Anchored in Humanity: Digital Insights in Literature

Studying literature in the traditional way is a key to powerful insights into digital culture. It's because literature and digital culture stem from the same thing: people. The literary tradition has a long history of delving into the human condition through its forms, and it helps people better understand the effects and biases of digital culture in and among humanity. Here are a couple of examples of insights I have seen this semester.

Our classmate Aleesha saw correlations between Pinterest and her literary study of Moby Dick. Her questions about the identity (e.g. genre) of the novel Moby Dick prompted questioning and a project about how the individual and collective pins of a person's Pinterest board reflect (or don't reflect) the identity of the pinner. Kayla pointed out how Captain Ahab deliberately gathered people around him and sought the advice of his peers in going after the whale. With their help, he succeeded. Sure, you could say that that was the way everyone had to do things, back in the day, but - it was effective. 

What literary study helps us discover can and should change digital habits. The amount of information online and in print is overwhelming, like the amount of organisms in a world of ocean. As well as consulting his fellow captains for up-to-date information on Moby Dick, Ahab had on hand with him more traditional aids in his search: "yellowish sea-charts" and "piles of old log-books" (177). These print resources were also invaluable to him in making his "reasonable surmises" (177) about the route of the white whale. Recognizing the limitations of each method, Ahab used both textual information and social research and proof to accomplish his goal. While many Web users might be tempted to favor either a search engine or asking people for help to find what they are looking for, we would do well to follow Ahab's example and use social and mechanical ways to find what we want. 

Aleesha, Kayla, and I are digital natives, but studying Moby Dick gave us valuable insights into our world.

Essay #1: Collaboration and Community of Moby Dick and Digital Culture

When we read literature, it is an individual action. It is between the reader and the text. Sure there are ways to discuss a piece of literature such as publishing an anthology or writing a research paper, but these avenues take time. Digital culture makes it bigger. With literature, we are able to see the world through one book’s perspective and as a critically thinking community, interpret the book’s ideas and either agree or disagree with them. In digital culture we do the same, but now on a massive scale where people from all different backgrounds come together to collaboration and give feedback on literature. It turns an independent reading to a global one.

In the introduction of Moby Dick it reveals that “Melville himself certainly believed that all men are united by the bond of reciprocal dependence, by a community of function and responsibility” (xv). The book itself is an example of this “community of function.” We have discussed in class how the book functions under different genres: epic, fiction, prose, allegory, play. The compilation of all these genres makes it impossible to identify it as one genre. In digital culture, people are represented by the different social media sites they use. As Aleesha demonstrates in her research, Pinterest is a way for pinners to repin a variety of pictures, outfits, recipes, etc. Identifying a person by one pin will not be a full representation of who that person is or their pin board. It would be like identifying Ishmael as only a sailor and ignoring his obvious knowledge of cetology, his background in teaching, and the fact that he is the narrator.

As a community, men “united by the bond of reciprocal dependence” create subcultures in which members mutually depend on one another to not only consume content, but to create and curate it as well. In Lizy’s research on fandom collaboration, crowdsourcing materials such as memes or articles on a particular show or book creates a wider fan base in which content can be remixed and shared to an even larger crowd. Information is shared and spread through curation tools such as Tumblr or Facebook or Twitter. Captain Ahab gathered his crew together, all of them dependent upon finding Moby Dick to complete their whaling mission, and together they sailed in search for the great white whale. Ahab used "every means at his disposal to find and kill the white whale" (30), including sea charts, books, and logs to determine where to find Moby Dick. He was crowdsourcing information when he spoke to fellow captains on the Rachel for example to get spotting information. It was a community effort for one common goal. The subcultures within digital culture come together as a community to read, review, comment, and remix content found in literature. Reading is no longer independent, or at least it doesn't have to be.

Kayla's Final Essay #1: Moby Dick and Online Communities

A traditional part of the literary canon such as Moby Dick has a lot to teach us about modern digital culture. The way Ishmael, Ahab, and the crew interact in the novel help us to understand the creation of communities in digital culture today, and their teachings affect the way we produce even traditional scholarly research.

