I’m interested in analyzing the sound of Virtual Worlds (VW). VW include the entire scope of interactions we have in virtual environments, which would include gaming, social networks, e-learning, and Zoom meetings.

The project stemmed from an idea that plagues me every time, I log in to play a multiplayer game or browse TikTok: why would anyone want to do anything else? What is it that draws (drags?) us in so completely when playing a game online or compels us to infinitely scroll? The immediate effect of these VW is the all-encompassing sound design that gets its claws in us using a diverse, multifaceted system of feedback audio, human voices, in-game elements, and sound tracking.

Hypothesis:

The sound levels of these VW is caustic, transgressive, overblown, on the border of intelligibility, and break the rules of radio broadcasting standards but yet we are entranced and astounded. Why do we run away from disorder and chaotic scenarios in real life but embrace them, indeed are drawn to them in VW? It may be necessary to add a second visual element analysis to my project, because as an addendum to this principle point I propose that truly novel visual scenarios (games) or amateur video (TikTok) avoid charges of caustic and offensive sound. My guess is that we become a sleuth and play an active role in figuring out what exactly is going on.

Alright, now to cool this prose down a bit. I would have to do some research into sound design in VW, with a focus on how human voices through a microphone are factored in. I’d also have to look a bit into how of sounds attract or repel attention. Ultimately I’m looking to hopefully pin on the sound levels and sound quality of these VW as offending broadcasting standard of loudness and incomprehensibility, but strangely attracting or compelling us..

Methods:

Using Audacity to record “system audio” I will gather Wav files from different game sessions (Apex Legends, Black Ops, maybe Roblox, etc…) maybe 15 minutes at a time. and then importing them into Ableton. For tiktok videos, I’ll grab them from the browser and recording with Audacity. The program to analyze the sound is a plug in from IZotope called Insight 2 that works in Ableton. Here’s what the dashboard looks like.

There are 4 circled areas each designating a different mode of analysis.

There are two which are intuitive and I aim to utilize them, at least in the beginning. The “Loudness” area in the top left has a dropdown which designates different broadcasting standards and allows the user to see in real-time when sound levels offend those levels. In the bottom left “Sound Field” is something I would be interested in seeing if certain VW tend to fall to the left or right field. This would be a secondary investigation to the first, but it might reveal something interesting. There are bunch of ways to analyze sound including using a spectrogram, but I have yet to learn more about them

An initial experiment I’d like to conduct is “how much time in the red” does a sound sample last for? This would give allow us to see how long it disobeys loudness broadcast level standards.

Another experiment would be to measure “quality” and the distortion levels, I don’t think this should be too hard to get out of the analyzer.

The impetus for this project was inspired by a quote from a recent article I read on Poe.

Poe’s fetish objects point towards a larger tradition of objectifying the terrors of the soul in Gothic literature. Old stone walls, devices of torture, evil eyes, casks of Amontillado, tufts of hair, purloined letters, and, above all, the ancient entanglement of death and beauty.

https://www.thesmartset.com/poe-boy/

I thought, since I love horror, the grotesque, gothic literature and film, that I’d like to see how body parts are treated in the prose of Poe. With Prof. Allred we thought it best to focus solely on the short stories, the reason being that language is more concise in shorter works of prose, and less functional.

On GitHub I have deposited the Txt file I used which compiles 69 of Poe’s shorts stories. The reason for including more than just his horror/thriller stories was to take the corpus and ensure I didn’t miss any mention of body part in the oeuvre. A bit of a brute force method, but at this point I didn’t have a very clear hypothesis, and needed to get some useful fragments of text. Using Voyant Tools, the following is the frequency list of terms highlighted by those worthy of note.

Rank : Term : Count
12 : eyes : 295
14 head 283
24 hand 214
33 body 196
34 feet 196
38 mind 187
50 death 167
68 : eye :151

A combined 446 times for eye/eyes. Eye* which includes eyelid, eye-glasses, etc… appears 471 times. Deciding to focus on the clear winner here, I exported the sentence fragments which contained “eye” or “eyes”; with a word context of 10 per each side of the term, then sent that back through Voyant to try to pinpoint characteristically grotesque phrases.

