Author Archives: Matt Rubin

Something of a Retrospective – A Goodbye, Too

I’m fairly sure I’ve missed a post or two, so consider this a combination make-up-farewell post. I want to start by saying that it was a pleasure to work alongside everyone in this course, not just my group. I think being in a classroom environment where everyone is in a similar boat to you with regards to working on a group project made me more comfortable working on my own. To clarify, even in other courses where I’m working on a project, not everyone in that class is working in a group – some work alone, some work in pairs, some work with more. I suppose it’s a matter of feeling secure, if anything.

Something that has come up across all of my classes at least tangentially this semester is the idea of memory and how it interacts with other more immaterial concepts, such as narrative and archiving. It’s made me think about how the memories of not simply this class, but how each of our projects will affect their their respective “environments” (“environment” as in “environment scan”) over time. This may seem needlessly existential, but, how will these projects look after they go dormant? That is, for the projects that are going to receive constant updates, I wonder how they will look at their culmination-before-stagnation, how they look before they go otherwise untouched for an indefinite period of time.

On a brighter note, I’ve also been wondering what will happen when (and if, I suppose) one of us will be reading some scholarly article or academic paper and see one of our projects cited in it. In fact, one of us could even encounter it in a more casual, mainstream context.

I’d also like to put an idea I’ve been toying with forward – during this semester, I looking at heraldry as a form of rebus, which posed a number of intrinsic and distinct challenges. For instance, the fact that when one “solves” a coat of arms, one will generally end up with a far more abstract and less defined result than when one solves a rebus. Indeed, “solving” a coat of arms is more like a fusion of mapping an area and analyzing a painting, while solving a rebus is more like a combination of solving a math problem and analyzing a poem: in the case of the former, it’s less straight-forward, and there are theoretically multiple, possibly radically different yet still correct methods and answers. So, I pose this question: while heraldry has connections to conventional rebuses that aren’t too obscure, what items, further removed from heraldry, could be interpreted as one would interpret a rebus?

Whatever the case may be, I wish you all the best of luck in your endeavors, and I look forward to potentially working with any or all of you next semester. Farewell, and have a lovely summer.

Personal Blog – The Home Stretch

It’s been a long, taxing journey this semester, and on some level I hope I speak for some people (although I know deep down that knowing the rest of you, very few of you probably share this with me) when I say that it took a lot out of me. Sometimes I’d give it my all, and still felt like I fell short of my goals. But, we’re nearing the end.

This week, we got down to the finishing touches. I submitted a piece regarding the differences between interpreting and analyzing rebuses as opposed to interpreting and analyzing other works, such as literature and visual art, along with an in-depth look at The Arms of the Duke of Argyll. I also submitted a very condensed version of the interpretation guide I’ve been talking about most of this semester. The final product doesn’t elaborate on the meanings of icons – rather, I rearranged the disorganized notes I had on translating symbols and figures in heraldry into other languages into a neater, more accessible form.

I’m not sure what the summer will hold for this project, especially in a personal sense. Maybe with more time on my hands, I can burrow through more texts for coats of arms. If conditions improve, maybe I’ll visit museums in person and see what there is to find. I’m sure my group members have posted about it, especially Ostap, but as you might know, museums’ digital collections are not necessarily the same as or as expansive as their physical ones.

On the subject of my group, I do want to take some time to thank them for the immense amount of amazing work they’ve done for this project. The project would never have come to fruition without Patricia’s website designing prowess, Ostap’s outreach and overall expertise in archiving, Rachel’s ability to consistently find and make use of interesting rebuses, and last but certainly not least, Bianca keeping us organized and functional. I’m not lying when I say this is one of the better and more cohesive groups I’ve had the opportunity to be a part of.

Rating Rebuses

This week, as a group, we ran through a list of selected rebuses organized in a spread sheet, and we rated each on a scale of 1-3, with 3 being the best. Essentially, the rebuses we unanimously voted “3” on are the ones that we’re going to give the most attention fastest. Outside of that, we’ve formally begun writing the pieces we plan on posting to the website. At the moment, I’m working on a condensed version of the heraldic iconography guide, along with some longer-form analysis of some selected works.

With regards to the former, I realized that my expanded iconography guide wasn’t particularly user-friendly. This is in part because I originally created it to be useful as a personal reference for me. I’m currently in the process of elaborating on bits of information those less experienced in heraldry may have trouble understanding, and picking and choosing which icons will actually be relevant to the rebuses on the site.