When Ahab tells the crew of their true mission and calls out “Death to Moby Dick!” (148), he immediately creates a tight-knit community. The crew looks to him as a leader and holds a common goal of killing Moby Dick, even though Ahab is the only one with a reason for a personal vendetta. We see similar types of online communities forming around specialized topics as well. These communities often create the kind of enthusiasm that gives them the title of “fandoms.” One of my classmates, Victoria, posted a series of blog posts and wrote a paper on the value of fandoms in digital culture, commenting on the need to remove a sense of apathy toward the study of the humanities. The formation of these fandoms may seem to happen over a short period of time, as it does in Moby Dick, but their influence is far reaching, creating interested consumers and content creators who are anything but apathetic.

One of the great contributions of online communities is the way they assist us with research. We are supposed to consult experts in a field of study, but how do we decide who is best? In our current abundance economy, we can find more information than we know how to process. Online communities help to narrow down the most important experts by collaboratively picking them out of the crowd to focus on.

Researchers in the digital age learn to focus on the people instead of simply ideas. Moby Dick focuses on a single whale, but the people involved and obsessed with the whale are much more important than which whale is being singled out. The enthusiasts and experts, who consist of Ahab and others, point us in the right direction. Moby Dick allows us to understand the need and uses for online communities, and more importantly, it helps us to take advantage of them to get to the influential people on certain topics. 

Final Paper and Project

It's all done! Here is a link to my prototype Moby Dick blog which I did as a mini project, and then a link to my paper in a Google Doc for those interested in reading it. It's about how format changes context, a comparison of literal and digital formats, and Moby Dick. Hope you guys are doing well on your final paper/projects! This was fun to explore.

**this has been edited on 12/12/2013 to update the link to the proper doc on Google Docs

Working Outline

Sorry this is super late. I forgot about making this post in the midst of working on my project and final paper (not to mention all the other stuff going on for other classes - crazy end of semester blues!). Here is the rough draft outline I used to help write my paper. Not exactly the order I went in and my paper includes a lot more detail than this (obviously and hopefully). Also check out my project prototype blog of reformatting Moby Dick which in part helped me in writing this paper. I had fun with it. Please leave comments there (for now comments will be approved by me in an email it sends to me before being published, but I can change that later).

Ishmael: Teaching the Dos and Don'ts of Citizen Journalism

Citizen journalism may sometimes seem like a field with no rules--anyone can upload videos or stories, and no overarching organization controls what goes out to the public. There are, however, some best practices being discussed in the media and among citizens. As I thought about Moby Dick's Ishmael as a citizen reporter (which isn't too hard to connect), I wondered where he was a good or bad example of media ethics and best practices.

I combined my curation tool of choice (Google alerts) with this topic and started to see some patterns and connections emerging between current stories and Ishmael's past, fictional one.

1. Provide information where other journalists can't. Recent bombings and attacks on school children in Syria were reported on by citizen journalists. Professionals couldn't have known where to be to get this information in real time, but local citizens stepped in to provide photos of the attackers and details on the story. Likewise, Ishmael provides a unique point of view on the adventures of the Pequod. He is in an isolated location (on a boat in the middle of the ocean) where others would be hard pressed to find them to report on the fate of the ship.
2. Weigh the risks before going into a dangerous situation. Professional journalist Lindsey Hilsum gave an address this month about why reporters go to war when there are so many risks. It's a balance between "no story is worth dying for" and "this story is important and worth it." Does Ishmael really assess the risks of reporting on the Pequod? In some ways, we can argue that he didn't really know the risks (or the true mission) when he first boarded the whaling ship, but he also knew that some things were off, and he was warned by others to not continue. 
3. Use the technological resources available to you. iTunes approved a new citizen journalism app this week that allows users to upload short videos, photos, and text updates. This app could arguably be used for lesser forms of journalism and take the form of a celebrity gossip or paparazzi venue, but it also has the potential to spread useful information. Ishmael uses technology in the sense of the first definition in the OED, "treatise on art," but it is sometimes difficult to see where the connection is to a more modern idea of technology. Does Ishmael really take advantage of resources available to him to publish this story?
4. Ask: Why is this information being published? The murder of an 18-year-old boy in a South African school in late October was recorded on video by a fellow classmate. The video spread quickly and made many question the ethics of circulating such a video. Was it purely for spectacle, for commercial purposes that drew more people to news outlets' sites? Does all truth need to be circulated? We can then think about the purpose behind Ishmael's reporting. He tells a gruesome tale at times, but the information is not purely for spectacle--there is context for the story. He hasn't simply uploaded a video titled "Huge Whale Sinks Entire Ship and Crew." He tells the story of the people involved. 