A semblance of a thesis I started out with was that Poe informed our notion of the grotesque, and I was hoping here to get some meaty adjective-noun parings, or at least sentence fragments which demonstrated this sensibility. I didn’t find that initially in Voyant, below is a “link” chart demonstrating most common occurrence in which “eyes” or “eye” and words which appear next to them.

I was really hoping for “dripping eye”, “groaning eyes”, “disgusting eye”, or “ugly eyes”. It seems Poe isn’t as obvious a grotesque writer as I once hoped and I would have to dig deeper into the sentence to find what I was looking for. Off to AntConc to take a closer look!

“Eyes” rather than “eye” revealed an interesting et of singular appearances

I was hoping to see a repetition of certain phrases, that would certainly cement the stamp of “grotesque” on an author right? Poe was more subtle than that, and his juicier bites of prose are saved for a select for of the horror works:

“deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket” – The Black Cat “They were
wild, bold, ravenous—their red eyes glaring upon me” – The Pit and the Pendulum “deep-set eyes glared with unnatural lustre” – The Gold-Bug “The face was fearfully discolored, and the eye-balls protruded” – The Murders in the Rue Morgue.

Would it have been worth it to have the short stories arranged by publication date? I didn’t double check that when compiling my list, but something to keep in mind for the future. I could have traced easily his use of the term over the course of his writing. Another consideration when compiling a corpus is to nest the texts in a meaningful way. I could have done it my genre, or are least “obviously horror/mystery” and “the rest”.

JSTOR Text analyzer suggested I read up on the latest Ophthalmology research.

Interesting to note “Eye irritation” was labeled an identified term, and I take this to mean the exact term was found in the text. Dress hooks are a tool for sewing which utilize an eye closure.

What I’d like to propose is that Poe has not informed our notion of the grotesque in relation to the body in any consistent way. There are scattershot instances of it across his work, and while “eyes” and “eye” appear more than any other body part, this fact can be credited to his detective novels. His apparent influence stems from a few influential stories which loom large in the public eye.

A difficult mode of investigation that I chose from the outset, which I won’t repeat again was to tie up an accepted scholarly term like “grotesque” with text mining. The term reflects a mood or sensibility rather than a string of letters. I very well have missed notions of the topic in a fragment because it was the whole paragraph which spelled out the mood. the grotesque is found after all in the vulgar expansions in size or of use which doesn’t hinge on an identifiable term.

Last ditch effort! I took from the complete short story collection, phrases which mentioned a body part at all. I identified: arm, face, feet, hand, head, mouth which were statistically significant and thought I’d try to see which grotesque terms show up the most in relation to the set.

It has slowly dawned on me that what I wasn’t searching for could be found in repetition or frequency, at all. Which makes the prospect of using a distant reading mode difficult. I was instead looking for singular instances of the grotesque which are used sporadically and for effect in Poe’s work. At least I was able to pinpoint which body parts were used most often in his work, which might be important for a specific kind of academic study.

After posting edit thoughts: What I wanted to measure was sentiment, which isn’t what these programs identify. Ideally there could be a program which shades sentences or even paragraphs in different colors depending on their intensity or coolness, parochial or transgressive qualities. There are sentiment analysis tools used for decoding Social Media posts, and I wonder if they could have helped me.

Project website: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/30b82e70672f4b7ea86be57e289d794a

My project is a map of an imaginary city composed of characters, figures, ideas, “psyches” fleshed out with photographs from a real city fraught with political and religious tension. It’s a bit of a confusing project to be sure, dazed, let’s say. It also doesn’t offer much in the way in commentary on William Blake. Instead it is meant to offer visual clues at the symbolic level of this city of imagination and art built by Blake’s character Los. Its goal is to instill in the visitor a sense of wonder, enchantment, and confusion but at the same time a realization that concrete/pictorial references can be linked to even the most fanciful ideas. Blake, famous for his illustrated poems, never did an engraving of Golgonzoola. Characters featured in his other poems have been represented visually, these include: Urizen, Hela, Har, Enitharmon, Orc. None of these are mentioned in his description of Golgonzoola, that’s why it’s so difficult to mentally grab a hold of. It also features: “sixty−four thousand Genii, guard the Eastern Gate: /  And sixty−four thousand Gnomes, guard the Northern Gate”. Not the kind of thing that one can easily visualize. The whole description boggles the mind. To bring it back to earth a bit I thought it would be fun to couch the typography of real world locations.

