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<\/a><\/p>\nThe following is excerpted from a talk I gave at Middlebury College on February 24th, 2016 as part of the Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series<\/a>. It’s a literature talk which means major spoiler alerts<\/strong>! The data & code for many of the visualizations below are available here<\/a>. This is very much a work-in-progress talk, and I welcome feedback, questions, suggestions, and collaborations!\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n Early last year, the award-winning writer and scholar Robert Macfarlane published an article in The Guardian<\/em>, intended as a preview to his book Landmarks<\/em>, which was to be published later that week. In the article (and in the book), Macfarlane laments the loss of the language of landscapes, which he argues is being displaced by the language of technology. He cites the Oxford Junior Dictionary\u2019s contentious decision to \u201ccull\u201d many \u201cnature words\u201d (Macfarlane n.p.) from its list, \u00a0removing words like \u201cadder, ash, beech, hazel, and willow\u201d and replacing them with \u201cattachment, blog, broadband, and chatroom.\u201d<\/p>\n In response to this loss, Macfarlane works to collect and preserve hyper-local place words. He records words like \u201cpirr\u201d: \u201ca light breath of wind, such as will make a cat\u2019s paw on the water\u201d\u00a0and \u201csmeuse\u201d: an English dialect noun for \u201cthe gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal\u201d:<\/p>\n \u201cNow I know the word \u2018smeuse,\u2019\u201d Macfarlane writes, \u201cI notice these signs of creaturely commute more often.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n These words are sometimes collected through casual conversations, but more frequently, he reports, through archival research, web searches, email conversations between scholars, and recorded oral histories. Technology is often characterized in opposition to the natural world (and sometimes with good reason). But it is clear from Macfarlane\u2019s account of his own research that digital technology has not displaced the language of the natural world\u2014it has recorded, transmitted, publicized, and preserved it.<\/p>\n Because, as Macfarlane\u2019s book illustrates, our research methods have been deeply altered by digital technologies\u2014it behooves us to increase the specificity of our understanding of technology. We are perhaps most familiar with \u201cblack box\u201d technologies that separate user from code and mystify the processes through which new knowledge creation is facilitated. Further, it impedes knowledge creation and innovation\u2014we learn to adapt our current methods or practices to new technologies rather than to create new technologies that better serve our practices and philosophies. And if there\u2019s one thing you take away today it\u2019s this\u2014that the more humanists participate in the creation of their own research tools, the better those tools will be for our research<\/strong>.<\/p>\n As I\u2019ve learned (sometimes quite painfully) through the process of this project, the more I understand about digital technologies the better my ability to create, adapt, and critique the limits of that technology. But perhaps more surprisingly, the more I learned about digital technologies, the better equipped I also was to push back on literary theory. What follows is both an account of my attempts to adapt concepts from ecology to literary texts via technology as well as\u00a0reflections on what the process has revealed about the novels.<\/p>\n This project began with a question: How might we digitally represent the ecosystems of novels? <\/em>At the time I was writing a dissertation about the visual and textual relationships between nationalism and specific engagements with the natural world (e.g. gardening, natural history, witchcraft, and herbalism) and at the same time tending a small garden I dug in some borrowed space in a friend\u2019s lawn outside of Boston. There was something about the space of the garden that pulled my attention in a really different and corporeal way than the way I was engaging with representations of the natural world in texts. I was reading the poetry of the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West\u2013who is perhaps most famous in literary circles for her relationship with Virginia Woolf and in gardening circles for the creation of her \u201cWhite\u201d garden at Sissinghurst Castle<\/a> in Kent and the gardening column<\/a>\u00a0she wrote for The Observer <\/em>(now The Guardian<\/em>) for many years. In her long poem The Garden, <\/em>she writes of a gardener who:<\/p>\n …even in the interruption brought \/ By friends, [] will not stroll \/ At simple ease, but ever dart his eyes \/ Noticing faults, and feeling fingers twitch, \/ Eager to cut, to tie, correct promote”<\/p><\/div>Those of us who garden in public enough spaces likely recognize this characterization of the corporeal pull that keeps us in thrall to our gardens, even in the presence of visitors.<\/p>\n There was something about the very different corporeal and affective responses I was experiencing while gardening that had me thinking about the effectiveness of the different ways I was engaging with the natural world: from the close reading and deep analysis I was performing on texts about the natural world to produce my dissertation to my attempts to create the conditions to allow the plants in my garden to grow and thrive.