Craig Saper (cjsaper@gmail.com) is an Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Language, Literacy, and Culture doctoral program at UMBC, and the author of
This is the source
The research experiment described in this article, Readies Online,
started as
a database to make accessible a rare manuscript of important modernist poets and
writers including Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, F. W.
Marinetti, Kay Boyle, Nancy Cunard, Eugene Jolas, and many others. Each of these
contributors had sent works prepared for Bob Brown's machine, and he called the
prepared texts readies. In the midst of building the collection of texts, the
researcher realized that moving the texts through an electronic version of Brown's
machine, or through the interface constructed on the website to simulate Brown's
machine, changed how one read — even changed the essence of what one read. Speed,
pace, direction, and visual cues took on new importance already apparent in reading
printed texts, but not stressed. Punctuation now represented an illegible and
non-representational, visual cue rather than a direct link to the phono-centric
pauses and stops that are more commonly represented by punctuation. The futures of
reading, and the use of new devices like e-readers, will have consequences for the
definition and practice of what we call reading.
Simulation of reading machine opens digital humanities and literacy studies to visual, experiential and non-logocentric aspects of reading language usually ignored in database mining.
As a matter of principle, the book is illegible, and it calls for or commands reading in the name of that illegibility. Illegibility is not a question of what is too badly formed, crossed out, scribbled: the illegible is what remains closed in the opening of the book. What slips from page to page but remains caught, glued, stitched into the binding, or else laboriously jotted as marginalia that attempt to trip over the secret, that begin to write another book. What is illegible is not reading at all, yet only by starting from it does something then offer itself to reading.
In 1931, in the French Côte d'Azur village of Cagnes-sur-Mer, a group of expatriate avant-garde artists and writers gathered to try out a prototype of a reading machine built by Ross Saunders, according to the plans and designs of Robert Carlton Brown II (1886-1959), known to the avant-garde writers as Bob Brown. Brown, a bestselling writer and international publisher, was part of the modernist circles not just in the late 1920's and early 1930's, but also since 1916 when he first started publishing his avant-garde poetry. After traveling the world for two years with the profits from his publishing empire, Bob spent a few years in Europe, mostly in France, publishing a handful of experimental books with prominent presses as well as with his own imprint, Roving Eye Press.
After publishing two versions of his plans for the machine, Brown decided to invite the most distinguished expatriate modernist writers to contribute to a new volume,
readiesstyle. Bob also transferred at least some of these texts on rolls of paper with one single line of text, and he prepared at least one other sample of a text printed in
readiesstyle to show to engineers who might build and manufacture the machine. He never found a manufacturer, but his dreams for a reading mechanism were similar to the eventual microfilm machines. Brown wrote to the inventor of microfilm and microfiche readers, worked with engineers, produced rolls of literary texts (such as one of the novel
PuffyCombs’s song
Come with Me,but not the sampling machine or player to listen to it. Brown’s readies, like sampling in music, are inseparable from the machines used to play the texts.
I wanted to address that problem of recovering the previously un-publishable readies (because of the lack of a machine). This article is part of a series of my publications and research projects that concern my effort to re-publish and make accessible rare manuscripts associated with the machine, and to make Bob Brown’s remarkable life known to a wider public (and even to scholars who know only about the few years he lived in France). In order to publish works specifically prepared for Bob Brown’s reading machine, I decided the publication of the texts in the anthology should not simply consist of a printed text – even if those texts were a facsimile of Brown’s published anthology. Instead, the project would make these texts available online in a way as similar as possible to Brown’s presentation in the prototype of the machine. I began by constructing a database, using MySQL, to make these works accessible to a much wider audience.
This strategy of using databases online to make otherwise rare texts widely accessible
and searchable was in keeping with what we now call digital humanities
research.
