Simon Rowberry

Abstract: The Kindle has been strongly established as one of the market leaders in e-reading technology since its launch in 2008. This has been facilitated by both Amazon’s existing market base and the willingness to allow their proprietary book format to be read on multiple devices, as long as the reader uses Amazon’s proprietary Kindle app. As with the book, readers were offered a space to annotate their texts and highlight interesting passages. While these annotations were traditionally only shared in print very slowly through passing books around, the Kindle offered an amplification of this process, allowing popular highlights to be seen by any interested party. More recently, Amazon’s acquisition of the “editable book encyclopaedia,” Shelfari, has begun to transform the authorized interactions one can have on an e-reader, making e-books a more explicitly social object. This shift towards the social has always been part of Amazon’s plans for the Kindle, since one has always been able to connect to annotations from Wikipedia or the Oxford Dictionary of English, resources built through collaboration. There is also a chance to tweet quotes or post them on Facebook. All these interfaces explicate social connections that have previously been invisible and offer rich new resources for the empirical study of reading.

Despite the potential benefits for these new integrated interfaces, this paper will question how they transform and potentially limit the ways in which people engage with literature and the (e-)book. The user annotations are easy to use and appear to be authorized through their appearance in the official Kindle app. Therefore, to what degree are users going to want to engage with further reading outside of official app? To what extent will these annotations be verified for truth, rather than being checked for being non-offensive? The margins of the E-Book, as exemplified by the Kindle is a deeply contested space, where a lot of promise of the early hypertext movement could finally be realised, but much depends on the potential hegemony of systems such as the Kindle’s integration of Shelfari annotations.

“Authorized Fan Culture and the Kindle.” Resurrecting the Book. November 2013. Library of Birmingham

