ReadingRebus: Performance Report/White Paper
Created collectively by Patricia Belen, Bianca F.-C. Calabresi, Rachel M. L. Dixon, Matt, Ostap Kin
I. Group Members:
Patricia Belen: Project Concept / Designer / Developer
Patricia is the creator of ReadingRebus and is the project’s designer/developer. She is responsible for the website design, layout, coding, content planning, content creation and UI/UX – helping to create new ways of exploring historical rebuses. Patricia created our social media accounts and helps maintain them by posting content and tangling with Twitter. Patricia also contributed an essay and found much of our initial rebus sources and open-access collections.
Bianca F.-C. Calabresi: Project Manager / Editor
As Project Manager for ReadingRebus, Bianca designed and managed our workflow chart, posted most of the weekly group blog content, and supervised written submissions by the group. On an ongoing basis, Bianca provides material for social media outreach and reviews all content for typographical errors, factual inconsistencies, and infelicities of style both before and after postings, maintaining a running list of corrections and emendations. She contributed two essays on rebuses and located most of the rebuses and reference materials hidden behind paywalls or in limited-access research collections.
Rachel M.L. Dixon: Multilingual Puzzle Researcher / Developer
Rachel joins ReadingRebus as a multilingual puzzle researcher, a project that merges many of her research foci in one delightful place. Rachel is the public face of the project, presenting our materials in class and at DH events. Along with her other contributions, Rachel handles outreach to the puzzle community, manages our group Zotero and collection scoring spreadsheet, and makes corrections directly on the website. Rachel contributed our central explanatory essay and the vast majority of our French and Spanish rebuses, which she also translated.
Matt: Researcher / Analyst
For the ReadingRebus project, Matt’s role primarily covers seeking out rebuses of note and information on rebuses and their interpretation. Their primary contributions to the final product consist of writing in the form of reference tables, interpretation guides, and analyses. Matt contributed two essays and a long catalogue entry, two more on heraldry and coats of arms, for which they are exclusively responsible, as well as a guide to symbols in heraldry and rebuses at large.
Ostap Kin: Researcher / Institutional Outreach
Ostap contributed essays on the trajectory of rebuses and digital online collection of rebuses, and organized and edited the bibliography of suggested primary and secondary sources for users’ future research. As director of institutional outreach for ReadingRebus he located and approached archives with unpublished rebuses, which we hope to pursue further as institutions open up.
II. Project Narrative:
Overview
The ubiquity of emojis in our digital chat conversations invites interrogation into rebus writing as a predecessor to the emoji and an interdisciplinary area of study, intersecting many aspects of digital humanities. By definition, an emoji is a pictogram representing an object; an ideogram representing an abstract concept; or an emoticon representing human emotion. Pre-dating emojis, a rebus uses a symbol to represent a sound, syllable, part of a word, or whole word, regardless of its meaning. Rebus writing combines visual elements with letters, words, and phonics to create puzzles which need to be deciphered and translated in order to understand their meaning. Coinciding with France’s invasion of Egypt and subsequent discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, rebus writing enjoyed a resurgence as a form of playful and satirical expression in late-18th– early-19th-century Europe and America. Circulating in printed broadsides, advertisements, letters, reading exercises, bibles, picture puzzles, and newspaper games, rebus writing became distinct from its ancient origins and early modern functions, entering more expansively into the daily lives of children and adults as visual vernacular.
ReadingRebus (RR) is an online, visual archive of primarily late-18th– early-19th-century European and American rebus ephemera, that includes research into their history and cultural uses. While focusing predominantly on this period, the project leaves open possibilities to expand its temporal and geographical scope through additional visual artifacts, historical research, and multilingual examples, some of which we have already begun to provide. The project aims to make a core group of historical rebus ephemera accessible in an engaging, collaborative, and interactive format to scholars in diverse fields as well as to members of the general public – opening up new possibilities for discovering how we see and interpret visual information. Each rebus puzzle is treated as an interface of inquiry to conduct close reading experimentations, translations, and ambiguous interpretations by audience participants. RR challenges the notion of traditional texts by using humanistic qualitative analysis, while also contributing to the history of language, visual literacy, and visual communication, connecting cuneiform and hieroglyphs to contemporary, digital emojis.