Personal Blog: Coming to Terms with Feasibility

The title of this post may seem somber, but in reality, this has been quite the week. During our group’s meeting after Thursday’s class, we discussed what was feasible at this stage, and what wasn’t, and I realized that tossing the entire collection of heraldry I had picked was never even in the cards. This week’s remaining work includes looking through a variety of rebuses we’ve narrowed down and collated from multiple origins and rating them on a scale based on quality and usability.

Some time ago I was talking about how I was going through Codex Seraphinianus in search of rebuses in the book’s own languages. For those unaware, the book is not in any known language, constructed or otherwise. At this point though, my time is probably better spent elsewhere (additionally, at second glance, it’s pretty clear that most of what I’ve dredged up from the book isn’t that usable).

As Bianca talks about in her post, we’ve decided to cut down on the length of the essays we will be writing for the project website.

Personal Blog – Metadata

This week, I’m focusing on producing what will eventually amount to appraisal of my collection of heraldry that I’ve amassed. The first step was going through my entire collection and selecting the most appropriate and viable images. This was somewhat time-consuming, but relatively easy. Generally, I selected the images that were larger, more vibrant, and more detailed. For instance:

This is an example of a coat of arms that would fit the bill.
This image depicts an example of an element of heraldry, the canton. This image is smaller, and has less detail, and for good reason too – it’s mainly to demonstrate where the canton would appear on a coat of arms. Thus, it wouldn’t serve as well as, for instance, the above image.

I narrowed the collection down to roughly 33 images from the 400 or so I have collected. By appending metadata to an image, one can give it empirical context. In other words, in the case of our project, a user that comes to the site and sees a rebus will have less trouble interpreting or analyzing it if something of a “given” is established by way of metadata.

Reading Rebuses – Project Update

A screenshot from the site’s front page. Unfortunately, the animation on it wasn’t able to be captured via screenshot.

(Apologies for posting somewhat after midnight, I was having trouble logging into my gmail account.)

At the moment, progress remains steady, and in general, it seems as though we’re hitting our milestones. In terms of specifics, I (Matt) have had to expand on my original plan to document different types of symbolism and iconography in rebuses and heraldry and their meanings, turning my small-scale collection of footnotes into a more expansive, comprehensive guide to interpretation. The audit log I proposed is also seeing some more use, and I’m still gathering resources from Codex Seraphinianus and some other niche texts.

Patricia’s progress on the site is genuinely impressive; while I’m certainly not the expert on web design, even at a glance, the site looks great. The formatting is intuitive already, even in its in-progress state. Briana has been examining “verbal” rebuses in the form of poems and the exchange thereof. She’s made something of a breakthrough as she’s taken a look at a certain collection of 18th-19th century rebuses containing some of the first known ones from black women in the United States.

In the realm of our social media and outreach, Rachel may have made notable discovery: in her personal blog, she mentions that our group may not need NFTs “in order to digitize art for the internet++” era. To elaborate, this will greatly expand the amount of material we can use and upload, in part due to a large quantity of open-access resources that we now can potentially use. Ostap is working on an index/table of contents for the site, which should improve the user experience and make it easier to navigate. He has also been doing an excellent job the outreach front.

We plan on using break to catch up somewhat on work, although we plan on meeting only once this coming week, on Thursday when class is normally held. We decided that we may need to think harder about categorization, and we’ve decided to give Zotaro a try to help in that area. We’re also looking to schedule a meeting with Micki Kaufman at some point, ideally this week. Finally, we plan to write a short scholarly piece on some of our more general findings, which we will likely host on the site.

A screenshot highlighting our appearance as the 3rd result on Ecosia for the term “19th century rebus collection.” Sadly, we’ve dropped one place since the last time I checked in. 3rd place isn’t bad at all though.

Personal Blog – A Search Engine Occurrence and More

This previous week, I searched “19th century rebus collection” on Ecosia and found that, believe it or not, our group’s project proposal was the first result! I was afraid at first that it was a result of Ecosia harvesting my data (something I figured they were above, or at least moreso than most search engines not named DuckDuckGO), so I asked for a second opinion. Indeed, the proposal appears within the first two search results more often than not.