Abstract:
The Failure of the Digital Humanities
Mark Sample’s “Unseen and Unremarked On: Don DeLillo and the Failure of the Digital Humanities” argues that post-1922 literary texts are being left behind as a part of the Digital Humanities (Sample 2012). This is a direct result of the Sonny Bono, or “Mickey Mouse,” Copyright Term Extension Act, another apparent move towards perpetual copyright. These difficulties are compounded by other obstacles including closed access or disorganised archives, insufficient preservation tools for early computer usage, and authors who simply refuse to embrace the digital. Without the necessary permissions or archival material, scholars of these twentieth century scholars are becoming increasingly envious of their colleagues, who develop tools that would equally aid interpretation of these more recent authors. Mid-twentieth century literature is of particular relevance to Digital Humanities research, since many frequently cited precursors of electronic literature including Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963), and the short stories of Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones (originally published c.1960s), are still protected by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. Many of the theoretical issues that have been teased out of these texts – especially early hypertext theory (see Landow 1992; Bolter 1991; Joyce 2002) – perhaps can only truly be tested once many of these texts have been the subject of digital experimentation. This paper argues that although these projects are often not being carried out by faculty members, the need and potential uses for such tools among non-academic readers is demonstrated through the samizdat distribution of online versions and tools readily available for all those who wish to conduct a Google search. The launch of the first authorized Pynchon e-books (Flood 2012) was met with dismissive claims that better samizdat copies had been in circulation for many years beforehand. These projects are coming into fruition externally to traditional (digital) humanities departments, spreading out to computer scientists’ extracurricular projects or the work of those outside of the academy who build digital tools and resources for the love of the original literary artefact. A few examples of the diverse work being undertaken includes wikis (for authors such as Thomas Pynchon (Ware 2006) and Terry Pratchett (Anon. 2005)) databases (Finnegans Wake Extensible Elucidation Treasury (FWEET) (Slepon 2005), interpretations of literary texts through social media on both a single platform, and a dense and complex ecosystem of literary engagement and reception (such as the recently organized group read of William Gaddis’s JR centralised around the Twitter hashtag #occupygaddis) and many other forms that demonstrate potential platforms for further research and development.
Literature Review
This study fits into a wider field of readership and reception studies, an interdisciplinary research subject, which has had some crossover within the Digital Humanities. Anouk Lang’s edited collection, From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, which includes chapters on how reader recommendation systems are changing in the digital age (Wright 2012), the community of LibraryThing (Pinder 2012), and the network of reader reviews on Amazon (Finn 2012). Furthermore, the present study runs parallel to crowdsourcing in the Digital Humanities, most recently exemplified by the Transcribe Bentham Project (Causer and Wallace 2012), as many projects involve large numbers of volunteers to organize materials. Moreover, as Henry Jenkins et al. have recently suggested, the easy transmission and manipulability of media in the early twenty-first century is essential to ensure the text’s viability, and the evidence of fan communities exploring literary texts suggests a desire for these more of these platforms. (Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013) There have also been more specific papers exploring the use of particular social network platforms for literary reception (see Schroeder and den Besten 2009; Ketzan 2012) and how the use of these tools reflect the development of underlying software through the way users build on the platform (Howison and Crowston 2011).
Do “Amateurs” Fit into the Big Tent of the Digital Humanities?
There has been a considerable debate concerning the purview of the Digital Humanities, particularly the extent to which building tools is essential to being described as Digital Humanities. (Svensson 2012) This paper asserts that the Big Tent should be widened to include a broader spectrum of scholars, amateur or professional, who engage with the transformational nature of digital tools, whether engaging with new methods of collaborating and presenting interpretive data or building databases to explore the manipulable nature of the original texts. These pockets of activity demonstrate a potential audience for these tools and push the boundaries of what counts as fair use in ways that academic institutions typically shy away from for fear of lawsuits. The deformative acts (Samuels and McGann 1999) these projects often engage in can thus reveal the ways in which these texts reflect a Digital Humanities agenda despite their marginalized status as both amateur projects and remediated texts (Bolter and Grusin 2000) still protected by copyright. Furthermore, there is evidence of the acceptance of these projects through examining the number of citations to some of the most prominent projects such as FWEET, which has been cited as both an exemplar of hypertextuality (Krapp 2005) and a reference guide for Joyce’s enigmatic text comparable to Roland McHugh’s authoritative Annotations to Finnegans Wake. (Conley 2007) Thus, we can witness how these projects engage with the academy.
Case Studies
The present study focuses on two case studies to illustrate the range of productivity that has engaged the non-Digital Humanities community for two twentieth-century authors: James Joyce and Vladimir Nabokov. These two authors represent polar opposites regarding their respective estates’ view of intellectual property rights and digital media. The Joyce estate has been involved in a couple of high profile copyright disputes leading to the dissolution of some major digital editions of Joyce’s work, most prominently, Michael Groden’s “Digital Ulysses.” On the other hand, FWEET, maintained by Raphel Slepon, a former medical researcher and programmer, runs counter to the usually aggressive policies of the Joyce estate. FWEET collates allusions from McHugh’s Annotations to Finnegans Wake (McHugh 1980) and other major reference guides to Joyce’s novel, as well as material collected from a range of independent contributors, into a database which allows the user to sift through a taxonomy of references, view all the noted allusions on a line-by-line basis, or search for particular tropes. The original text is obfuscated by the database’s interface and thus the website acts as a reference guide primarily rather than a readable digital edition of the text.
Meanwhile, the Nabokov estate has occasionally granted the use of his texts for digital work despite taking an aggressive policy towards intellectual property rights in post-Soviet Russia. Two digital Nabokov projects have been sanctioned since 1967: Ted Nelson’s demonstration of Pale Fire as a hypertext in the late 1960s and Brian Boyd’s Ada Online. Alongside these official projects, there have been a plethora of hypertext experiments with the whole or parts of Pale Fire. These examples of remediation begin to explore the generative network of Nabokov’s most complex novel and demonstrate the novel’s effectiveness as a precursor of hypertext literature. Both case studies highlight how two respected authors’ works are being transformed by digital media without the intervention of digital humanists. Through careful study of the digital reception of the texts, we can not only learn how these texts are being transmitted and circulated by a popular audience, but also start to understand how these texts, currently protected by strict copyright laws, can and will be part of a wider Digital Humanities ecology.