Equivalent online rebus sites
While we looked at many digital resources while working on the project, we found that discussions of rebuses online are infrequent. Primarily appearing in blogs, they tend to present a single rebus or two and their specific histories rather than an investigation of rebuses more broadly or deeply. While the sites often provide written solutions to the puzzles, the inclusion of guides to solving rebuses are rare and always static, unlike our site, which focuses on the ability to compare rebuses, by genre, by subject, by chronological or geographical similarities, and to acquire a rebus “vocabulary” through interactive experimentation and play, thanks to the use of hotspot areas for each rebus in an artifact.
Some rebus sites focused more fully on rebus construction or creation, and were somewhat removed from any historical context, such as the rebus-o-matic site additionally listed in our bibliography. In addition to blogs and other resources, there are instances of rebus-solving communities found on social posting sites such as Reddit and Stack Overflow.
In short, our project does fill a number of niches. Firstly, it is a site that focuses on rebuses, and a site that focuses on rebuses for the sake of rebuses, rather than a site with a focus on some other topic that brings rebuses briefly into conversation with that topic. Secondly, our project grants users a place to engage with rebuses in manners that other places where they are located don’t necessarily offer at all. Finally, our project offers a decent volume of scholarly content related to rebuses, along with metadata on the rebuses present on the site.
Critical material on rebuses
Recognizing the long history of writing on rebuses and their relation to semiotics, we provide a bibliography that extends back to the 16th century, tailored both for a general public and for audiences interested in a particular era or type of rebus as well. We posted several research essays (500-1500 words) that provide an overview of rebuses, their history, materiality, and function. Several of our research pieces analyze rebuses as a whole in a more critical or deconstructive manner. These pieces examine where rebuses stand as analyzable works, the way one must consider a rebus in order to critically analyze a rebus, the unique qualities and challenges of analyzing rebuses specifically, and the interactions between author or creator and rebus. While “what is a rebus?” is a question they don’t quite pose verbatim, they are meant to serve as something of an aid to those who ask those questions, in addition to those curious about the theory behind rebus analysis. We also present essays which address particular aspects of rebuses (i.e. rebuses in and as heraldry, code as a form of rebus writing). In addition, we chose to highlight Rauchenberg’s Rebus in relation to traditional rebuses and, to include an essay on a neglected set of verbal rebuses by the 18th-century poet Phillis Wheatley Peters placing her work in the context of popular acrostic rebuses published widely in Britain and its American colonies in that period. Thus our critical interventions into this field aim both to broaden the appeal and understanding of rebuses to a wider audience and to demonstrate how the rebus form may intersect with and impact current and emergent scholarly fields, like Africana and American studies and print history. Finally, our bibliography offers a number of resources which pay special attention to rebuses: including rare books which featured rebuses a few centuries ago as well as different blogs which use rebuses now; in order to help users to see a trajectory of rebuses and their presentations in published materials.
III. Audience:
Many people have found the rebus project of value given the rebus’s several overlapping qualities (play, poetics, aesthetics, materiality, among others), as well as its long existence spanning several cultures. ReadingRebus will be of particular interest to scholars in fields as diverse as linguistics, history, folklore, game studies, education, communications, design studies, and visual arts, as well as to members of the general public interested in puzzles, puzzle-solving, emojis, and crafts.
Moreover, as happens with all sorts of riddles, rebuses may attract the attention of virtually everyone, because rebuses often contain all necessary ingredients to do so. First, one deals with words and meanings which are coded, hidden; second, often when one deals with rebuses one encounters singularly aesthetically pleasing and simply beautiful works. Third, looking at rebuses often means looking at a certain epoch and allows one to notice how that epoch might be reflected in its rebuses.
After exploring the project website, users will ideally become more familiar with and more knowledgeable about rebuses, their history, and the distinctive aspects of their existence. There is also of course the goal of keeping the site both intellectually stimulating and enjoyable in terms of entertainment for users. The fact that users can contribute their own translations, comments, and thoughts grants them a chance to feel personally involved with and attached to the project and what it is trying to accomplish.
