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The 19 Voyages of Henry James
Shawna RossArizona State University
June 11, 2015
Twitter handle: @ShawnaRoss
Larger projecttransatlantic travel institutions
• Literature foregrounds the institutions of transatlantic travel to critique transnational political, economic, and demographic systems.
• Writers put the ocean liner to work as a machine for transnational thought by recovering the international tensions at play in ships whose construction attempted to hide these tensions.
Why Henry James?• Content– “The Patagonia,” “Pandora,” letters
• Style– Figurative language, model of
consciousness
The Spreadsheet
Why an interactive map?
• Multiple audiences: scholars, students, public
• New currents in literary criticism– Transnational modernism, oceanic
studies
• Digital humanities– Non-empirical approach to data– Archive-centered app design
Richly textured archival approach…
“The Arabia, and Cunard Steamships,” Scientific American (8.25): 5 March 1853.
Upload: A “take all comers” model
• http://color.hailpixel.com/• Stories, letters, criticism• Wikimedia commons– http://commons.wikimedia.org/
• NYC Passenger Lists – Internet Archive
• My Aunt Robin’s cool silhouette of Henry James (Katherine McLellen, 1911 [not 1905], Smith College Museum of Art)
Nifty picture? LET’S DO THIS THING.
“History of American Steam Navigation,” Illustrated London News, vol. 16, May 1850: 368.
Psychological QHow to maintain desire?
• So. Much. Time– No progress no reward
• Discovery by interacting with data? No more.– Research: me-facing– Presentation: public-facing
• Must we script what people learn?– Exhibits & expertise– Spreadsheets & spontaneity
Psychological A
• Each platform has ideal time per day• Public buy-in– Casual learning a high possibility– Don’t use public buy-in as an excuse for
laziness in app/site/exhibit design
• Basic job as a teacher– Structuring but not controlling learning
• But not wholly a teacher– K-12: possible doesn’t mean you must do it
Technical Q:Tools reveal my conceptual shallowness
• Overkill– Difficult to ignore, bypass, or switch off
irrelevant Omeka/Neatline features
• What is my unit of analysis?– Literary text, geographic point, voyage,
ship?
• Omeka assumes 1x (item) = 1y (collection)– Ship : James voyage = 1:1– Ship : shipyard ≠ 1:1
Technical A:
• Understand that technical mastery will not lead automatically to humanistic insight– But I still must understand various steam engines in
each issue of Popular Mechanics!
• “What is my unit of analysis?” still rules– Decide whether to foreground discrete unit (each
journey) or comparison (technology, nationality, formality?)
• Theory of Data Relativity– My items are sometimes particles, sometimes waves– Dublin core: all particles, all the time
Results:Embrace the idiosyncrasy!
• Not a map? It’s not fundamentally geographical?– Level of intervention (work by hand) may not
necessarily be the same as the mode of presentation
– Most “shiny” part might be automated
• Interactive ships– Draw me silhouettes!
• My unit of analysis may be a ship• My only 1:1 relationship = voyage:ship
• Radical subjectivity of archive– Indulgent metadata as scholarship