What happened next, in the middle of building the database, was a recognition that
moving the texts through an electronic version of Brown's machine — or through the
analogous interface standing in for the machine and constructed on a website
(readies.org) — did not simply present a database of searchable texts. Instead, it
simulated how one might have experienced using Bob Brown's machine back in 1931 as if it
was made in the twenty-first century. That is, the simple database and peculiar
interface, changed how one reads; it even changed the essence of what one reads. Now,
issues of speed, pace, direction, and visual cues took on new importance. Yes, these
issues were already apparent in reading printed texts, but they were not stressed or
highlighted as they became in the interactive interface. Mundane aspects of every
literary text, like punctuation, now represented an illegible and non-representational
visual cue rather than a direct link to the phonocentric pauses and stops that are more
commonly represented by punctuation. Usually an em-dash, for example, cues a reader to
pause, but in the readies, the em-dash cues the eye to increase the speed and skip to
the next word. At high rates of speed reading becomes a visual experience without any
sounding out words. Punctuation cues a reader’s voice, whether reading aloud or
silently, but in the readies, the punctuation circumvents the voice to cue the reader’s
eyes. Suddenly, the digital humanities
effort looked more like a Derridean
experiment in grammatological reading, or what Greg Ulmer would call an applied
grammatology.
That is, the project suggested a future of reading, that will
involve new devices like e-readers, and will change the definition and practice of what
we call reading and even introduce an electracy.
As the project progressed through iterations, I published critical editions of two other
experimental works by Bob Brown designed explicitly for his reading machine. Those
critical editions appeared as part of a series edited by Jerome McGann and Nick Frankel
on literature by design,
and they strengthened my appreciation that visual
non-phonocentric design might form the basis for literary meaning and a marginalized
aspect of literature. My publications received much attention because they corresponded
with the release of a number of new (or newly improved) e-readers.
readies.The texts running through the machines on my website include some of the readies produced for Brown's machine by modernist poets and writers.
As the project continued to attract interest, I published a series of other articles
and chapters and continued to do biographical research on Brown’s life and his machine.
In the early 1930’s, the beaming out of printed text over radio waves and the televisual
poetry that Brown predicted and advocated for had an absurd air of science fiction,
which has led many to read Brown’s plans for the machine as simply an art-stunt. In
support of that view, in 1931, Brown wrote in enthusiastic hyperbole, similar to the
style of other avant-garde manifestos of the time, about the machine's potential to
change reading forever. For those interested in the digital humanities now, Brown's
research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of the phenomenon of
text-messaging (with its abbreviated language) and electronic text readers. You are no
doubt reading this article online with the words beamed out tele-matically. And Brown's
practical plans for his reading machine include precise details that evoke both
steampunk design and Kindle: Extracting the dainty reading roll from its pill box container
the reader slips it smoothly into its slot in the machine, sets the speed
regulator, turns on the electric current and the whole 100,000, 200,000, 300,000
or million words spill out before his eyes [. . .] in one continuous line of type.
My machine is equipped with controls so the reading record can be turned back or
shot ahead [. . . ] magnifying glass [. . .] moved nearer or farther from the
type, so the reader may browse in 6 point, 8, 10, 12, 16 or any size that suits
him.
unroll a televistic readie
in the
style of modernist experiments; the design also followed the changes in reading
practices during the first quarter of the twentieth century. Gertrude Stein understood
that Brown's machine, as well as his processed texts for it, suggested a shift toward a
different way to comprehend texts. That is, the mechanism of this book, a type of book
explicitly built to resemble reading mechanisms like ticker-tape machines rather than a
codex, produced at least for Stein specific changes in reading practices.
On the one hand, the inspiration for Brown's machine certainly includes Duchamp's machines and poetics. Artists like Raymond Roussell built their own Surrealist reading machines relatively soon after news of Brown’s reading machine appeared on the scene. It seems fitting that Brown would call the processed texts the readies, explicitly alluding to talkies and movies, and implicitly to readymades. In light of his own claims in
The mechanical surrounds us like a flood. The machine and its relations to man is doubtless one of the major problems of the age. Ever more accelerated becomes the tempo, ever more whirling are the pistons, ever more violent is the influence of this titanic instrument upon the thoughts and acts of man(379). The context of his literary and artistic tastes and writings make it easy for even the best critics, and sometimes for Brown himself, to think of the project only in terms of the modernist revolution of the word and as a
stab in the dark at writing modernly.
On the other hand, Brown seemed to consider his machine and the changes to reading in
much more practical and even commercial terms like microfilm than like Duchamp’s
toy-like machines. Unlike microfilm, in Brown’s machine the text would roll out in
one continuous line of type
. The magnifying glass,
spools of one line of type, electric current, controls and regulators all seem both
quaint and futuristic. Using his machine one could see microscopic
type on a movable tape running beneath a slot equipped with a magnifying glass and
brought up to life size before the reader's birdlike eye
. One could also
control the speed, bringing the usual relaxed pace of reading up to the fast modern
speed of the day.