Bibliography
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Bolter, Jay David. (1991). Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. (2000). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Causer, Tim, and Valerie Wallace. (2012). Building A Volunteer Community: Results and Findings from Transcribe Bentham Digital Humanities Quarterly 6(2). http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/6/2/000125/000125.html.
Conley, Tim. (2007). Annotations to ‘Finnegans Wake’ (review). James Joyce Quarterly 1(2): 363–366.
Finn, Ed. (2012). New Literary Cultures: Mapping the Digital Networks of Toni Morrison. In From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, ed. Anouk Lang, 177–202. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press.
Flood, Alison. (2012). Thomas Pynchon Finally Gives in to Gravity as Digital Backlist Is Published. The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jun/13/thomas-pynchon-digital-backlist-published (accessed 25 October 2012).
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”Widening the Big Tent: Amateurs and the ’Failure of the Digital Humanities.”’ Digital Humanities 2013. July 2013. University of Lincoln-Nebraska.

Abstract: As Jane Grayson has previously discussed in “Nabokov and Perec,” there is little overlap between the Oulipo and Nabokov biographically, although both parties appeared to have appreciated some of the other’s work. It is from a formal perspective that Nabokov and Oulipo authors have the greatest crossover, since both are known for their love and use of word games in their fiction. Rather than suggesting a comparative reading of Oulipian and Nabokovian texts, this paper will explore the possibilities of applying the interpretative possibilities of Oulipo, including Jean Lescure’s “n+7” method to Nabokov’s corpus, to perform what Jerome McGann and Johanna Drucker call a deformative reading. This paper will consider the fruitfulness of such a methodology for reading Nabokov’s texts, acknowledging that such an approach can often lead to creative misreadings rather than strict and rigorous interpretation. This can be off-set, however, by the use of equivalent misreadings in Nabokov’s works, such as Shade’s pivotal misreading in his poem, “Pale Fire.” Through careful negotiation of these tricky issues, I hope to reveal a potential reading of Vladimir Nabokov’s works.

Simon Rowberry. ”Reading Queneau Reading Nabokov.” Vladimir Nabokov and France. May 2013. Université Paris IV-Sorbonne

Simon Rowberry. ”Pre-Historic Hypertext.” Invited Talk Narrative Research Group. November 2012. University of Bournemouth

Abstract: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) has a long and complex history of remediation dating back to Ted Nelson’s apocryphal early hypertext demonstration using Pale Fire in 1969, as well as being the subject of two artist’s books and a radio play. In the last 20 years, several unauthorized versions of Nabokov’s text have been produced for the Web in both English and Russian, as well as a couple of more recent authorized e-book editions and several experiments that were only publically acknowledged, but not shared. The one constant amongst these digitization projects was the feeling that here was a novel that cried out to become an electronic hypertext. This paper will trace the novel’s history of digital remediation with a particular focus on the use of interface by the amateurs, and a handful of professionals, who are trying to reproduce and enhance the network present in Nabokov’s novel. Through doing so, they have not used scholarly mark-up such as the TEI standards, but rather present the text through a variety of linking mechanisms approximating the possibilities of a digital edition of the text. Since Nabokov’s works are still protected by copyright, these editions represent the best current chance to understand how one of the most frequently cited print-based hypertexts can be translated into the digital medium. Much of the paratextual complexity of Pale Fire has been undermined through these remediations and this paper will question to what extent it is possible to represent this complexity on the screen.

Simon Rowberry. ”Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the Problem of Interface.” Digital Humanities Congress. September 2012. University of Sheffield

Abstract: Seventy percent of links within Pale Fire arise from the index, reasserting the importance of the index as a hypertextual device in the novel. The index is regularly dismissed or lauded for its unreliability and the (lack of) insight it imparts to the distrusting reader, who have suffered through the rest of Kinbote’s commentary. The index, however, cannot be overlooked, since it is one of the most interesting and rare paratextual devices in the history of the novel. Jay David Bolter posits that the index, as an archetypal paratextual device, is supremely enabling for the active reader, as it allows them to reconfigure the structure of the text towards the themes which interest them most. This paper will posit that, just as Kinbote’s commentary does eventually elucidate most of the key references in ‘Pale Fire’, but displaced by Kinbote’s agenda, the index can be inverted and subverted by the reader in order to gain a greater understanding to the novel. The index enables the reader to explore Kinbote’s linear narrative in a manner that avoids being simply propelled towards the next part of Kinbote’s delusions, dissecting Kinbote’s claims as to what the note elucidates. I will argue in this paper that the inversion of the index is an important part of both forming a solid interpretation of the novel, but also encourages the transition between a linear and non-linear reading more so than the commentary, and thus creates the Nabokovian good rereader.