IV. Project Activities:
Initial Goals (https://dhpraxis21.commons.gc.cuny.edu/reading-rebus-work-plan/)
Outcome 1: Establish and start Social Media Accounts: Twitter, Instagram (possibly Tumblr): Weekly postings to be determined on Sundays and uploaded. Rachel & Matt to maintain. by March 8
Outcome 2a. Corpus of 15-20 18th-&-19th-century rebuses with permissions to reproduce: Ostap to contact archives & special collections and oversee permissions. Rachel to explore French collections. Bianca to explore Italian & Spanish supplementary material. by March 29
Outcome 2b: 2-4 essay-length general analyses of rebuses history, theory, material production, and relation to other visual culture (heraldry eg). Matt, Rachel, Ostap, Bianca to provide. by April 12
Outcome 2c: specific short pieces (“wall labels”) for each featured rebus, with links to further information. Matt, Rachel, Ostap, Bianca to provide. by April 19
Outcome 3: design and upload the following web pages: Patricia to design & develop with content providers:
About/intro: Rachel by May 3
Contact: Bianca & Patricia by April 26
How-to-rebus & interactive tutorial: Matt & Patricia by April 12
Object pages: Rachel, Ostap, Bianca by April 19
Further Reference & Bibliography: Ostap, Rachel, Matt, Bianca by April 26
Outcome 4: circulate, revise, edit, submit group project report: Bianca by May 17
Research
Our research was mostly conducted individually based on our specific interests in heraldry, poetry, multi-lingual examples, archives, materials, art and design, puzzles, and more. We spent the first weeks of the project reaching out to special collections in hopes of finding unique examples that could be digitized for the website. Unfortunately, the situation with Covid left most of our emails unanswered. One institution, the Connecticut Historical Society, did supply a rebus but it lacked context and information so did not end up on our website. However, conducting searches through museum websites, and public collections such as the DPLA, Library of Congress, NYPL, HathiTrust, Europeana, and the Internet Archive resulted in an abundance of rebuses and resources.
As a group, we gathered examples, some were saved in our shared Google folder, others were saved privately on Zotero, our personal computers, spreadsheets, docs, lists, etc. We shared our findings during our bi-weekly meetings. In March, a decision was made to narrow down our findings and finalize the information needed for the website. We settled on a group of metadata for each rebus sample. We tried documents for each rebus but after finding that too timely and cumbersome, we decided a single spreadsheet would be easier to manage. The spreadsheet allowed us to place the rebus link, metadata and rating system all in one system.
For each rebus on the spreadsheet, each member of the group examined and rated the item in question’s quality on a numerical scale, with higher numbers indicating the best quality. Generally, an item with a score of 3 was one that the group member rating it considered to be of significant enough quality to include. Thus, for the sake of feasibility, we only included items that had an average score (that is, the mean value of each group member’s score) of 3 or greater.
Going into more detail, quality within the context of this rating system was based on content, image resolution and clarity, the amount of available data on the item, and a small degree of personal opinion. With regards to the lattermost of these, as well as the relative subjectivity of this system and the existence of human error, the choice to average the scores was made. In addition to taking each group member’s rating into account equally, by averaging the scores together, we were able to choose rebuses that the majority of us considered good.
Of course, if the threshold was set very much below 3, there would have been no way to include each and every item we found. In fact, early on in the project before our scope was more refined, there was a period where we discussed adding all sorts of content, such as rebus-like items and numerical wordplay in alphabets other than the Latin alphabet (such as Hebrew gematriot).
With regards to our research infrastructure, it was fairly freeform, especially at first. We mostly sought out varied content in our respective areas of interest and expertise, recorded it, and made the rest of the group aware of our findings. In doing so, we were not only able to keep our fellow group members in the loop about our current business, but we were also created a situation where the exploits and methods of one of us could prompt or otherwise inspire another one of us to try new avenues of research or explore new sources.
However, some of our research did not bear fruit. Certain sources were barren of usable content, or presented problems in terms of accessibility or usability. For instance, one group member attempted to mine Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus for the purposes of uncovering rebus-like content in a language that exists only in a single place – in this case, the book in question. Unfortunately, there simply wasn’t all that much to be found.
On the other hand, other sources were extremely helpful and provided an abundance of rebuses and information on them. The Bodleian Library’s John Johnson Collection contained a very solid collection of Valentine’s-Day-themed rebuses, for instance, and Arthur Charles Fox-Davies’ A Complete Guide to Heraldry contained not only a wealth of information on heraldry as a whole, but roughly 30 coats of arms and images of other heraldic items, such as tabards and crowns that were considered at some point for use on the site.
Ultimately, while we only followed our work plan loosely and in some cases produced material a week or two after our self-imposed deadline, having the work plan provided a useful reference point in our discord and email conversations and our extra-curricular Sunday-evening reviews. The group was remarkably diligent in showing up to those standing meetings, which meant that we knew no one could get too lost or far behind without the offer of support and that we could discuss and reassign tasks in real time as needed.
