Of course, it’s not the end! The semester is ending and we won’t have to blog anymore but the Reading Rebus project is being built to live on. All the rebuses that were left off of the final selection are absolutely worthy to be included even though they didn’t score high in our rating system. And now that I’m comfortable adding content to the website, it will become a much more relaxing activity, free from deadlines and presentations. Right now, I feel like a “rebus-adding machine” and I think I’m starting to see rebuses everywhere.

There’s also some outreach I’d like to do over the summer, when things have calmed down. I can finally send the project to my friends and colleagues to let them know why I’ve been missing these last few months, working on something in the “digital humanities” (which no one seems to understand in my circles). I will admit, we haven’t been the best at outreach but it’s because we want the project to be worthy of being seen. And I can say that I’m confident that the end result will be what I imagined and more.

I’ll also take this opportunity to thank my team members. As Bianca so eloquently said in the final group update, we are a hive-mind. This is also funny because you’ll see on the website how many rebuses contain bees, so many bees! Bianca has been driving the re-bus as PM, especially lately, reminding us of deadlines, commenting on files, copy-editing our work, and more. I can’t believe you have never PM’d before. High-five to Rachel for keeping us thinking about what rebuses are and expanding the project in all sorts of ambitious directions. There is no better person to represent the group in the presentation. Ostap’s knowledge and experiences with archives was invaluable. Although we weren’t able to properly use special collections, I’ve learned so much from your contributions. What Matt has done with heraldry is truly inspiring, I think you are now a specialist in this area. I aspire to be this focused on my next research project. But, it’s not the end! I only wanted to express my gratitude on this blog so that it’s saved for posterity! More soon…

Reiterating Rachel’s post, I was about to sit and start some “rebus writing” but I remembered this blog post was due so that gives you a good indication of where my mind is at these days. How is next week May? Did Jan, Feb, March and April actually happen? In this mad rush of the end of the semester (both this class and my job) I’m very anxious to finish the rebus project although we still have a long way to go. Rebuses are rated so we can finish the metadata templates and begin adding them to the website. This will be fun but also a bit time-consuming. At that point the website will start looking like something that’s ready for public consumption. I’m actually a bit envious of the other projects (Community Fridges and Corona Chronicles) that already have an engaged community that is contributing. Related to outreach, Twitter suspended our account because #twitterhatesrebuses for some reason. Anyway, we’re back up now (I think – I’m afraid to login) but I find it so funny that of all the evil things occurring on twitter, they somehow thought our three tweets were cause for concern.

I was reflecting this week on how my team has been working and whether we’ve spent enough time “doing the work” vs. “talking about doing the work” – in other words, why does it seem like everything needs to happen in these last two weeks? I kept going back and forth and finally decided we did both equally. It might seem like we didn’t “do” enough work but we wouldn’t have been able to “do” any work without all of our conversations about the work.

Lastly, I’m excited to read my team’s rebus writings. Onward!

This week was about preparing for our presentation and also curating rebuses. Our group (thanks to PM Bianca) has come up with a rating system so that we can easily decide what gets added to the website and what gets cut. This will help us narrow down our selections and also think carefully about the criteria for selecting rebuses. We’ve expanded our scope to include more non-British and American selections. It’s so exciting to see Japanese and Chinese rebus artifacts represented! I only wish I was familiar with these languages to offer some scholarly interpretations. Not only is this a team curation effort, it’s also a process of curating and editing myself. I’ve collected so many links and resources since the beginning that I’ve had to carefully select what I put forth for the group to vote. Some of the rebuses that I found ‘way-back-when’ suddenly don’t seem so interesting compared to more recent finds. Ideally, we would include everything but the clock is ticking… And with most things, I find choosing quality over quantity is the best path forward.

As I was putting together the slides for the presentation and looking at the sources of our rebuses, I found myself being so grateful that there are publicly and digitally accessible archives for us to use, no questions asked, no fees requested. Library of Congress, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, NYPL, Smithsonian, DPLA, and more – what absolutely awesome resources we have available to us! It’s safe to say our project could not be done without these institutions, especially in a time of a pandemic when their physical doors are shut but the digital doors are open 24/7. That’s not to say that archives are perfect and without problems. But, in general, they have enabled us to create this project that we’re excited to reveal.

This week’s tasks were all about organization. Each of us have been gathering so many links and images to rebus sources that our Google folders were becoming unruly. As a result, we were at a standstill as to how to go about curating the rebuses to add to the website. We settled on a method and have recently finalized the metadata thanks to Ostap. So, now the not-so-fun part of creating docs, copying, pasting, putting into folders, etc. And then we’ll finally be able to see everything we’ve collected and narrow down a final corpus. I’m a bit behind on doing this due to a busy work week but hope to catch up this weekend.

Bianca’s discovery of “rebus” in the crossword puzzle last week had me thinking about rebuses which use type only, different from the pictorial rebuses that I have been focusing on. I found an article on the English literal rebus and will try to type some clever examples. It’s surprisingly difficult to type some of these given the limitations of computer word processing (typewriter, where are you?) and I’m not even sure how they will turn out in WordPress… Answers at the bottom of the post.

B
—–
TIME

DOSE DOSE

B
E
A
T

THEHANGRE

Answers: be on time, double dose, down beat, hang in there!

