A list of interesting things

This is just a list of interesting artifacts I'm gleaning from image-based research, with thanks to Malcolm Jones, Sheila O'Connell, and Anthony Griffiths.

Jones, Malcolm. The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Print. 

Anonymous, The Royall & most plesent Game of y Goose, ca. 1665...
Wenceslaus Hollar, A Pake of Knaves, 1670s... (original ca. 1640 by Thomas Jenner...)
Anonymous, The cats castle besieged and stormed by the rats, after 1665...
Anonymous, A Pleasant History of the World Turned upside down, 1670s...
Wiliam Marshall, Heraclitus Dream, 1642...
Anonymous, A true discourse. Declaring the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter, 1590...
Anonymous, A true relation of an apparition in the likenesse of a bird with a white brest, 1641...
Anonymous, Punishment of the Whipping post for Vagrants and Sturdy Beggars, ca. 1678...
Anonymous, The Severall Places Where you May hear News, ca. 1600.
Anonymous, The image of the lyfe of man that was painted in a table by Apelles... ca. 1656...
Thomas Cross, Divine Examples of God's Severe Judgments upon Sabbath-Breakers, 1671...
Anonymous, portrait of John Goodwin with windmill on head from Coleman St. conclave visited, John Vicars, 1648...
Anonymous, These trades-men are preachers, 1647...
Anonymous, The Committee; or Popery in Masquerade, 1680...
Anonymous, The Anatomie of the English nunnery at Lisbon, Thomas Robinson, 1623...
Anonymous, A Mappe of the Man of Sin, 1622...
Anonymous, The Triumphs of Providence over Hell, France & Rome, 1696...
Anonymous, England's Memorial, ca. 1688...
Stephen College, The Catholick Gamesters or A Dubble Match of Boweling, 1680...
Anonymous, Pyrotechnica Loyolana, Ignatian fireworks, 1667...
Anonymous, from A Justification of the Present War against the United Netherlands, 1672...
Francis Barlow, ['Egg' of Dutch Rebellion], ca. 1672...
William Faithorne, The Emblem of Englands Destractions, 1658...
Anonymous, scenes from All the memorable & wonder-strikinge, Parliamentary mercies, 1642...
William Marshall, Syons Calamitye or Englands Miserye Hieroglyphically Delineated, 1643...
Anonymous after Francis Barlow, All is fish That comes to the Nett, 1698...
Anonymous, emblemata, welche... Signor Spagniols, 1570s...
Anonymous, Revells of Christendome, ca. 1626...
Anonymous, The Papists Powder Treason, 1612... [POSSIBLE?]
Michael Droeshout, The Powder Treason, between 1610 and 1625...
Cornelius Danckertz The Younger, The Various Revolution of Kingdmes and States, ante 1662 and after 1673...
John Goddard, The Tree of Mans Life... ca. 1639...
Anonymous, Physica sev Naturae Theatrum, 1611...
William Marshall, An Artificiall Description of Logick, 1637/8...
William Marshall, modded owl emblem for trencher, 1650...Anonymous, [Staircase of the Ages--Couples], published by George Minnikin between 1685 and 1699...
Richard Gaywood, trade card for Arthur Tooker's Piktuer Shope, 1664...

O'Connell, Sheila. The Popular Print in England: 1550-1850. London: British Museum Press, 1999. Print

David Vinckboons, The Battle of Death and Time, 1610
Anonymous, The Poysonous Tree, ca. 1580.
Anonymous, A proper newe Ballad, declaring the substaunce of all the late pretended Treasons against the Queenes Majestie, 1586.
Anonymous, An Epitome of Gospel Mystery Emblematically Illustrated, 1700.
Anonymous, The Young-Man's Conquest Over the Powers of Darkness, 1684.
Dirk Vellert, A geneaology of the Kings of England, 1562.

Griffiths, Antony. The Print in Stuart Britain. London: British Museum Press, 1998. Print.

Simon Gribelin, The Seven Bishops, 1688.
Anonymous, Great Britains Wonder: or, Londons Admiration, 1684.
Anonymous, A True Narrative of the Horrid Hellish Popish-Plot, 1682.
Anonymous, The Happy Instruments of Englands Preservation, 1681.
Stephen College, A Strange Case Strangely Altered, 1680.
Anonymous, The Solemn Mock Procession of the Pope, Cardinals, Jesuits, Fryers &c. through the City of London, 1679.
Anonymous, Set of playing cards on the Popish Plot, 1679.
Wenceslaus Hollar, An Orthographical Design of Severall Viewes upon the Road in England and Wales, 1660.
Cornelis Danckertsz, A Thankful Remembrance of God's Mercie by G.C., 1625.
Anonymous, The Double Deliverance, 1621.
Anonymous, The Description of Giles Mompesson late Knight censured by Parliament, 1621.
John Speed, James I in Parliament, 1604.
Stephen Harrison, Arches of Triumph, 1604.

