The Paradise Lost Flash Audiotext

In many Digital Humanities projects, the focus has been on
acquiring, digitizing, and encoding materials for online
search and retrieval, rather than on interface design. A common
notion in Humanities computing, carried over from the
information technology industry, is that content should be
prepared so as to as to be deliverable through pre-existing
interfaces as well as those yet to be conceived. But this
procedure suits developers more than users. Simply making a
wealth of primary and supplemental materials available in
digital form does not make them usable. Moreover, the practice
of coding and representing humanities materials as information
objects flies in the face of many humanities scholars and
teachers, who view works of art and culture as historically and
materially situated, as unique combinations of form and content.
Digital humanists, rather than merely archiving these materials
in standard formats, should design interfaces that bespeak their
unique qualities and accommodate the desiderata of scholars,
teachers, and students.
In designing the interface for our own project, we began with
the premise that new media can be used to enhance student
comprehension of complex poems, even those for which print
resources are rich and abundant. The complex poem we had in
mind was John Milton’s Paradise Lost (hereafter, PL), perhaps
the single literary work most often assigned to English-speaking
university students around the world. 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.
The aural register is especially crucial for the study of PL. Blind
Milton composed his epic orally, dictating it to amanuenses
and even insisting that he was relaying what the Muse had first
dictated to him as he slept. The original text of PL, then, was
not a mute manuscript but a narrative voice attentively heard
and transcribed. Even when present-day students successfully
comprehend Milton’s poetry during a solitary, silent reading,
reading through the eyes alone diminishes the aural impact of
the verse and the voice as its medium. Instructors and students
now seem to be recognizing that the merely visual reading of
PL leaves something to be desired. In recent years an increasing
number of marathon group readings of Milton’s epic has
occurred at colleges and even high schools in the U.S.A. and
elsewhere. Such voluntary meetings are unlikely to become
standard practice any time soon, however, and classroom time
does not permit instructors to read aloud or play a recording of
the poem (10,565 lines), even if they recognize that
comprehension increases markedly when students both see and
hear the text.
In the fall of 2004, having thought through this pedagogical
situation, we developed an interface design that would correlate
an electronic text with an audio track of PL. We then solicited
volunteers to record Book Nine, the selection most often
anthologized and assigned to undergraduates. In the spring of
2005, with the aid of a Liberal Arts Instructional Technology
Services (LAITS) grant, we developed a prototype “audiotext”
of Book Nine. This prototype, which is now publicly available
at <http://www.laits.utexas.edu/miltonpl/>,
uses Adobe/Macromedia Flash technology to synchronize a
modernized text with audio and annotations within a single
window designed to look like an open book. It uses a
karaoke-style moving highlight to indicate the line being voiced
and an optional stationary highlight to mark annotated words
and phrases. Because Flash is not free software, some may
object to its widespread use in digital humanities projects. But
developing the audiotext with an open standard such as SMIL
and/or SVG would have been far more difficult, if not
impossible. Furthermore, Adobe has released the Flash file
format specification (SWF), spawning a large and robust open
source Flash community as well as third party software that
generates SWF files. The SWF format now rivals PDF and
HTML in readability and accessibility, respectively. Making
the audiotext accessible to users who require screen readers
seemed particularly important to us, given a work composed
by Milton.
During the Fall of 2005, more than 200 students tested the
prototype in various courses: a freshman honors seminar in
world literature, a large lecture section of the mandatory
sophomore literature survey, and an upper division course
devoted to Milton. According to the results of an anonymous
survey administered by the instructors, the majority of students
(91%) said that they understood the action better than they did when using a print version only. Such improvement in
comprehension implies that students also better understood
Milton's notoriously intricate syntax, line by line, and thus
became more sophisticated readers overall. These student
surveys, as well as comments we received from instructors,
testify to the pedagogical utility of our design. But we also
believe that our interface provides a better solution for scholars
and general readers. Although we have deliberately adhered to
the logic and aesthetics of the printed page, our design also
uses the capacities of contemporary information technology to
improve upon the book. During audio playback, the pages turn
automatically, minimizing the cognitive break of page-turning
and further encouraging users to continue uninterrupted with
the reading.
More importantly, our design solves a problem of print
technology that has persisted in digital technology: the tendency
of supplemental materials, such as explanatory or textual notes,
to disrupt the sort of immersive reading experience vital to the
understanding of challenging literary texts. Although notes can
enrich a reader’s appreciation, when they are printed on the
same page as the primary text (footnotes), they can be visually
and mentally distracting. On the other hand, if they are printed
in an appendix (endnotes), they are difficult to compare with
the primary text and are in practice often ignored altogether.
Unfortunately, the majority of hypertexts and ebooks have
simply reproduced footnote or endnote schemes. Our interface
design exploits Flash technology to smooth out this age-old
snag in reading, allowing the user to make notes and other
supplements appear and disappear as needed, without scrolling,
turning pages, or negotiating multiple windows or frames. When
the audiotext is in annotation mode, explanatory notes simply
replace the text on the page facing the one being read/heard.
In the spring of 2005, we responded to student and instructor
feedback by adding two more viewing modes to the prototype.
The “comparison” mode displays our modernized reading text
in parallel with a diplomatic transcript of the 1674 text on which
it is based. This mode allows teachers to point out differences
in orthography and punctuation without asking their students
to consult a facsimile edition. The “your notes” mode,
meanwhile, allows students to edit and save their own notes
for each page. These notes are stored on the student’s computer
in a separate file, from which they are then imported for each
new session. This mode thus reproduces a capacity of print
books seldom reproduced in electronic formats—space for
readers’ own annotative marginalia. Teachers who ask their
students to keep reading journals may find this mode especially
useful. Unlike similar features in Blackboard and other online
classroom systems, the notes are individually rather than
collaboratively composed, and the mode does not require
usernames and passwords. In fact, we encourage users to
download the audiotext for offline use rather than load it online
in their browsers. The audiotext in this regard represents a
departure from the “Web 2.0” movement, a convergence of
applications that make the network, rather than the user’s own
computer, the platform. Although our interface design is
applicable to many of these technologies, the audiotext itself
provides an example of a richer and more flexible desktop
solution for teachers and students than print books or ebooks.
Ultimately, we hope to complete audiotexts of all twelve books.
In 2006-2007, with the help of a second LAITS grant, we are
developing Books One and Two. John Rumrich has also applied
for an NEH Digital Humanities Fellowship that would enable
him to complete additional audiotexts in 2007-2008. In the next
phase of the project, we plan to develop a separate front-end
utility that will search the text of the poem in an XML document
that conforms to the P5 guidelines of the Text Encoding
Initiative. This utility, which will also be able to search the
annotations and user notes, will return results that correspond
and connect to specific pages in the audiotexts.
Bibliography
Mayer, Richard E. Multimedia Learning. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001.