<\/p>\n At the same time, I was beginning to engage with some of the digital methods emerging from the field of digital humanities\u2014not for my dissertation, but for fun. And I found myself pulled into programming in a different but analogous way as I often get pulled into weeding.<\/p>\n Over time, my single question evolved into a series of questions:<\/p>\n I started to think about the possible consonances of close reading, programming, and gardening\u2014all require some initial deep attention and planning. But in a garden, it\u2019s often the letting go of control that produces the best results. So I started to wonder if I could create the conditions through which a novel\u2019s ecological thumbprint or ecosystem could emerge? Or through which other readers might come into deeper contact with the novel and, ultimately, the natural world.<\/p>\n For several decades, close reading has been the primary method for producing the evidence with which literary arguments are made in scholarship and, especially, in our classrooms. More recently, Franco Moretti has controversially advocated for \u201cdistant reading\u201d where the researcher \u201creads\u201d thousands or even millions of texts algorithmically, looking for patterns and structures that span multiple texts. However, both closeness and distance can be dangerous positions to occupy in relation to our environment. To be too close is to lose sight of the larger systems in which we are imbricated. To be too distant is to remain outside, to see patterns without acknowledging one\u2019s complicity within those systems.<\/p>\n By thinking beyond the binary of close and distant reading, I offer new modes of experiencing literatures of the environment that seek to connect readers and viewers not only to individual novels but also to thinking about and attending to the environment. My methods are derived from Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels\u2019s concept of \u201cinterpretive deformation\u201d (115) in which \u201cinterpretation of works of imagination call[] for responsive works of imagination, not reflexive works of analysis\u201d (109). McGann and Samuels explore the productive activities of deformation in a chapter of McGann\u2019s book Radiant Textuality <\/em>(2001). In the chapter, McGann and Samuels argue that \u00a0\u201ccriticism (scholarship as well as interpretation) tends to imagine itself as an informative rather than deformative activity\u201d (144).<\/p>\n They go on to argue that all interpretation is deformative, but that engaging explicitly in deformative procedures (such as reading a poem backwards, or reading only the verbs in a poem), foregrounds the subjectivity of the critic and her subsequent interpretation. Further, when deformation is preformed through criticism or\u2014in my case, through computer programming and visualizations\u2014\u201cthe reader [is put] in a highly idiosyncratic relation to the work\u201d (McGann and Samuels 116). When readers occupy the space of this idiosyncratic relation, the reverberations of difference between their own point of view and the critic\u2019s invite reflection.<\/p>\n Today you\u2019re going to hear about some as yet early steps towards producing and theorizing these other kinds of engagement in the context of two novels: Thomas Hardy\u2019s Tess of d\u2019Urbervilles <\/em>and Mary Webb\u2019s Gone to Earth. <\/em><\/p>\n Born in Dorset in the southwest of England in 1840, Hardy was a prolific novelist and poet whose life spanned the Victorian and Modern eras. At the beginning of his writing career, he primarily wrote novels\u2014publishing more than a dozen between 1870 and 1895. Critics have long noted the importance of the natural world to Hardy\u2019s novels.<\/p>\n Tess of the D\u2019Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented<\/a>, <\/em>published in 1891, is regarded by many as his best novel and by John Humma as \u201cEngland\u2019s if not the world\u2019s most famous nature novel\u201d (63). The early troubles of the eponymous protagonist double when she meets Alec D\u2019Urberville, who relentlessly pursues her, resulting in a sexual assault that leaves Tess pregnant. Returning to her family, Tess gives birth to a child she names Sorrow who dies within weeks. A few years later, Tess seeks employment Talbothays dairy where she meets and falls in love with Angel Clare, a son of a minister, who she eventually marries. On the night of their wedding each confesses to having had sexual relations previous to the marriage. While Tess is accepting of Angel\u2019s past, his worldview is completely shattered by Tess\u2019s admission, and he leaves her (with some money) to start a farm in Brazil. Tess is driven further and further into financial difficulties. She is eventually discovered by Alec who again relentlessly pursues her until she agrees to live with him. When Angel returns from Brazil to reclaim Tess, Tess murders Alec and flees with Angel. Within a few days she is apprehended and hanged.<\/p>\n Mary Webb<\/a> was a great admirer of Hardy\u2019s, corresponding with him and dedicating her fourth novel Seven for a Secret <\/em>to him, with his permission, in 1922. When Webb sent Hardy a presentation copy of the novel she included a note: \u201cI do appreciate with intensity the rich beauty and majesty of your own interpretation of nature & humanity\u201d (qtd. in Crawford & Crawford 97). And Hardy and Webb are often connected in terms of their understanding and treatment of the natural world.