V. Accomplishments:
The ReadingRebus website is built on the WordPress platform. WordPress is an ideal choice for a content management system because it has built-in database capabilities, flexibility of design through theme customization, ease of use for team members to enter information through its interface, and a community of users and plugin developers devoted to its open-source format.
Prior to developing the website, we created an animated logo to post on social media to create excitement in anticipation of the website. The animation replaced parts of “Reading Rebus” with visual symbols to inform viewers what a rebus is and how it is used.
We developed a custom WordPress theme, created to fit the rebus content we needed, rather than forcing the rebus content to fit within an existing theme. The aesthetic of the website was designed to be whimsical and playful, yet informative and easy to use. The interactive features envisioned in our original proposal to create a “digital playground” were successfully added.
The homepage highlights, through text and visual examples, what a rebus is. Using contemporary icons in place of words, the viewer can hover over the icons to reveal their verbal equivalents and gain an understanding of how rebuses work. In addition, we include the dictionary definition of “rebus” from the OED and a prominent link to the essay “What We’re Talking about When We’re Talking about Rebuses” which introduces how and why rebuses came to be. The homepage also features rebuses culled from our curated collection and links to our research essays. Each time a viewer revisits the homepage, they are presented with a different group of rebuses and essays.
The Rebus Collection featured 37 rebuses, grouped in nine categories to start, arranged in a grid format with thumbnail image preview and title of the rebus. Categories were established based on the physical and generic characteristics of the rebuses, but also what we felt were good points of entry for the audience. A viewer can click on “advertisements” or “letters” to see only those rebuses. We have also included “unsolved” as a category to prompt those who are interested to solve rebuses on their own. Through our research, we have discovered many rebuses not translated which we offer as a way for the audience to become involved in the project. As more rebuses are added to the collection, categories may also be added.
Clicking on a rebus will bring the viewer to the detail page of that rebus that features a larger image, title, and metadata (Author/Artist, Publisher, Date, Description, Language, Repository). The viewer can interact with the large image and hover over the images and symbols to reveal hints that help solve the rebus. Alternatively, the viewer can expand the area to the right of the image to reveal the entire translation if available. If the viewer has their own translation or comments about this rebus, they are encouraged to “contribute a translation” by filling out the form at the bottom of the page.
In addition to categories, we have implemented a tagging system for the rebus collection. Tags are more informal and may represent aspects such as time period (“19th century”), place (“American”), subject (“women”), or concept (“love”). The tags offer yet another point of entry for a user to discover rebuses; clicking on the “politics” tag will show all rebuses pertaining to this subject. Since our audience may not be familiar with all the types, materials, places, and genres of rebuses, discoverability was an important consideration of the website design.
The Research section currently features nine essays authored by the team on rebus history, cultural uses, and new discoveries. Our varied, individual interests take precedent here with writings on heraldry, material history, poetry, archives, and technology. To encourage further research, we have included a Bibliography page of primary and secondary resources. The area of rebus study has not been catalogued thoroughly or received its scholarly due so an introductory bibliography will aid those seeking to learn more. Primary sources include books that feature rebuses while the secondary sources contain information about and critical discussions of rebuses.
Future additions to the website may include an interactive map to show the breadth of where rebuses were used, along with more rebuses added to the collection and additional research essays.
The site is hosted at Reclaim Hosting through a free student account offered by CUNY Graduate Center. This hosting platform conducts daily, offsite backups. In the event the website needs to move, migration tools are available from WordPress and Reclaim Hosting.
While somewhat superficial as a measure, perhaps, for some time our project proposal on the CUNY Commons was near the top, if not at the top, of the search engine Ecosia’s results for the search “19th century rebus collection,” and other, similar enough searches. Although this only questionably speaks to the project’s success, especially due to the occurance’s ephemerality, it’s still at least somewhat notable as a metric.
VI. Evaluation:
Feedback from meeting with Micki Kaufman, Advisor to the Master of Arts in Digital Humanities Program, April 1, 2021
We set up a meeting with Micki for the Thursday class time during Spring Break, as we were all available then. We were still very much at the planning stages of the project; however Micki was able to get a sense of the different directions in which we might head and as a result gave very useful suggestions. She suggested we explore how ALT text on our site might interact with the concept of rebuses and lead to further theoretical understanding of the genre. She also encouraged us to bring more Digital into the Digital Humanities dimension of the project: for example, proposing that we use Text Analysis on the verbal rebuses we were finding, and on the Wheatley Peters’ poems in particular to see what we might uncover. Likewise, she liked very much the idea of a map that represented the range of geo-locations for the rebuses, not only where they were produced or are now housed, but also the spatial imaginaries that the rebuses evoked, for example, Quebec or Senegambia in their content or their historical circumstances. While we weren’t able to do enough work of this sort to incorporate these modes of inquiry into the website at its launching, those of us who plan to continue with the project do intend to apply these ideas to develop its impact and interactivity further.