That aside, I’ve begun revisting one of my favorite texts, Codex Seraphinianus, in search of more esoteric rebuses. It’s interesting to look for them in a book that is written in a non-existent language, and indeed, many of the images I’ve taken are less definitively rebuses than those, for instance, that I took from A Complete Guide to Heraldry. This has gotten me thinking, as well as with our group’s discussion of verbal rebuses: can a non-rebus be interpreted as a rebus?

Additionally, I’m still working on my heraldry interpretation and iconography guide. It turns out I’m going to need to be far, far more exhaustive than I had originally thought, and I’ve had to branch out beyond the Complete Guide to research what certain symbols mean. It’s impressive to see just how many different sorts of creatures are represented in heraldry, in part because of the fact that many texts only include mentions of animals that exist predominantly in Western European heraldry. It’s also important to keep in mind that an animal’s name in other languages can allow it to be more versatile in rebuses in those languages, so I’m thinking about compiling a list of translated names and synonyms for the creatures and icons in my guide.

Personal Journal Entry – Burrowing Through Texts and More

I’m part of the Reading Rebuses project. Since my last entry, I’ve done my fair share of recording information about icons and symbols found in coats of arms, which are their own sort of stand-alone rebus, but that have iconography and symbology that can be applied to other rebuses. I’ve also come to encounter “wearable” rebuses – mostly in the form of heraldic armor and crowns and other regalia from bygone eras. But perhaps the most interesting journey I’ve gone on involved Arthur Charles Fox-Davies’ A Complete Guide to Heraldry.

Essentially, I’ve gone through the entire text and excised each image from it. Originally, my plan was save time and energy and only extract “useful” images, but only a few images in I realized that I had no real means of determining if an image is “useful” or not. In the end, I amassed over 350 images, which I now have saved both to my computer and to our group’s drive folder, and some of which I’ve begun to appraise and analyze. If nothing else, I’ve archived the text in a format that I don’t think anyone has done before.

I also made my first Twitter post in roughly 7 years as a result of this project. I’m not sure whether or not to feel proud about this.

Personal Bio, Contribution Statement

Matt’s academic background is primarily in the humanities, both digital and otherwise, especially in the realms of literary analysis and critical theory. They studied what they refer to as “Applied Narrative” at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study – essentially, the ways in which narrative and storytelling have been, are, and could be used. Professionally, they have worked near-exclusively as an instructor or educator for children aged 6 to 14, and more rarely, as a researcher and information gatherer. They are incredibly interested in iconography and symbolism, and as a huge fan of Guiles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, they always have the Deleuzian idea of the rhizome on their mind. They have a penitent for connecting elements and concepts together, even when they have no business doing so.

For the Reading Rebus project, Matt’s role primarily covers seeking out rebuses of note and information of rebuses and their interpretation. Their primary contributions to the final product will likely consist of writing in the form of reference tables, interpretation guides, and analyses.

Personal Journal Week 1 – Reebus to Go

I’d like to think that our first week has certainly not gone poorly. I’m both pleased and disappointed in myself to say that I had the most trouble getting on board the project – to clarify, I’m incredibly excited for this project, but the enthusiasm my collaborators are approaching it with is truly admirable. I’m absolutely looking forward to seeing how this project goes, especially with a team dynamic like our own.

My greatest fear at the moment is stagnation, but instead of worry about that, I’ve tried and succeeded to think more positively. That is, this project’s final product is something that I wish to actively work towards, and so I try to envision what the project could become rather than clouding my mind with needless worry. It’s certainly going to be a busy semester, as this is going to be one of at least 3 projects that is going to require my active attention – thankfully however, I’ve always found it enjoyable having multiple projects to work on at a time. Often, I end up finding inspiration for one inside another.

Thus far, most of my work has been in the realm of seeking out rebuses and rebus-related content that could be worth using in some manner. Some of my favorite findings include nested rebuses (rebuses in rebuses), an online rebus generator, and information on the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority’s usage of rebuses. I’m pleased to say that the sheer amount of information that is at least tangentially related to rebuses is so massive that I don’t think our group will have any issues in the realm of running out of material.

For our next meeting, my plan is to present or showcase some of the rebuses I found, along with the analyses and appraisals I’ve been working on. I’m well aware that these rebuses may not be used in the final product, but I found myself wanting to test my skill.