Although it didn’t quite feel like one, I was grateful to have this break. We had our regular Thursday evening meeting and Micki was kind enough to join us. We talked through verbal rebuses (rebus poems), PWP and various ways we could include digital methods to analyze the work, such as textual analysis = data = an argument. Other digital methods we’re considering adding to the project are maps but there are some questions as to what to map and how it contributes to the project. One big revelation that came out of that meeting was the reminder that the project should not necessarily be answering questions, but rather asking them!

I’ve made a lot of progress to the website v.3.0 (not public yet). To be honest, a website of this size does not need a versioning mechanism but it helps me feel like it’s moving forward. So, v.3.0 has the website architecture complete and rebus interactive functions in place. I’ve placed a few rebuses on the website to test the functionality and I’m excited at the results. It’s a bit labor-intensive but considering we won’t have translations for everything, it’s nothing to complain about. All the pages are developed but with placeholder text. It’s good to see this all in place so we can get an idea of the things we need to write. For v.4.0, I’m thinking about rebus poems and how to display them with the same creativity that we display the pictorial rebuses. And, also maps – where do they belong on the website, what kind of maps, are they interactive, etc.

While I was making progress on the website development, I put the researching/writing part on hold. Thankfully, the team members are finding wonderful things. I always look forward to the days when I have time to open up our Google folders and see what’s new!

I’d like to reiterate what others have stated – how our projects feel so “real” and “alive” at this stage of the process! Reading Rebus is now at v2.0 and by the time we get to the end of the semester, it might be v.12.0 but that’s the joy of working on digital projects. They are constantly evolving and growing (which is also frustrating because it can feel like they never end). As the website is now feeling like a physical object, there’s a small part of me that wants to keep it to myself, a secret between my team and classmates. It’s not that I don’t want to share or impart knowledge about rebuses, it’s more the pressure I feel as public audiences see our website, and the fear of criticisms they may have.

As the designer/developer, I’m thinking of ways showing the various types of rebuses we’re discovering. Figuring out a design or a coding solution is kind of like solving a rebus. As Bianca and Matt mentioned, the “verbal rebuses” are challenging but also exciting! I’m now wondering if other poets or writers were writing verbal rebuses without realizing it and if they didn’t explicitly state it was rebus, is it still a rebus? I’m also really excited at the different categories of ephemera of rebuses we’ve come up with and the many instances of crossovers. Our Google folder of examples is starting to fill up and we’ll probably end up with more examples than we’re able to add to the website by v.12.0.

And going back to our topic of pandemic life from last week, I’ve realized how much puzzles have helped me take mental breaks. Rachel mentioned at a recent meeting how puzzle activities are usually familial and generational. In my case, I feel like I’ve only really discovered them during this pandemic. Perhaps, the NYTimes can create a data viz to show how many new “Games” subscribers have signed up since March 2020?

This week for me was filled with small tasks and big thinking about our project. I’m working on the website draft which is a lot of small technical things to figure out but at the same time, a lot of thinking about the bigger issues of the project. Our project manager, Bianca brought up some “anxious” questions that have us thinking about our criteria for choosing rebuses, why we are even doing this in the first place, and will we be able to have enough examples on our websites to demonstrate the claims put forth in our proposal? Fortunately, I think we all felt better after Micki reassured us that it needs to be a work in progress. Rachel asked “why rebuses?” which has now become the start of every thought and task having to do with this project.

All the team members seem to be falling into position to tackle their roles and interests. I’m really happy that the project is going in directions that I would never have been able to do on my own like research into French rebuses and heraldry. Even though it broadens the initial idea, I’m confident the website will be a useful tool for learning about rebuses. I’m also confident that the website won’t be perfect and the research won’t be complete but it’s all good!

Lastly, I find myself needing more time – to research, gather, question, write, design, etc. Wouldn’t our projects turn out so much better if we could work on them full-time 🙂

Last week’s presentation by Stephen Zweibel changed my perception of data. Previously (and naively), I considered data to be computer-generated but actually it also includes non-digital items. From his slide “Forms of Data”, it appears that everything is data so therefore, data is everything! Which makes sense – without data, our projects would not exist. Even with our Rebus project, we will be dealing with digital files and code, etc. but even the digital files are based off of actual objects, data in the form of pieces of paper that were printed. 

I also started to think about big vs. small data. Our project is using small data, perhaps even tiny data, for scholarly purposes. On the other side of the spectrum is big data, big tech, AI, IoT- types of data, analytics and data used for profit and marketing. What about medium data, is there such a thing?

So, a DMP is essential. Our process to follow the checklist was straightforward. Although we “checked” everything off, there are still a lot of unknowns at this point. But, the DMP is now firmly implanted in my head and going forward, obtaining and preserving data will be a constant concern.  If my team finds that we’re unable to manage the data, that’s a major hurdle to overcome. I can already see how all the files in Google Drive can become uncontrollable if we don’t stay organized! Meanwhile, who knows how Google is profiting from the data we’re storing on their servers.

Patricia is a graphic designer who creates identities, printed materials, publications, websites, content management systems and digital solutions for clients in the art, culture and commerce industries. Her research and writing explore the intersection of graphic design history, technology and contemporary practice. Patricia is also a teaching artist-in-residence in graphic design and new media at Fordham University and is currently working towards an MA in Digital Humanities at The Graduate Center, CUNY.

Patricia is the creator of Reading Rebus and is the project’s designer/developer. She is responsible for the logo and website design, layout, coding, content planning, content creation and UI/UX – helping to create new ways of exploring historical rebuses.