I may have missed a post: I’m not sure.  The numbers don’t quite add up.  So I thought I’d use this as a chance to reflect on the days, hours, and minutes, leading up to Thursday’s presentation.

By Monday evening most of the copy had been submitted (Project Manager: manage thyself!) and proofread (but with the comments on Google docs, so not everyone had seen/ corrected their typos) when the link went to Bret.  Thanks to his alacrity, Tuesday and Wednesday we made further corrections based on his suggestions, and on all the things I found that I had overlooked the first two times: spelling errors, inconsistencies, alternative solutions for some of the rebuses.  Patricia and Rachel made the adjustments with a lot of herculean lifting and remarkable calm.

As late as Thursday morning, I went over the material a couple more times and discovered yet more misspellings.  But I also found an obscure article on American Tobacco Slang that allowed us to decipher a remaining enigmatic rebus on one of our demos.  According to Katherine Kell, in “Folk Names for Tobacco,” “a soldier” is a lighted or whole cigar or cigarette as opposed to ‘a dead soldier’ or a stub.”  There are even “ranks” of soldiers, according to the size of the remaining cigarette.

The corrections didn’t make it into our slide deck, but they did give me a feeling of confidence that the site was undergoing continual improvement and getting ever closer to where we wanted it to be.  It was a luxury that ReadingRebus went last, as celebrating our classmates’ achievements took my mind off the looming presentation.  Not that there was anything to worry about, Rachel did an amazing job and the demos went off without any glitches.  Now that the prosecco has gone flat and the confetti has been swept up, I plan to do more micro-correcting, refining the entries further, and adding more glorious rebuses for people to explore and solve.

Drop by the magic re-bus!  Or press here for our theme song!

In the endpapers of an edition published in Venice 1556 of the Spanish best-seller La Celestina, an anonymous reader has inscribed the following explanation of “pintando motes” or “painting words”: “Lovers in Spain are wont to paint words as refreshment [relief] from/of their passions [sorrows].” The annotator provides three examples of this practice, with their explanations: “Dado me as dado Coraçon cuydado”; “Asperas piernas Elvira as”; and “Consuela te Coraçon que el Mundo Rueda.”

Our rebus collecting and research has largely focused on the interpersonal dimension of puzzle making and solving: the rebus used to create an inner circle of decipherers, to make pedagogy more palatable and memorable to students, to circulate political opinions in an increasingly centrifugal and global public sphere, to attract consumers to industrialized products, or to record sentiments between intimates.  In all these contexts, the rebus rehearses and resolves, momentarily, the inherent problem of signification; the rebus foregrounds the challenges of textual communication but promises the reader a monolithic (and monolingual) solution as designed by its creator, rewarding them with a delightful if transient sense of proficiency and control.

Our early modern explicator, however, suggests an additional function for the puzzle: “recreaçion” of a different sort.  Somehow, s/he does not exactly explain why, the process of painting words about their condition allows lovers—at least in Spain—respite from lovesickness or grief.  At the same time, recreaçion, like the early modern English equivalent, implies both the possibility of a restorative ease/easing and the “growing afresh” or “increase” of those passions: a renewal of the desires that led to this solitary translation from verbal to visual in the first place.  The rebus articulates and instantiates the writer as an amorous subject, even without an audience.  Despite its isolation, deriving from an unrequited passion, and even in its most limited circulation, the rebus functions as what D.A. Miller terms an “open secret”: for example, the “harsh pains” of Elvira, as expressed covertly, establish her not only as a lover but as a writer who both precedes an audience and controls its access and response to her painted words.[1]  The anonymous commentator, on the other hand, establishes their own proximity to such authorial subjects, by providing the solution directly below the rebuses, suggesting their own ability to see the supposed interiority inside the puzzle and the person from whom it emanates.

Nonetheless, we are given the sense that Rebuses–as well as those better known salves, Reading & Writing–can function as solace, as refreshment, in a period of solitude and deprivation.  I know ReadingRebus–both our group and its project–has served that purpose for me, as has the class as a whole, and for that I feel profoundly grateful to everyone in it.