Whether avant-garde provocation or patent-pending application, the printed form of the
readies used punctuation marks as visual analogies, and this essay seeks to examine that
aspect of textual production usually effaced in tagging, digital humanities databases,
and in phonocentric readings of texts whether online or not. Readies function as a
printed analogy for what reading will feel and look like spinning
past the eye out of a word-machine,
and, in that sense, em-dashes on a
printed page are, for Brown, a
In Brown's readies, the em-dashes have a visual equivalent in the cartoon action lines that sometimes alternatively indicate light, surprise, or inspiration (Eureka). They are also synonymous with the xxxxxxxx of redacted texts. In either case, instead of punctuation serving a phonocentric system, those marks now serve a visio-semantic system much like the system of visual poetry. The style of preparation and reading of these texts led, counter-intuitively, to modern realist novels by James T. Farrell and in Brown's own
In Brown's
The em–dashes do not make the prepared texts, or readies, easier to read or more
accessible, rather those marks change the very rules and constraints of what constitutes
reading. The visual punctuation suggests the 3-D sculptural apparatus involved in
reading and a precursor to future reading machines — perhaps not hand-held, but spatial,
sculptural and dependent on the place for the reader's body. In describing how to read
digital poetry, Roberto Simanowski describes the process of transforming text into a
post-alphabetic object that allows for both reading and playing with a text stray
visual marks
as illegible.
The electronic project described here began as a mere supplement for my publications and research on Brown. From the initial motivation, work on the project led first to a way to think about databases, interfaces, and mechanized procedures as alternatives to the dominant processing technologies and procedures, and later to a realization that one could simulate reading and experiences much as one simulates running with a Wii Fit; one could experience alternative constraints to the dominant print-based styles of reading — alternative styles and processes (like reading from a scroll) usually only described rather than demonstrated in scholarly studies. So, the Brown machine simulation became a prototype for a series of simulations on other reading situations both in the past and in potential futures.
To better illuminate this important moment in literary history, and to avoid the
problem that Brown identifies as using printed analogies to crudely simulate movement,
the online simulation moves beyond the goal of making accessible and available the works
published as readies. I began to suspect this other theoretical aspect when I consulted
with Michael North, one of the leading authorities on modernist literature and on Bob
Brown's work. North suggested, in terms of my simulation project, that the computer was
the machine; so, we did not need to draw a picture of a machine in the machine. The
machine should scroll the text. Finally, Did Bob Brown build the reading machine or just imagine
it?
My answer was that the evidence of the works he produced for a reading
machine and his patent proposals for the machine make the answer ambiguous. Was it
analogous to a ticker-tape machine or a microfilm machine? There is evidence for both
and perhaps some combination of these two types of reading machines. That ambiguity of
the model of Brown’s machine also makes building an actual machine a challenge – perhaps
an impossible challenge – a challenge of making a representation, an analogy, a metaphor
for a provocation meant to unsettle our facile and received ideas about reading,
analogy, and representation itself. This was no simple task.
In thinking about the implications of how the machine compiles, cites, and indexes a database of texts, one might overlook other issues, like motion and optical illusions, that we usually do not include in databases. How does one cite the pace of a reading? Is it something that applies only to specific uses and readings and therefore is not cited as part of the text itself? To answer this question, I needed to better appreciate how citation is normally handled in printed on paper literature rather than in the age of machine-reading. I turned to the definitive source for the consensus view of how to cite literary works, the
As the epigraph from the
Works Citedsection. The word
In the preface to the latest edition of the
fresh black ribbon and clean type are essentialand that edition of the
thin paper except for a carbon copy.Feal notes that
in just thirty years, there has been a dramatic shift in the way we conduct research, find primary and secondary materials, process information, and prepare a paper for submission
that all students write papers using word-processing software
Electronicin a bibliographic record is not indicating anything about how the text was written, prepared, or published originally, but rather in what medium it was read. The inclusion of that one word changes how we cite texts. No longer do we cite its means of production (publisher, author, date, etc.) alone. We now must cite the means of consumption: we cite the technology or the type of reading machine (e.g. printed book device, DVD, microfilm, etc), and that small inclusion shifts the ground of reading and suggests two aspects of the readies.org project that are easily missed. One must now include the word READIES after a citation of a text from that site, and one must recognize a fundamental difference in reading readies in the machine online and reading only the transcript in a printed collection. The texts are different – the meaning, look, affective impact, ideological positioning, and genre are different. Perhaps, in the future, scholars will think of reading (or how we consume texts) as having genres in the way that we readily accept genres of a text’s production. Scholars will specialize (and have already begun to specialize) in the machines used to read. Instead of focusing on periodization, genres of production, or languages of literature, the digital humanities are opening the door (and readies.org leading the way) to appreciating genres of practices and their comparative readings, for example, reading a phrase spray painted on a wall versus on readies.org. The readies.org project demonstrates one genre of reading, and it also demands specialized interpretive perspectives.