<\/p>\n A 1917 review in the New Statesman <\/em>claimed that \u201cGone to Earth <\/em>is the most impressive novel since Thomas Hardy gave us Tess of the D\u2019Urbervilles<\/em>\u201d (qtd. in Crawford & Crawford 150). And indeed Gone to Earth<\/a><\/em> might be considered a kind of rewriting of Tess. <\/em>In the novel, a young Hazel Woodus lives with her ignorant and indifferent father and a menagerie of rescued animals (including a one-eyed cat and pet fox named, well \u201cFoxy\u201d). Webb writes that:<\/p>\n Like Tess, Hazel is relentlessly pursued by two male suitors: the first, a man named Reddin, is a country squire who lives in his decaying ancestral home with his misogynist manservant (who is obsessed with clipping a collection of yews into the shapes of swans). Edward Marston, the second suitor, is a minister new to the area who eventually marries Hazel against his mother\u2019s wishes and brings Hazel to live with him in a state of unconsummated marriage. Reddin continues to pursue Hazel after her marriage. Catching her outside of her cottage one day, he assaults her and impregnates her, convincing her to run away with him back to his ancestral home. When Edward finds out where she is, he violently confronts Reddin and brings Hazel back to live with him, promising to raise the child as his own. Before the child is born, however, Hazel dies trying to protect Foxy from a pack of hounds driven by Reddin on a foxhunt.<\/p>\n Webb characterizes Hazel\u2019s suitors as \u201cReddin the destroyer\u201d and \u201cEdward the savior\u201d (final page of novel)\u2014a description that also maps onto Tess where Alec is the destroyer and Angel the savior. And yet both Angel and Edward are failed saviours: in each novel neither the protagonist nor her child survives. The similarities in the plots and themes of the two novels make them ideal for comparison.<\/p>\n Before we get to the visualizations, I want to talk briefly about my digital methods and tools. I\u2019m not going to go into great detail, but I\u2019ve provided a list of resources and hyperlinks in the credits slide below and linked to many of them within the text.<\/p>\n Both of the texts I selected are in the public domain and\u00a0freely available on Project Gutenberg<\/a>. However, because no dataset existed that would adequately address my research questions, I needed to create my own structured data from these texts. I did this through a process of tagging every instance of a named character and reference to the natural world in both novels. \u00a0Some of this I was able to automate through a tool called CATMA<\/a> (Computer-Aided Textual Markup and Analysis) but a lot of it was done by hand.<\/p>\n This markup process is probably the most important step in this entire research project\u2014and one that takes the most time and labor. The actual tagging can feel very tedious, but the intellectual work that goes into designing a markup schema is integral to the success of addressing the research questions. How the structure of the information is designed determines how the information can be used. For example, we are able to search library catalogues by author or by Library of Congress subject headings because book records are structured in such a way that specific fields like \u201cauthor\u201d correspond to specific pieces of information, like \u201cRobert Frost.\u201d If you searched for \u201cRobert Frost\u201d in a date field, the catalogue would (hopefully) return zero results. We take advantage of good and bad structured data all the time, but humanists are rarely involved in creating that data. The process of creating a markup schema surfaces individual and cultural ways of thinking and valuing concepts\u2014in my case\u2014novels and the natural world.<\/p>\n Like in many archival preservation projects, the most important and difficult question is not what to keep or what to tag but what to dispose of, what not to tag. This became painfully evident when\u2014after attempting to mark up and categorize all features of landscapes at the beginning of this project\u2014my schema became needlessly complex and my progress was very, very slow. Knowing that this is a forever iterative process, I eventually compromised by focusing only on \u201cliving\u201d beings in the novel\u2014the flora, fauna, and fungi\u2014and only as they were directly named. I realized very quickly that significant references to the natural world emerged\u2014particularly in Webb\u2019s novel\u2014not through direct references but through invocation, through metaphor and simile. For example, Hazel is described as \u201ctawny and foxlike\u201d (Ch. 1) and \u201csexless as a leaf\u201d (Ch. 1). In a work of fiction, does it matter if the word \u201cleaf\u201d describes an actual feature of the fictional landscape or if it\u2019s an example of figurative language? I ended up marking both.<\/p>\n Finally, I struggled with how to mark humans\u2014clearly we are a part of the kingdom Fauna, but I wanted to be able to isolate the main characters of each novel and contextualize them in relation to the nonhuman others with whom they shared textual space (more on this later). As such, when you see the tag \u201cFauna\u201d today, recognize that it is fauna absent of humans (something that will be fixed in later iterations).