Disclaimer: This is not a commentary on the state of the Middle East, the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, territorial claims, or any other geoplitical issue. In fact, the choice of locations is based almost arbitrarily on where the travel group brought my group. Certainly there are Muslim, Armenian, and Christian parts of Old Jerusalem which someone could have placed as the “center”. It came to me in a dream last night that the “center” of each city has simply the most efficient point for everyone to gather, and only a modern conception of that place understanding it as principal or

First Steps

The idea came to me during one of my obsessive research frenzies after I first encountered the mandala of Golgonooza. It was created by a user at a blog, and is not an original artwork by Blake. There is a section from “Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion” which details an imaginary city with quite defined cardinal points and a center. Bulls, Cherubs, and Seven Forms amongst other symbols are described at different Gates of this city resulting in one of his most obtuse sections of verse.

I really love the abstract quality of it, and since I’m in Jerusalem I thought I’d try to flesh out some of the places from this verse using photography. The link that allowed me to place Golgonooza (thought to be an interior world) was a quote by the scholar Kenneth Johnston saying it  “”the urban form of Jerusalem in the fallen world”. It should be acknowledged that the connections are loose and interpretive.

Data Collection

The iphone has a great geotagging system, even in airplane mode. I walked to a location with the description of the Gates in mind: “an act of true love” “Eden” “forms of war”, etc… and attempted to find scenes which resembled these sensibilities. I made sure to walk horizontally in order to place the Gates net to each other on the mandala, but of course they could have been arranged another way. It was a fantastic way to explore a city.

The software I used was StoryMaps from ArcGIS which was very intuitive. It accommodated the idea I had in my mind almost immediately. Unfortunately it’s a finicky system with weird saving issues, long load times, and a click-based UI that doesn’t always work. I wish, for example, the pictures could be made to appear larger or that the tagging system worked in a more comprehensive way.

I hope this post helps explain the generation and execution of this project. In truth, I haven’t wrapped my head around what its stated aim could be. Is it a mnemonic device, experimental lit crit, travel guide, photo journal, or pedagogical aid? The project is meant to instill a sense of wonder about Blake’s poetry and hopefully inspire further reading.

The grammatical confusion in this title is meant to convey my understanding of the digital maps we use in our daily lives and I’d like to highlight two interesting ones. Aside from digital maps which contain sliders and filters to control the year in view, maps are always a representation of the present that has passed us by. This isn’t to say they represent the past, but represent a present which is now past… Ok, maybe they are the same thing. Maybe a “frozen past” is a better way to signify this, but even this doesn’t touch the admittedly fuzzy sense I’m trying to get across. Maybe what I’m trying to get at is: the map is always the past, even if it signifies a present that we understand/recognize.

The Snapchat Map

IMAGE HERE

By zooming out on the globe screen, one can see parts of the world populated with avatars that symbolize snapchat activity. Clicking on any of these will present a series of video that were recently posted. 

Caveat: One may get the feeling that in cases where there is no snapchat activity it is representative of a part of the world that is boring, without an interesting daily life, etc… The reality is that they may not have access to mobile technology which hosts the App, or the App itself may be banned from that country.

The Citizen Map

IMAGE HERE

The homepage of this app is a map which tracks past and present criminal activities. Users can upload photos, video, and even live stream events as they unfold. Icons represent car accidents, physical altercations, and 

Caveat: The map is updated according to criminal activity heard by the citizen tem and logged into the app manually by them. My guess is that there may be a bias on the part of the loggers to “finish” maps in higher crime areas, choosing to add them there, rather than more spare areas. From the Bonilla and Hantel piece: “the map reifies the truth of what it represents”. In which case populating areas with the icons of crime that might be more immediate, but minor, (think scuffles or fender benders) but cumulatively to the mind of the viewer are seen as a sign of high crime rates.