Other critical perspectives, like reader response approaches, stress the importance of
the reader, but with the new requirements from the MLA the entire profession of readers
(professional readers of the modern languages) makes reading an ontological aspect of
the works cited. Reading now has genres, and the future of digital studies will include
the study of these genres and their corresponding poetics in the way that literature
programs study the genres and poetics of texts (e.g. romantic sonnets, realist novels,
modernist visual poetry, etc.). What seemed bizarre, creative, or beyond the structure
of a text has now become a widely accepted and crucial aspect of a text's structure.
Elsewhere I have coined the term
The key discovery is that how one reads a text (the machine one uses) is part of the works cited, not separate from it. Reading is always already mediated by machines, and therefore, always already virtual, simulated, artificial, and dependent on the illegible mechanism supporting it. As the opening epigraph by Jean-Luc Nancy explains, the binding, glue-marks, the bookbinders markings, and other illegible aspects of the book's apparatus make reading possible. Reading is always already depended on the illegible. In the age of e-reading devices appearing (and changing) regularly, the illegibility of these delivery systems (i.e., the props for reading) have a more obvious stress and exposure. There is no direct reading outside of technology, and the current interest in digital access technologies will open a field of reading different from the histories of reading in the West to examine how the access technologies become essential aspects of the texts themselves. What is the difference between the book and its support (paper,computer screen or vellum, etc)? Or, put another way, how does reading change the database (in books, online, or some other medium)? Digital humanities research focuses on the infrastructure of texts, but almost exclusively on databases rather than on reading interfaces. Much of the research focusing on databases assumes the medium and interface apparatus as a neutral ground, and depends on a monolithic idealized reader.
Throughout the last decade through the current day, much digital humanities research
has examined and used databases; in fact, one might argue that the database is the
foundation and goal of digital humanities. In the database driven research, of which
readies.org is certainly a part, digital technology allows not only for expansion of
concordances, but also, and more importantly, for new types of tagged, hyperlinked, and
radiant texts. The term database-driven
and database
are more metaphorical
than literal structured data. Databases changed the experience of reading, and that
change served as the initial focus on the readies.org project. In
[i]f certain features of the new information technologies have overtaken us – for instance, the recent and massive turn to word processing – more advanced developments generate suspicion
if database has been an incitement to the use of archive, it has changed our relation to the ownership of knowledge.And he continues:
One of the most radical aspects of database is its power to separate knowledge from academic prestige and from its attendant regime of intellectual property. Scholarship, as traditionally conceived, has maintained its prestige partly through its privileged relation to the protection and retrieval of scarce resources. Now, however, millions of people who cannot or do not want to go to the archives are accessing them in digital form. In addition, digital information has profoundly undermined an academic elite’s control over the circulation of knowledge.
Readies.org, starting as a simple database project, demonstrates an advanced word
processing and makes an alternative form of reading available outside of academic
publishing systems; that is, the project is available on the web without the protection
of the rare and scarce texts. Stallybrass sees this simple situation of access as
intensely creative, and he connects it to a necessary step in Shakespeare’s creativity.