<\/p>\n Because the goal was not to make exact or precise comparisons, but rather to trace major connections among living beings and patterns across texts, I had to increase my tolerance for flattening some of the ambiguities I had been trained to highlight.\u00a0For the remainder of this talk, I\u2019m going to share four different sets of visualizations I\u2019ve created based on this data that represent key concepts and patterns within the novels.<\/p>\n Early in my process, I wanted to get a visual overview of the notable presences and absences of the novel. I began by graphing every instance of a tag in the two novels in Tableau Public<\/a>. Each vertical line is a tag in the novel and the horizontal axis is the novel from start to finish.<\/p>\n As you can see in the above visualization, Tess appears frequently throughout the majority of the novel. While Angel appears early on (when happening upon young women dancing in Tess’s village), his presence is “thickest” in the middle of the novel and spotty in the final third when he is in Brazil and no longer within the space of Tess’s world. Fauna is particularly dense in the first half of the novel, before the major turn, which is when Angel rejects Tess after their marriage. The density of these descriptions supports various ecocritical readings of the novel which portray Tess’s time at Talbothays Dairy (where she meets Angel) as the most idyllic (Meadowsong<\/a>)\u00a0or pastoral (Martell<\/a>) of the novel. However, the presence of flora does not as neatly correspond to this characterization. Indeed, the most dense moments of flora in the novel occur nearer the end of the novel when Tess is being worked to the bone at a farm in Flintcomb-Ash where she digs swedes (rutabagas) and threshes wheat. These direct comparisons open up questions about how we have understood and characterized the pastoral mode in relation to\u00a0the presence of nonhuman others.<\/p>\n Similar to\u00a0Tess,\u00a0<\/em>Hazel as the protagonist is the most frequent tag in\u00a0Gone to Earth<\/em>. Hazel’s father, Abel, disappears from the novel almost entirely once Hazel has married Edward. Like Angel, Edward isn’t fleshed out as a character until well into the novel. In both novels, the antagonists (Alec and Reddin) occupy more of the narrative frame than the (failed) “saviors,” whose later entrances aren’t enough to counteract the damage done by the antagonists.<\/p>\n These visualizations were useful as exploratory tools, which helped me dig in deeper to the data and the novel. For example, many scholars have argued that Tess\u2019s time at Talbothays dairy is the most pastoral section of the novel, dense with description of the natural world and eroticized connections between Tess and the environment she occupies. This graph suggests that the most organically dense section of the novel precedes her time at Talbothays and her assault. Which begs the question, which literary categories or concepts are objectively measurable? For instance are there measurable qualities of the pastoral mode that could be identified by an algorithm? Or is the pastoral a case of \u201cyou know it when you see it?\u201d<\/p>\n Second, and paradoxically, the more a human is named in the novel, the more absent he might be. For instance, when Angel is away in Brazil, Tess thinks about him constantly, but we, as readers, are rarely transported to Brazil to hear from Angel. In other words, \u201cAngel\u201d is present in the text of the novel, but he is not present in the space of the fictional ecosystem that Tess occupies (while he\u2019s in Brazil). Angel\u2019s textual presence is invoked by Tess\u2019s memory and desire. The presence and absence of Angel and Alec in this graph are greatly impacted by Tess\u2019s attention: when Alec intrudes, she thinks less of Angel.<\/p>\n While these two sets of graphs around the two novels are interesting as separate artifacts, they are difficult to compare. By isolating the \u201cflora\u201d tags in each novel, and rescaling the horizontal axis (that is\u2014the length of the novel\u2014since Tess<\/em> is nearly twice as long as Gone to Earth<\/em>) a visual comparison becomes possible. The result is a kind of botanical barcode<\/em>\u2014one that will be unique and visually distinct for each novel.<\/p>\n These kinds of distillations of novels, or\u2014to return to McGann & Samuel\u2019s term\u2014\u201cdeformations\u201d of novels often experience brief bursts of popularity online. You may have seen Adam Calhoun\u2019s visualizations of the punctuation of novels<\/a> popping up in your social media and other feeds last week. Or Jaz Parkinson\u2019s color signatures of novels<\/a> a few years ago.<\/p>\n My botanical barcodes are particularly useful in understanding how mentions of the natural world (or in this case, the flora) fit within or help frame the narrative structure of the novel. For example, in Tess\u2019s <\/em>botanical barcode, mentions of flora appear most frequently at the beginning and end of the novel\u2014like an establishing shot in a film.<\/p>\nIntroduction<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\nProject Beginnings<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nThe Novels<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nAbsence & Presence<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\nBotanical Barcodes<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n