 This is all hopefully leading me to what I hope will become my final project, as I've discussed earlier, which would be a guidebook of dos and don'ts to citizen journalism.

Moby Dick: A Book Before It's Time

At the time of publication, Melville only sold 500 copies of Moby Dick in the UK compared to 6,700 copies of his first book Typee; although it sold fairer in the US with 3,215 copies, it still sold less than four previous books by him (source). Considering how famous the book is now, what is something Ishmael is doing that gets his every day journal entries, random rantings, and mini lectures so many views? Perhaps it isn't the book itself finally getting credit where it's due, but in this day of age the readers have adapted to the book's style. To put in layman's terms: Ishmael is actually a first edition blogger.

Final Project Thoughts (Extra Post, Prologue to Post 2 of this week)

Beware! I am posting my prewriting and rough drafts, showing my progressive steps, diving into the second stage of academic blogging, and saying social proof doesn't always work.

This isn't my second post for the week about digital tools with Moby Dick, but I will link to it at the bottom after it's published. This is a prologue for what I'll do in that post and how I got to that idea.

This is a post about my final topic. If you guys can comment, it will help me with my theme and tell me if this is something I can actually do a final project on. Even if you only read the last couple paragraphs under the asterisks, that will really help me. Or comment here on Google+ for an even faster read and respond. Give me social proof, homies and peers!

Ahab's Poetry: Reformatting the Text of Moby Dick

After reading Professor Burton's post on digitally mediating literary texts, I immediately wanted to try making poetry out of the more poetic passages in Moby Dick. I decided to take Ahab's soliloquy from chapter 37 and see what I could do with it.

It was surprisingly easy to see where the line breaks should go, though I'm no poet myself. I felt like the stanzas fell together into themes. After I made the poem, I printed it out and made notes on it like I would with any other poem.

I've linked here to the original version I made and my annotated version.

Some of the most interesting things I noticed were the use of color imagery and Christ/Satan imagery. I looked up the iron crown of Lombardy, which I had just skipped over when actually reading the novel. In some ways, I think poetry just helps us to slow down when reading texts and look for meaning in every word.

But seriously, the last few stanzas? They look like perfect poetry to me.

Moby Dick Digitized

(focusing on illustrate the text/make typography art, #7 and #8 on this post about making literary text digital)

I was originally going to translate sections of Moby Dick into Spanish and use my mic to make an audible Spanish version, but my mic is quiet so I decided to do something else: typography art. Then it got me thinking of something else that's taken texts and even movies into the digital world. Minimalist posters are everywhere on the internet. So I did a bit of both and may have even gotten carried away with it. Here are some minimalist posters-ish pictures I found for Moby Dick (image 1, image 2, image 3) if you don't know what they are and don't understand my creations below...

Minimalist Posters (made using Windows Paint - can you guess which was hardest?):

This is for Chapter 61 titled Stubb Kills a Whale, featuring the whaling
boats. The quote is found in the last paragraph of this chapter.

So we have the captain's hat for Chapter 28: Ahab where Captain Ahab is really introduced.
The quote describing Ahab is found on the first page of the chapter.

We have Moby Dick's tail featured in Chapter 41 dedicated to none other
than Moby Dick himself. The quote is found on the first page of the chapter.

Chapter 99: The Doubloon features the coin Ishmael describes
on the first page of this chapter.

Now for the typography pictures that will be under the read more to save on scrolling space.

Midterm Paper Final

I tell you what - this paper was rough to start. I had ideas floating around, had my outline, had my notes, but nothing really stood out to me in terms of a "so what" for the paper. But after reading your comments and really thinking about the essence of socially optimized research and Moby Dick, I was finally able to finalize my ideas and hopefully I did that successfully.