Also going back to the Bonilla and Hantel piece. I liked two solutions for creating maps which are “no longer anchored by political sovereignty as a regulatory ideal of postcolonial independence”. The past defines the present and if the tool for carving up territory as a “technology of possession” here are two interesting ways to get beyond that function. The time-lapse which is a good way of getting out of the “spatial-temporal” mode. But even more interesting to me was the “Slave Revolt in Jamaica, 1760–1761: A Cartographic Narrative” map which does a solid job of providing key literary elements to support the historical events.

Final thoughts: Is a map an archive? How do maps represent fissures in the terrain like earthquakes and tsunamis?

1.

I appreciate Ramsay’s comment regarding the ability to code or “build something” as a key consideration in one’s acknowledgement that they are a DH scholar. This struck me as useful in drawing a line in the sand in a field where a “definitional dilemma” seems to rear its head regarding the field from time to time. The problem with this, however, is that the scope of projects available to burgeoning scholars intending to code from the ground up in my view are limited. One could create a “collaboratively built tool that enables other scholars to add descriptive metadata to digitized manuscripts” but would another project really be necessary to practitioners when there is already Hypothesis and Manifold?

And with so many useful text analysis (Voyant), geo-spatial mapping, and data viz tools (Tableau) readily available, why the emphasis on knowing a computer programming language? Maybe the point is to have a working-knowledge of coding. In the same way a Literature major might need to know how to compose a sonnet. They may not be experts in the achievement of this goal, but can create one from the “ground up”. Alternatively can a Philosophy major be considered a scholar if they are unable to write a paper incorporating symbolic logic? It may not fit the end goal of their research which relies perhaps more on the merits of literary value rather than math and an Analytical style.

Maybe the issue of ground-level working knowledge of a skill? Wittgenstein famously came to Cambridge without having read Aristotle, which is very much in line with Keats’ Negative Capability. In the Humanities we don’t have a distinction between working knowledge and technical knowledge the same way other faculties like Social Science might have. A social scientist who can’t run a lab or has difficulty with statistics, seems to fail the tenets of the field, but what does that look like in the Humanities? Would it be one’s ability to mention at the drop of a hat five major themes from Songs of Innocence and Experience? Is a Literature major’s scholarly status docked for not having read Blake?

2.

So DH is a “motley of effort” (Krauss) and since I’m also taking a Pedagogy course this semester I’ve been made aware of two big sectioned off areas of DH. One in which the field makes a commitment to grappling with the fine points of online and hybrid learning in a way that is equitable and caters to the needs of students; the other is one which leans towards public scholarship: “addressing our work not simply to ‘the public’ but also… to specific communities” (Brennan). With social, racial, historical concerns to the fore. Its the explanation and pedagogical utility of DH projects that I feel could benefit from a reevaluation.

At least two of the projects offer an “explore” tab which breaks down the crucial elements of research and offers up the historic reasons for why a project is so vital. These explore tabs are inherent to most DH projects I’ve seen online and go a long way towards reckoning with the issue that ”scholarship that is not always fully legible to those not versed in the particular methods or conversations taking place in that domain”.

If this breakdown of core concepts is such a common occurrence, then it seems to me that; in the same way that there are just a few standards of notation software available that most people have agreed to use, can’t there be a software that organizes these Archive-heavy projects for people? The problem I run into is that, I know that project which perform archival work: gathering documents and organizing them across a timeline are set up the same way. That is, they have sections organized into: Explore, Find out More, Dig Deeper, Outline View modes, etc… Sometimes when I want to quickly switch from one to the other to compare the two, the UI is set up in such a way that I have to flip through pages and pages or differently organized and color-coded navigation views just to have the two side-by-side. I wonder if there isn’t room for a more Unified Approach to Archival Projects.