Simon Rowberry. ”Inverting Kinbote’s Index.” Nabokov Upside Down. January 2012. University of Auckland, New Zealand

Abstract: Literary hypertext theory has petered out in the last decade, giving way to studies on narrative in computer games, and narrative generation through social media outlets. With the current mass digitalization of texts into proprietary databases such as Google Books, ECCO, and EEBO, it is time to reconsider what it means for a text to be hypertextual, in order to turn digitization into something useful above being a representation of paper on screen. This paper will explore a new methodology for approaching hypertext and how this can facilitate our understanding of literary texts.

Simon Rowberry. ”What is Hypertext?: A Literary Perspective.” Research Student Symposium. June 2011. University of Winchester

Abstract: Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) [3] is often seen as the gold standard to which all other print-based literary hypertexts are compared [see 1 and 2 for two examples of the admiration of Pale Fire from the literary hypertext community]. It was also a point of inspiration for Ted Nelson while developing his early hypertext systems. Although frequently referenced, the underlying network has never successfully been mapped or explored beyond a surface level. This poster posits a single model for representing the connections made throughout the novel, color-coded, so one can see which parts represent the poem, commentary and index (figure 1).

http://www.ht2011.org/demos_posters/ht2011_submission_137.pdf

Abstract: In the mid-sixties, Ted Nelson worked at Brown University on an early hypertext system. In 1969, IBM wanted to show the system at a conference, and Nelson gained permission to use Vladimir Nabokov’s highly unconventional and hypertextual novel, Pale Fire (1962) as a technical demonstration of hypertext’s potential. Unfortunately, the idea was dismissedin favor of a more technical-looking presentation, and thus was never demonstrated publicly. This paper re-considers Pale Fire’s position in hypertext history, and posits that if it was used in this early hypertext demonstration, it would have been the ‘father of all hypertext demonstrations’ to complement Douglas Engelbart’s ‘Mother of All Demos’ in 1968. In order to demonstrate the significance of Pale Fire’s hypertextuality and Nelson’s ambitions to use it, this paper will explore its hypertextual structure, the implication thereof for the novel and evaluate its success as a hypertext compared to electronic systems.

Simon Rowberry. ”Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Lost ’Father of all hypertext demos’?” ACM Hypertext 2011. June 2011. Technical University/Eindhoven, Netherlands

Abstract: Lolita and Pale Fire are two of Nabokov’s most morally challenging novels and in an – likely vain – attempt to distinguish himself from the narrator and thus, the moral difficulty in the text, Nabokov distances himself from the text by employing hypertextual tropes including hyperlinks and transclusion, that is layering of one text within another. In both texts, Nabokov uses these tropes in order to subvert the usual cause and effect model that influences one’s idea of morality, in particular the proclamation of death far before the cause and motive, thereby complicating the issue of morality in the text and bypassing a straightforward didactic reading. Pale Fire’s hypertextuality is well documented as the discourse between Shade’s poem, Kinbote’s commentary and meta-commentary, and Nabokov’s select few hints to reader as to how to read the novel. In Lolita, Nabokov uses the framing device of John Ray Jr.’s foreword, Nabokov’s afterword, and hypertextual layering within the text to dislocate the spatio-temporal aspects of the text, revealing the novel’s conclusion in a fictional foreword. Nabokov uses this hypertextuality not only to subvert cause and effect but also to make the texts irresolvable and thus add ambiguity and plurality into the text. For example, recent discourse on Lolita highlights that the reader does not know Lolita’s true name. If one cannot even resolve the most basic signifiers in the text, such as a central character’s name, then it becomes more difficult to make profound moral judgements regarding the text without effort and consideration. Thus, although Nabokov uses hypertext to distance himself from didacticism, he empowers the reader to choose his or her own moral position in relation to these difficult texts.

Simon Rowberry, ”Nabokov’s Do-It-Yourself Didacticism: Hypertext in Lolita and Pale Fire.” Nabokov and Morality. May 2011. University of Strathclyde