Sometimes (and maybe most of the time...and I'm sure plenty of you fellow writers can relate to this) I get hung up on the details and semantics behind writing the perfect paper - something that will get me a good grade or stand out to be so impressive it's mind blowing. But that's just not realistic. I heard in an interview once with a writer that "you don't get it right, you get it written." I hear it all the time: just write it. Just do it. After I wrote this paper, something that was academic but perhaps not perfectly formal, I realized that by not holding up on those details (semicolon here or comma, full three lined sentence or short ones, direct quote or paraphrase) I was able to just enjoy writing the paper.

Here is the link to my paper. Feel free to read, respond, and/or argue against my ideas. Hope you guys had fun with your papers too!

Socially Optimized Voyage (Midterm Prewriting)

Here is my brief outline for what I'm thinking of doing my paper on:

Basically after talking about Socially Optimized Research in class last Wednesday, I got this impression that this is what Captain Ahab did preparing for his voyage to get Moby Dick. First he had to "tell people" about the trip. He searched high and low for different crew members to join him (even if they didn't initially know they were going on a trek for an unbeatable white whale) who had a love for the sea and training in whaling. Next step is "curating research." There's a quote in chapter 44 about how Ahab has "large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts" and books and and logs of sperm whale sightings. Then we have "searching new media and social networks" (content vs people) which to me would be the first mates (specifically Starbuck) who have more insight on this quest, but still aren't scholars on Moby Dick (this is a little different from my initial notes above - more specific and less about all the crew members who fit better in the "tell people" stage). In addition to that, I thought of the log and the line in chapter 125 and how Ahab went from a compass to "new media" using the log and the line to get pointed in the right direction again. Last is searching traditional scholarship. All the ship captains Ahab talks with during the voyage would, to me, be the traditional sources he would go to for specific information about the whale because these ships like the Rachel (ha I said Rebecca in my notes - ignore that) actually encounter the whale.

Anyway, I'm still working on an exact thesis statement and the "so what," but any thoughts? If you think I'm stretching it please let me know. Good luck to you all on your own papers! I've seen some really excellent ideas.

Which Character are You?

I found this article by Wil Gesler focusing on how Melville's novel can be used in geography classes to explore these five themes: "the journey, human/environment interactions, social relationships in space, acquiring knowledge, and ambiguities and their resolution." I decided to take on the Journey theme and use it as a "which character are you" kind of set up.

Captain Ahab: Gesler states Ahab "will use every means at his disposal to find and kill the white whale" (pg 30). He points out that in Chapter 44 on page 177 that the captain has brought out "a large wrinkled roll of yellowish sea charts...intently study[ing] the various lines and shadings...and with slow but steady pencil trace additional courses over spaces that before were blank." He also has piles of books which contains his research on other ships and their voyages, as well as logs of where sperm whales have been caught or spotted. I would liken him to an internet user who can find plenty of information on the internet, who participates in the world of digital culture, but maybe spends too much time thinking about the internet and all its possibilities rather than the consequences of spending hours online and not also living in the world outside of digital life.

Ishmael: Ishmael is on this journey, but for two contradicting reasons.  In the first chapter on page 5 Ishmael stays "I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage...I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment...chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself." So he is on this journey because he wants to be and is interested in whaling, but also because Fate made him go. So to liken this to our class, I'm going to make the connection that Ishmaels of digital culture are the ones who are only interested in "mainstream internet sites" like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Youtube, or Wikipedia. But when they start thinking about the "fates," like the importance of digital culture or all the other aspects of the web like crowdsourcing or consuming, the Ishmaels don't really know what to say about it yet. But at least the Ishmaels are engaged with the internet and willing to explore it by going on different long tail tangents.

(sorry, couldn't get a white whale!)

Starbuck, Stubb, and the crew of Pequod: Chapter 38 has Starbuck realizing he is bound to this journey despite feelings it is suicidal and mad: "Oh! I plainly see my miserable office, - to obey, rebelling; and worse yet, to hate with a touch of pity!" And we have Stubb in chapter 39 believing that what will be will be: "I know not all that may be coming, but be it what it will, I'll go to it laughing." So for you crewmembers of the internet, you all must be in this digital culture journey for the ride. You don't know how far in you'll go, and maybe you'll end up lost in the surf of the digital sea, but at least you'll go down with a smile.