The databases will also reveal the extent to which the gatekeepers
are themselves trespassers who do, perhaps unconsciously, what Shakespeare
deliberately and shamelessly did in the construction of his poems and plays. He
appropriated for his own use what he read or heard, as can readily be seen in his
most famous soliloquy
; Stallybrass goes on to list many variants of to be or
not to be — for about 25 years before
havingNot only does this statement assume that one cannot create (inventoryis a requirement forinvention.
invent) without a memory store (
inventory) to invent from and with, but it also assumes that one’s memory-store is effectively
inventoried,that its matters are in readily-recovered
locations
one’s reading as a database. In this pedagogy, reading is a technology of inventorying information to make it reusable
The shift from database to simulation begins in thinking about the
the general field of humanities education and scholarship will not take the use of digital technology seriously until one demonstrates how its tools improve the ways we explore and explain aesthetic works — until, that is, they expand our interpretational procedures
all at oncein simulation rather than
relying on step-by-step sequential processes that auditory learning styles favor
stresses that learning to interpret literature through visual methods is a skill of increasing importance in a world where images have the capacity to dominate and direct human behavior.The visual aspects of readies.org enter the database-driven digital humanities much like a Trojan horse or Pandora’s box: once the databases’ interface allows for movement, inventory practices, and the non-logocentric visual, then reading and interpretation change; the foundation of the digital humanities changes too.
McGann calls for a move beyond conceptual analysis into the kinds of knowledge
involved in performative operations — a practice of everyday imaginative life
[Texts] are not containers of meaning or data, but
sets of rules (algorithms) for generating themselves: for discovering, organizing,
and utilizing meanings and data,
unnecessary
words, inserting the em-dashes, and in the variable speed and
direction available in this online machine), performing precisely this move away from
the direct and transparent representation of a text. In the same
No database can function without a user interface, and in the case of cultural materials the interface is an especially crucial element of these kinds of digital instruments. Interface embeds, implicitly and explicitly, many kinds of hierarchical and narrativized organizations. Indeed, the database — any database — represents an initial critical analysis of the content materials, and while its structure is not narrativized, it is severely constrained and organized. The free play offered to the user of such environments is at least as much a function of interface design as it is of its data structure.
Again, what he describes moves close to the notion of what I am calling a simulation in
readies.org (the online reading machine began as a database); the machine demonstrates
this physical narrativization of the absolutely particular reading practice of each user
and each specific reading (using the machine). If To pretend, I actually do the thing: I have therefore only
pretended to pretend
digitization fundamentally changes the idea of
recording and transmitting,
and now ideological interpellation and subject
disciplining can no longer be the centerpiece of an understanding of sociality, even
though disciplining and socializing go on. It would seem necessary that we add to an
understanding of sociality the modulations of the affective background
modulations of
the affective background
before and beyond subjective interpretation, as well as
on a physicality of eye twitches, enervations, and constant rapid movements.
We usually associate electronic simulations with physical activities like driving, flying, or guitar playing. We also associate simulations with social systems, urban planning, or athletic activity, and products like Wii and Sims suggest a visceral interaction with databases of information. In the humanities, walk through simulations of ancient buildings, art museums, plans for cities never actually built, or historical events like world's fairs are now commonplace. The reading machine online asks the user to consider that sedentary reflective Apollonian thing we call reading as an acrobatic inventive thrill ride. Instead of rolling your eyes, the machine rolls the text by forcing the user to engage muscles atrophied in literacy, waiting to experience the visuality of reading in which serifs, dashes, and (( stray punctuation set in motion an animated cartoon of what reading will look like from the viewers of the future. In the 1950’s, Bob Brown suggested to a television producer a children’s program that would animate letters and words, and, although the ideas was quickly rejected, animated letters and words later made up much of the content in programs like
In the midst of building the online reading machine simulation/analogy for a machine built in 1931, and preparing the database of readies texts, the art-stunt (but nevertheless prescient and practical) aspects of everyday reading became obvious. Speed, pace, direction, and visual cues took on a new importance that was already apparent, but not stressed, in printed texts. When Bob Brown published his proposal for a reading machine, he had been thinking about it for nearly 20 years. He thought of the reading machine as a tool to inventory all literary and non-literary texts. What he did not fully realize is that he also suggested that one could simulate an unfamiliar reading practice [one that might have worked to increase the rate of reading or frustrate it] using something like a reading machine; that simulation is precisely what my online machine suggests. The reading machine set in motion the next great stage of humanities research: using simulations (of reading) to study alternative reading practices — past, future, or imagined.