Peer review and instructor feedback
While our followers on social media are few, for the moment, many of them are classmates in the DH program and so we have gotten a good sense of that community’s positive responses to the project, which rebuses were easy or more difficult to solve, and what captured our peers’ attention. The dress rehearsal brought home to us how the strengths of the project lay in its visual richness and variety and that we should emphasize those aspects when publicizing the site.
Instructor feedback throughout the semester encouraged us to embrace the playful as well as the aesthetic dimensions of rebuses and translated them into UX encounters and viewer experiences. Editorial suggestions also helped improve the clarity and precision of our theoretical conclusions on rebuses and their histories.
Based on the feedback we received, there is a desire to see more ludic elements added to the website. While it wasn’t quite possible to implement more of these elements before the semester’s end, in the future, these additions could be made real. They would most likely in part take a similar form to the site’s homepage’s interactive elements in order to compliment what the site already offers.
External review
In addition to peer review, we will be seeking feedback from staff members of Emojipedia and the New York Times puzzles team. Thanks to a group member’s contacts, we have already shared the site with Robert Vinluan and Sam Ezersky of that team. Their experience with visual symbols and puzzle-solving activities will bring a wealth of knowledge to the Reading Rebus website. In addition, their unfamiliarity with the website and its functions may give us ideas on how to improve the user experience.
Also, we look forward to receiving feedback from users surfing our website. There is enough content (in terms of rebuses) on our website so that users can start sharing their opinions. In addition to that, since we always thought of our resources as an interactive space, as we increase their number, the unsolved rebuses available on our website could be translated and these translations could be sent to us via email.
Weaknesses and Strengths
Notably, our Twitter and IG postings received by far the most views when they included animation, regardless of whether we were posting in response to a specific event (i.e. Mother’s Day etc.). This suggests that we should focus on drawing people to the site through digital models of how rebuses work rather than posting static images however apropos or historically compelling.
As our instructor hinted, not having a specific group member responsible for Outreach beyond Archival Institutions, probably diminished our ability to generate enthusiasm for the site. We found it a struggle to keep up with postings collectively, nor were we able to plan ahead for what content we would share and assign the week’s outreach to different members proportionally. While the freedom group members had to pursue the aspects of ReadingRebus that interested them the most probably led to a richer website as a result, it also at times seemed to prioritize research over audience: an imbalance that the group should address as the site grows.
VII. Continuation/Future of the Project/Sustainability:
Future of the Project
In June, 2021, the website will be featured in an online exhibition at the Fordham University Gallery (https://fordhamuniversitygalleries.com/home.html). Now that the first iteration of the website is complete, we will also be reaching out to various colleagues to expand its range and influence. There is interest among some members of the group to continue working on the website although we have not formalized a plan and for now have ceased standing meetings.. We have many more rebuses to be added to the collection and, perhaps, this work can be done over time by 1-2 team members. At least one member will maintain the hosting and WordPress platforms to keep them up-to-date. Another member plans to hone their WordPress skills by uploading additional images and content in the next few months and to update their scholarly essays as new material emerges. Lastly, there may be grant and funding opportunities that team members may want to apply for in order to expand the scholarly findings uncovered in the process of creating ReadingRebus.
VIII. Long Term Impact:
The Reading Rebus project will continue to be used in presentations such as the aforementioned online exhibit at Fordham. Additionally, the active community of puzzle creators and enthusiasts have begun to take notice and will likely contribute more interpretations and translations as the collection grows. Some rebus artifacts that were discovered in this process have led to additional research and academic projects by members of the team, such as the ongoing discovery into the rebus writing of Phillis Wheatley Peters, and mapping the historical rise of the rebus as it crosses imperialist routes over time. As scholarship about the rebus in English is scarce, ReadingRebus shall continue to be a resource and hub for puzzle lovers and curious scholars. As creators, the group has found that rebuses now pop into view consistently in our quotidian experience and add to our understanding of this visual-verbal genre. We hope that our site will have a similar effect on its viewers who, in turn, will expand the discussion and accumulation of rebuses as the ReadingRebus project has aimed and continues to aim to do.