Maybe you guys would like to look at the other four themes? Or add on to this one - what was your journey through reading Moby Dick or getting through the first unit of this class? Which character are you?

Catching Our Moby Dicks of the Internet

I really appreciated this post because it briefly puts together the things we've discussed in class and on our blog posts. And considering what we've read recently about the long tail in digital culture, I'd like address the ideas of isolation and collaboration with the long tail concept (allowing products that may be overlooked in favor of "the hits" and mainstream materials to become marketable).

We have mentioned a bit how modern technology can make the world a bigger or smaller place. Indulge with me on a terribly written extended metaphor: In Moby Dick we have a group of sailors from different backgrounds (Harvard educated, sailing educated, not at all), different religions (Christian, tribal Pagan), different ethnicity (South Sea Islander, African tribal) all thrown together in one ship Pequod. So we have everyone from all over the world tossed into the surf of the internet. It brings us all together with emails, blog posts, recipe exchanges (Dough-Boy cup of Aunt Charity's ginger-water anyone?), news, etc. We all collaborate together to catch our own personal Moby Dicks of the internet: on a quest for that one whale song you've never heard before unlike any other whale song? want to tackle the impossible project using google docs harpoons and JSTOR?

Maybe I'm just being silly, but we've been told Moby Dick is technology, not just a part of it. So I will continue my metaphor to explain that with collaboration and making the world a smaller place, there is still isolation created from the wonderful space of digital life.

While we're out surfing the internet, on the Pequod in the middle of the ocean, we are cut off from the homeland. I can easily sit in a room with a group of my friends, not talk to each other, and all be on our laptops talking to other people. We are isolated from one another and we're physically in the same room! The ones in the ship, on the internet, we all have one thing in common: a song, an interest, a political group, crowdsourcing to get money to fund a project. The people we leave at home though are where we are known. Ishmael joins this crew of essentially strangers. They don't even know their own captain until chapter 28, don't mention the goal to get Moby Dick until chapter 41. Where is Ishmael's family? How did Queequeg and Tashtego and Daggoo end up on this crew? Are these guys creating avatars for themselves while on this ship? How much does the reader actually know about these crazy crew mates?

As powerful and adventurous the web is, we should also make sure we don't lose ourselves to the high seas and excitement. I'm not saying a good sailing trip isn't healthy. However, where Ishmael has "nothing particular to interest [him] on shore," (pg 1) we do. I'm guilty of spending too much time in front of a screen to find out who I am and what I like, rather than going out into the world and exploring myself. I don't need to sail for hours on the ocean of the web "whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul" (pg 1). There are people to talk to, things to see, and homework to do...though the homework bit might not make my drizzly November soul any more summertime June.

Crowdsourcing with Moby Dick

Our Wednesday class talked about crowdsourcing - getting information/input for a task/project/idea by seeking out the services of people, paid or unpaid, on the Internet. I think it's such a coincidence because I was surfing the internet for ways people of today have incorporated Moby Dick into life today and came across this video. It's a group of guys called King Post appealing to people of the internet for funding of a Moby Dick card game! How fun is that? Crowdsourcing and the book we're studying all in one.

So I tried to get the link above to be a direct video to here, but I couldn't figure it out without using Youtube. So I searched Youtube to see if King Post had the same video on there. I found them but they didn't have this video. Instead they have a channel of information about the game and book. So not only are they crowdsourcing, but they are using different databases to get their message out to appeal to more people and get more viewers.

Their crowdsourcing got them the funding they needed to make their card game possible. This just shows the power of the internet and how effective this method is of getting your ideas out there and getting the support you need to make stuff happen!

Avatars of Moby Dick

In our recent class discussions about creating our own internet avatars and how that defines us, I thought about all the avatars Moby Dick creates for itself.