[1] In his venerable “Secret Subjects, Open Secrets” (1985) D. A. Miller describes secrecy as the “subjective practice in which the oppositions of private/public, inside/outside, subject/object are established, and the sanctity of their first term kept inviolate. . . . [T]he phenomenon of the ‘open secret’ does not . . . bring about the collapse of these binarisms and their ideological effects, but rather attests to their fantasmatic recovery” (Miller 1985, 27). Through a Foucauldian reading, Miller goes on to explore the workings of the open secret in the 19^th-century novel, its role in creating the liberal/carceral subject, and its centrality to the maintenance of the social order, as “the very genre of the liberal subject . . . the genre that produces him, the genre to which, as its effect, he returns for ‘recreation’” (33).

I took some time out for three DH Zoom events this week: two were CUNY related or recommended.  The other came from Book History but was equally informative.

First, I attended some of the NJIT conference on April 23^rd:  Unfortunately I was late for the presentation that seemed most directly relevant to my work, on the history of machine translation, but I stayed and saw really interesting presentations on archiving DH projects, conceiving of cities as relationally rather than strictly geographically constructed spaces, and using VR to measure popular religious devotion in local Roman street shrines.  I also attended a breakout discussion of the poster related to this last project: I was impressed by the creativity and thoughtfulness of the undergraduates and their advisor, Louis Hamilton.  I loved the intersection of disciplines and the possibilities of more in the future.

I also dropped in on the CUNY Visions of Open event Friday afternoon, where 4 advanced PhD/post-doc students and recent alumni shared their current or capstone projects.  I found it inspiring and particularly helpful to see how different the presentations were as we prepare for our own launches and demonstrations in a few weeks.  It also clarified for me how a DH pedagogy project might look compared to a DViz or Text/Archival research project: the range of media and forms was liberating.

While I showed up for the first two events because they were recommended by the program, the last event (also on Friday) I linked to through a regular Material Text colloquium out of UPenn that I’ve been able to go to more frequently now that I don’t have to take Amtrak to Philadelphia on a Monday night.  While I don’t usually follow Manuscript studies, this Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies introduction of VisColl, a digital collation tool being developed by Alberto Campagnolo (Udine) and Dot Porter (SIMS) drew me in.  Although I’m awaiting the adaptation coming this summer for reproducing the structure and imposition of printed books, this leaf and quire collation formula is amazing in its own right, with icons for Flesh side and Hair side, ways to note aberrations in sewing structure or additional/missing leaves, or simply as a means to visualize the bifolia construction of a MS, compare it to others, reconstruct a work by importing bifolia from distantly held texts and on and on.  Check it out!

https://viscoll.org/

While the first two events broadened my understanding of what DH can be on the undergraduate and graduate level and beyond, the last returned me to my own work in early modern textual studies, making me impatient to begin to apply what I’m learning to my own research.  It was also heartening to see the collaborative spirit of DH at work beyond the Arcadia of CUNY: VisColl has benefited from and supported in turn advances made by VisCodex at the University of Toronto and EVT at the University of Torino in similar areas.  Sharing trouble-shooting, back-end creations, and UX has made each develop faster and better.

Wow!  To quote Bret: “the wheels on the rebus go round and round . . . “; and the PM on the rebus says “Deadlines Loom!”

On Sunday we wrestled with our metadata management tools, retreating momentarily from our template to a spread sheet when we began to realize that we had more artifacts than we realized.  We will have well more than 100 to choose from!!

Simply cataloguing them consistently will be challenging; we also still have plans for short essays on various topics.  But, again, we made some hard choices about length and format to keep our ambitions achievable and user friendly.

Kudos in particular to Patricia who is able to turn around graphics with speed, grace, and talent.  I continue to be worried that she and Rachel are doing more than their share of work, but there is plenty ahead to do:

TO VOLUNTEER FOR EVERYTHING!!

On a smaller scale, we collected our expenses for Bret, began a spread sheet for social media outreach so that we can create an overarching narrative for what and when we will post, and finalized the template for information that we will (eventually) use for each artifact that makes the cut.

I’ve been learning a huge amount by eavesdropping on the development of organizational systems by the Corona Chronicles and Mapping Cemeteries crews, as well as following the helpful discussions of tweaking data and scarcity/abundancy from the Freedom of Speech* and Community Fridge Archive projects.  Thanks to you all!

Grateful to my group for putting up with some leaning over into the front seat of the Re-bus this week: the PM on the rebus also says (to self)—“Move on back!”