Advanced Notes on Archival Research

My project has paired advantages and disadvantages:

	Advantages	Disadvantages
A	Obscure primary sources	Costly archival research
B	Image-texts take little time to read	Image-texts take too little time to read
C	Well-developed tertiary sources from two fields	Tertiary sources from two fields aren't in conversation with each other.

Disadvantage A: "Costly archival research"

By the grace of God, I've got the first disadvantage sorted out. I've received funding to go to London, Oxford, and Antwerp for two (discontinuous) months this summer to research at the British Library, the Bodleian, and the Plantin-Moretus Museum. That just leaves the problem of deciding what to do with the time I've been granted.

Disadvantage B: "Image-texts take too little time to read"

As the stoics say, "The obstacle becomes the path." So the short amount of time it takes to read an image-text yields a lot of time that I can spend writing close-readings in the libraries. This also means that I can take lots of bibliographic measurements while I'm there.

Disadvantage C: "Tertiary sources from two fields aren't in conversation with each other."

This is the most interesting problem. Here are some of the tertiary sources I'm using for advanced research:

• Ingram and Luborsky's Guide to English Illustrated Books (hereafter, Ingram and Luborsky)
• The Electronic Short Title Catalogue (hereafter, ESTC)
• explore.bl.uk
• Early English Books Online (hereafter, EEBO)
• Malcolm Jones' The Print in Early Modern England (hereafter, Jones)
• Michael Hunter's Printed Images in Early Modern Britain (hereafter, Hunter)
• Antony Griffiths' The Print in Stuart Britain (hereafter, Griffiths)
• Sheila O'Connell's The Popular Print in England (hereafter, O'Connell)

Since I have a project organized around image-texts, I can use these resources for image-based research, or for text-based research. Here's how.

Image-based research

1. Begin with any of the illustrated codices from above (Ingram & Luborsky, Jones, Hunter, Griffiths, O'Connell). Flip through and mark every illustration that appears interesting.
2. Repeat step 1 with another codex, if desired.
3. Use the bibliographic information provided in the codex to search the ESTC and Ingram & Luborsky for holdings. 
• Ingram & Luborsky hold more descriptions, but may be out of date / non-comprehensive
• The ESTC is more likely to be up-to-date, but may have less descriptive content
4. If an entry in the ESTC or Ingram & Luborsky matches the archive you will visit, record that entry.
• You will need to be up-to-speed on STC notation and library codes to use Ingram and Luborsky. For my two largest archives:
• L = British Library
• O = Oxford
5. Reserve the entry at the relevant library.
• explore.bl.uk has a handy "workspace" option, and an automated reservation system
• other libraries are more difficult
6. Repeat steps 1-5 until you hit the maximum reservations for each day.

Text-based research

1. Compile a list of interesting image-textual keywords you want to research.
• "strip"
• "row"
• "column"
• "sequence"
• "progression"
• "narrative"
• "volvelle"
• "pack"
• "cards"
2. Search the ESTC for the phrase "ingram and luborsky" and one of your keywords from 1.
3. Scroll through results and add new keywords.
4. Refine results according to your library codes.
5. Reserve the entry at the relevant library.
6. Repeat steps 1-5 until you hit the maximum reservations for each day.

Writing Journal, 0956.14.4.2014

The first challenge this morning is to write 500 words on a relatively tame bureaucratic document. The document is inescapable, so there's no way out but through. I think the easiest way to add 500 words is to reorganize the work that I have already written--I should reorganize it as a series of "they say" (lit review) and "I say" (thesis description) moves--and then build up the connective tissue. Frankly, I don't think there's much hard thinking to do on this assignment, so the best way to appraise my progress is the word count. (The current wordcount is 1125, so my goal is 1625.) The challenge, and it is a challenge, is to endure the strain of writing. Frankly, I've been lazy about writing in the past few weeks, so this will be an excellent challenge to my staying power. But I know I have these skills; I've written documents like this in the past. In the past I had fewer distractions, but even now, I don't have enough distractions to make this task impossible.

Against Footnotes

I'm against footnotes and endnotes in academic literature. I'll be brief.

• Academics use notes for digression.
• Academics use notes for obfuscation
• Important notes should be integrated into the argument.
• Unimportant notes should be excised from the argument.
• Notes break the reading flow of the document.
• Accepting all of this, academics will nevertheless defend notes as valuable digression, obfuscation, and dis-integration.

Writing Journal 1705.2.4.2014

Before:
The task in the next hour is to simplify at least one of the premises of my dissertation. I have a loose outline of what I want to do, but I want to articulate the unstated assumption behind that. I also have a short amount of time, so I'll have to choose a small section. I think I'll try to write a few questions at first, then try to develop the most central or promising one. The challenge of that will be integrating this new writing with old drafts. Another problem is that I have plenty of distractions for the writing period. But the good thing is that I can just slice off one part and call that progress.