First, the characters. Ishmael right off the bat creates his avatar by saying "Call me Ishmael." He makes a biblical allusion to call him the son of Abraham. Then there's his character development. He is educated, religious, but then rambles and goes on tangents about education and religion and whaling. All of this creates an image of him. Who is he really then? This jouney has become his Harvard. What does that say about who he is or what he wants others to think about him?

Second, the book itself. We have already discussed how Moby Dick has elements of an allegory, epic, novel, and recently play. Which avatar do we focus on? The fact that this is mostly an epic novel can make readers focus on its purpose as an attempt to harness nature and make a deep connection withnature in the story. If we focus on avatar allegory, readers focus on its purpose as a story with symbols to represent abstract ideas. As a book with stage direction like a play we see building drama. All of these avatars combined though is what makes the book a unique and forces us to look at ALL these elements.

So with our own avatars, whether on Facebook or Twitter or Tumblr, each avatar reflects different pieces of ourselves. Maybe the same way having so many avatars on the internet feels overwhelming also reflects how the avatars of Moby Dick makes it a difficult book to classify and overwhelms us with its many definitions.

Classifying Literature and Blogs

This post is inspired by our fellow Team Stubb mates Victoria and Brittany (find their post here and here respectively). They both made great points in the debate on categorizing Moby Dick as a novel, and more generally speaking, the debate on making these types of classifications at all. Personally, I like the idea of having classifications for books. It sets up a basic framework for writers. Even if Moby Dick fits into many categories such as myth or allegory or epic, I would say overall it generally serves as a novel. That statement itself can be room for debate (one that would be better suited to discuss in the posts earlier mentioned); however, I want to focus on another question. If our current standards and classifications of literature are "flawed" and currently evolving to mixing genres, then when will it start including blog posts and other internet driven writing into such categories? Have these categories already been made?

I liked on the first day of class, Dr Burton posed this sort of idea: out of the best books we learn knowledge - now switch "books" to "blogs." Out of the best blogs we learn knowledge. Some of the class seemed to mentally repel that idea. Maybe that's just my imagination. Think about it, though. I've read blog posts, personal essays, and other pieces on the internet that, to me, were worth more merit than what I've suffered through studying Romantic era poetry. Yet authors from hundreds of years ago are considered literary geniuses. What of the authors today? What of the authors that aren't the professionals submitting items for publications and just posting them right on the internet for anyone to find?

I've been told by many professors that literature is work charged with meaning. If a simple blog post has just as much or more meaning than what Melville or Shakespeare or Austen have to say, do we get to log that into literary categories recognized as something important enough to call a novel or nonfiction or classic? Or does everything in the digital age get categorized as hopeful writers, nobody's, fanboys and fangirls putting whatever they want online?

Syntax of Moby Dick and the Internet

This is my first time reading Moby Dick and my initial thoughts are all about the language of the story.

Reading the novel makes me feel like I'm listening to a drunk but educated stranger turned sailor. It's full of tangents and interruptions, rambling analysis and dramatic self reflections. Intriguing as it is, sometimes I get a little lost in the commas and semicolons. The first page sets the reader up for a long, syntactical journey: "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can." Readers have to take time to listen to the pauses. They have to connect the bits of sentences to one another. The fact that the novel is first person narrative also puts into perspective how the story is filtered - through an unreliable narrator that from his first sentence ("Call me Ishmael") implies that there is a story to him readers won't ever fully know or understand.

Relating it to the digital culture of today, I think we have a lot of blogs and personal posts on the internet that follow suit with Moby Dick's syntax. Many posts go unfiltered. They are in first person. People don't take time using spell check or grammar check before uploading a tweet or facebook status. Posts can ramble on (like mine right now actually). Comments underneath Youtube videos or new articles turn into tangents and spitfire arguments (like the tangents in the book). There are exceptions of course. This class is an example of that; posts are aimed towards a professor/university student level to give in depth analysis of Moby Dick (or literature in general) and our observations and understanding of digital culture and digital humanities so we tend to watch our posts for vocabulary and grammar. It's just interesting to see how the commonplace and upfront speech in this novel reflect the colloquial language of half the internet.

Also, I happened to find this blog post about tangent tendencies in classic literature and thought it was nice to get other examples of this - and to see I'm not the only one blogging about this!