier to comprehension
so much as countering the problem that
Whitman’s long, idiosyncratic lines and extensive use of
poetic catalogs can *look* like prose. Hearing as well
as seeing the text, Hutchison and Winship argued, should
help students gain an understanding of the aural register
of the poem and thereby become receptive to the concatenation
of Whitman’s aural and visual effects. The
editors also proposed that six different readers would
each voice the entire poem, whereas in the PL audiotexts
each character in the poem is voiced by a different
reader. The project would thus highlight an understudied
aspect of the poem: despite its title, “Song of Myself”
is a polyvocal poem, one in which distinct personae
and voices compete. Furthermore, by offering a menu
of six audio tracks from which a user can select at any
time, changing tracks without interruption, the new interface
would call attention to the subjective nature of
such vocalization factors as accent, pronunciation, and emphasis. This “remixability” addresses an issue raised
by otherwise enthusiastic listeners/observers at DH07
and elsewhere concerning the PL prototype. Although
Professor Rumrich and I considered our audio track to
be no more “accurate” a rendering of Milton’s lines than
the visual representations we included in the illustration
section, we overlooked the possibility that a single audio
recording would give the impression that we were claiming
to have realized Milton’s auditory intentions, just as
a single critically edited text strikes some textual critics
as more autocratic than an archive of versions.
Hutchison and Winship hired me, now a postdoctoral
fellow at Georgia Tech, as the project’s technical editor.
The project manager, Emily Cicchini, hired Scott Herrick,
a systems analyst for the Division of Instructional
Innovation and Assessment at UT-Austin, as lead developer.
Herrick had experience constructing a streaming
flash architecture for the Aswaat Arabiyya project (http://
www.laits.utexas.edu/aswaat/). In order to minimize the
time necessary to load six audio tracks, we decided to
stream the audio tracks from a Flash Server instead of
embedding the audio in the Flash movie, as had been
done in the PL prototype. Herrick and I were aware that
the choice of Flash as the core technology might prove a
liability for the project’s long term sustainability as well
as its adaptability to other contexts and purposes, but we
had developed a familiarity with the platform and were
not confident that we could achieve the desired animation
and synchronization effects using open-source alternatives.
Although the Flash Player is a free download,
it is proprietary to Adobe, whose standard Integrated
Development Environment (IDE) for Flash is a closed,
commercial product. Adobe released the specifications
for its playable Flash formats (SWF and FLV) in 2006, a
move that some believe was intended to discourage the
development of a free and open-source alternative while
increasing the number of third party applications capable
of generating SWF files.
Lately, Adobe has been promoting Flex Builder, an alternative
Flash IDE built on the open source Eclipse
platform yet itself proprietary. The new IDE resembles
a Java development suite and combines pre-built application
components with MXML, an XML-based markup
language, and ActionScript 3.0, an object-oriented
scripting language. Flex Builder is designed to appeal
to programmers and designers of Rich Internet Applications
who were never comfortable with the animation
and movie metaphors of the timeline-based standard
Flash IDE. Noting that Adobe is currently offering Flex
Builder for free to educators, Herrick suggested that we
build the “Song of Myself” audiotext in that environment.
To minimize the constraints of Flash, we separated
all of our content from the interface. The audio
tracks stream from the server as needed, while the text
is imported into the interface from a TEI (Text Encoding
Initiative) XML file at runtime. Suloni Robertson, an
LAITS graphic designer and artist, executed the background
image, which resembles an opened copy of the
original edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855.
The poem that would later be titled “Song of Myself”
opens this volume, and the beta of our audiotext version
is now available at http://www.laits.utexas.edu/leavesofgrass.
In addition to the audio controls, the application
includes a zoom function and an options panel with a
search engine and selection tools. In the next phase of
the project, we will add explanatory notes and an animated
page-turn effect. Ultimately, we plan to include a
full transcript, critical apparatus, and facsimile images of
the entire book. At that point, the audiotext will become
a full-fledged scholarly edition without compromising
its pedagogical utility or its innovative interface design.
The editors of the Walt Whitman Archive have generously
allowed us to use their transcript from a copy of
the 1855 edition (http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/
LG/1855/whole.html) as the basis for our electronic
text. Professor Hutchison has had conversations
with these editors about adapting the audiotext concept
to create a more robust front-end option for the archive’s
resources. To this end, we are exploring the possibility
of using an open-source alternative to the Flex IDE to
create a set of audiotext templates that could be used by
other projects.
Notes
1Jerome McGann, Radiant Textuality: Literature after
the World Wide Web (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 141.
2Bethany Nowviskie, “Interfacing the Rossetti Hypermedia
Archive,” (paper, Humanities and Technology Association
Conference, Charlottesville, VA, October 2000),
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/~bpn2f/1866/dgrinterface.
html.
3 Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, “‘So the Colors Cover the
Wires’: Interface, Aesthetics, and Usability,” A Companion
to Digital Humanities, ed. Susan Schreibman, Ray
Siemens, John Unsworth (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004),
525.
4Olin R. Bjork and John P. Rumrich, “The Paradise Lost
Flash Audiotext” (poster, ACH/LCC Digital Humanities
conference, Champaign-Urbana, IL, June 2-8, 2007),
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dh2007abstracts/xhtml.
xq?id=216.