In Praise of Bureaucratic Details

Life in the academy is filled with documents that can stymie a class, a dissertation, or a career if they're not satisfied in full detail. Indeed, most "introductions to graduate school" describe the arc of an academic career through these bureaucratic documents. This example is taken from my own department's guidebook.

Graduate Program Timeline for MA/PhD Students Who Enter with a BA
Year	Fall Semester	Spring Semester
1	Coursework	Coursework Select advisor and major field of study by end of 1st year
2	Coursework	Coursework Requirements for “Breadth” and “Critical Theory” completed by end of 2nd year Submit materials, including preliminary POS, for Advising Meeting Advising Meeting MA awarded
3	Coursework	Complete coursework Begin work on final POS
4	Submit POS 8903 and foreign-language requirement completed before candidacy exam	Complete candidacy exam
5	Complete prospectus Begin work on dissertation	Apply for additional year of funding Continue work on dissertation Apply for additional fellowships

These timelines and the documents they describe--preliminary POS, POS, prospectus--often put academics into complete despair. They often entail a series of arbitrary-seeming selections, such as, "Which 80 texts must you read for your exam?" or "What is the period of study for your dissertation?" On bureaucratic documents and in locked filing cabinets, the answers to these questions are simply lists or numbers: and so these selections seem completely arbitrary.

But I recommend that academics consider these as academic problems. Joseph M Williams reminds us that PROBLEMS, as academics deal with them, have both conditions for their satisfaction as well as rhetorical audiences. In the case of bureaucratic problems, the conditions come from the bureaucracy, but the academic import comes from the scholarly community.

To make short work of a much larger point, I recommend that academics recognize bureaucratic documents as a chance to state principles for an academic audience. When a PhD student chooses some 80 texts for a POS, she is really choosing her scholarly commitments. Those commitments, in turn, give her some grounding for the challenges to come. In the process of writing a dissertation, she will be buffeted by new facts and new views, and she can effectively reply to new facts, new views if she has selected her ground and her commitments. I say "effectively" not only because an effective reply would communicate to an academics community, but also because an effective reply conserves the ideas developed from earlier generations of inquiry. This tradition, community, and ground expresses itself through the small ways that academics respond to seemingly trivial questions; most of all, that standby conversation-piece of conferences: "What's your dissertation about?"

Distant reading is not our choice

Maybe you're deciding whether distant reading is right for you. If you favor distant reading, you may--like Moretti--would like to gather aggregated information about literature with the tools of quantitative sciences. If you oppose that, you may--like Moretti--find that literary texts are simply too dense. By "dense" I mean that you may find that literary language may contain unnaturally contradictory, nonsensical, or otherwise ambiguous language. The language of Ulysses, for example, makes no promise that it will comply with Stanford Natural Language processing. That app parsed the first sentence ("Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.") thusly:

(ROOT
  (S
    (ADVP (RB Stately))
    (, ,)
    (NP (NN plump) (NNP Buck) (NNP Mulligan))
    (VP (VBD came)
      (PP (IN from)
        (NP (DT the) (NN stairhead)))
      (, ,)
      (S
        (VP (VBG bearing)
          (NP
            (NP (DT a) (NN bowl))
            (PP (IN of)
              (NP (NN lather)))
            (SBAR
              (WHPP (IN on)
                (WHNP (WDT which)))
              (S
                (NP
                  (NP (DT a) (NN mirror))
                  (CC and)
                  (NP (DT a) (NN razor)))
                (VP (VBD lay)
                  (VP (VBN crossed)))))))))
    (. .)))

(ROOT
  (S
    (NP
      (NP (DT A) (JJ yellow) (NN dressinggown))
      (, ,)
      (VP (VBN ungirdled))
      (, ,))
    (VP (VBD was)
      (VP (VBN sustained)
        (ADVP (RB gently))
        (PP (IN behind)
          (NP (PRP him)))
        (PP (IN on)
          (NP (DT the) (JJ mild) (NN morning) (NN air)))))
If a scholar knows how to read both Joyce and this fragment of parsing, then she can write to me about the efficacy of the automation. Nevertheless, this kind of resource makes very simple stylometric units available to inhuman "readers." And this is where the trouble begins.

~~~

Jaron Lanier begins You Are Not A Gadget thus:

It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons—automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computer facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams."

The "automotons or numb mobs" are probably parsing "Stately pomp Buck Mulligan" more than contemporary texts. The classics of English literature are freely available on many sites, and provide"industrial cloud computing facilities" with an epic bulk of text to be "scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers..."

My point is that the 21st century has created legions of nonperson readers--possibly more nonpersons than persons--who will by sheer numbers come to predominate our reading communities. Now, more than ever, we have to arrive at a New Aesthetic to understand these inhuman persons, and our inter-phenomenal experience within a Democracy of Objects.