This move forward is especially exciting for me as I look to improve and deepen my TEI skills. Luckily, the experts in UVic’s HCMC will be on hand to give advice and support, and my graduate student Caley (a dab-hand at TEI) will be working next to me in the HCMC Lab. We are grateful to Bethany Nowviski, who on a recent visit to UVic as a Landsdowne Speaker suggested to me the anthology potential of the database suggestion PressBook as a good tool. We’re not sure yet what shape the anthology will take, but we’re eager to press ahead with this next stage.

And, then, coming up, we’re asking our most pressing research questions: (1) what does periodical poetry tell us about canonical Victorian poetry, and the relationship between volumes of poetry and popular poems in serial print? Do new models of poetics emerge? (2) What are the best-selling, and arguably greatest circulating, Victorian poems, if serial print is taken into account? (3) can computers perform close reading as well as quantitative reading?

Caley and I are also busy with the submissions for the special issue of Victorian Poetry on periodical print, due to be published in the Spring of 2014.

In “A Candlemas Dialogue,” the speaker struggles to conform to Christ’s will because of personal grief.  Christ’s voice asks her, “cannot love make thee / Carol for joy to me?”  Though the speaker has “compassed death,” she must remember that she has received the “tree of life’s own bough” in the cross.  This possession allows her to “give more and yet more” out of her “store.”  If the speaker wants to acquire God’s comfort and grace she must acknowledge what she has already been given and give that to God through charity.  The speaker answers Christ:

Because thou givest me Thyself, I will

Thy blessed word fulfill,

Give with both hands, and hoard by giving still:

Thy pleasure to fulfill,

And work Thy Will (26-30). 

She surrenders her personal story of grief to God’s larger story of the resurrection; she surrenders the life God has given her back to God.  MacLeod’s “Victus Victor” captures a similar bending of human will to divine command in the story of Father Damien, a priest who served the lepers on the island of Molokai and whose death in 1889 inspired MacLeod’s poem.  Mary Macleod’s “Victus Victor” captures a similar bending of human will to divine command in the story of Father Damien, a priest who served the leapers on the island of Molokai and died the year Macleod published her poem.  The speaker, Father Damien, resigns himself to his task: “no way but this?  What matter? Let it be” (1).  He diminishes his own role in charity to leave room for God’s miracles declaring:

Not mine to ease them for their mortal pain,

Not mine to bid the dead life live again—

But faithful love shall never toil in vain (16-18).

Father Damien has no powers of his own, no will of his own, except his faith in God.  Like the speaker of “A Candlemas Dialogue,” he imagines his reward as a union with God, a further self-effacement, in the  “sweetest gift” that  “God doth keep— / No earthly crown but His dear gift of—Sleep” (26-27).  In desiring sleep, Father Damien hopes that he can surrender to God in both his physical good works in earthly life earth and in a surrender of his soul in spiritual life.

While “A Candlemas Dialogue” and “Victus Victor” discuss surrender to God though charity, “Exultate Deo” and “In Winter” focus more explicitly on the spiritual accomplishment of surrender.  “Exultate Deo” compares the devotion of flowers, birds and sheep give to God simply by possessing “perfume and song and whiteness” (5) to man’s need to “ mount to prayer and praise” by “loftier ways” (9) since he “hath will and memory” (7). Man can only “walk in white” (12) when he enters into the “deep unto deep responsive” union with God (11).  The faithful must use the intellect to discipline mind and body into prayer.  Macleod’s “In Winter” works similarly as the winter, symbolic of the calming presence of God in death, shrouds the earth that “crowded pleasures” on the speaker’s sight (2). “Winter’s wings of healing” bring the speaker “their gift of peace” (31-21) if she can distance herself from the sensory delights of “life’s first dawn” and “summer’s mirth,” which prove “cold” (25-26).  While charity forms an essential component of religious surrender poems, the surrender must also restrain the intellectual and sensory faculties to make room for the spiritual.

All four of these poems exhibit this discipline in their form as well as their content.  Each stanza of “A Candlemas Dialoge” and “Victus Victor” employs only one rhyme.  Thus, every line in the first stanza of “A Candlemas Dialogue” ends with a rhyme for “thee”; every line in the second stanza rhymes with “voice.”  Macleod structures “Victus Victor” in triplets and never breaks rhyme. “Exultate Deo” rhyme scheme abcbcc deceff demonstrates Rossetti’s ability to mirror the two stanzas with a subtle shift.  “In Winter” adheres to the ababcdcd pattern conventional in women’s periodical poetry at the time.  According to Kathryn Ledbetter, the periodical poems often followed more conventional forms because they were meant to be “descriptive rather than metaphoric, conversational rather than rhetorical” (11).  These kinds of poems, argues Ledbetter, confirmed rather than challenged the image of women as saviors of civilization capable of submitting to home, country and Christianity (9).

Though Christianity encourages both males and females to submit to the will of God, the practice of charitable and spiritual surrender is most often associated with women.  In the Bible it is the Virgin Mary, after all, who first complies with the Christian project.  She responds to Gabriel, “behold the handmaiden of the Lord; be it done unto me according to thy word” (Luke 1:38).  For middle-class, Anglican Victorians, women more and more often represented moral and spiritual discipline.  The education of women became central to solidifying their role as guides to a more just, civilized, and ethical society.  In Educating the Proper Woman Reader, Jennifer Phegley traces the development of women’s education through the periodicals aimed at them.  They served as  “tools to help women become culturally literate” through providing articles on science and health, reproducing great works of art, and including good, appropriate literature (Phegley 15).  L.T. Meade, the editor of Atalanta from its founding to 1893, had long been involved in furthering education for women and girls.   The “Atalanta Scholarship and Reading Union,” which features in every issue, provided questions about literary texts for further study and offered scholarships for excellent essays on these topics. Women’s periodicals provided a space for a woman to read and write “for herself and in her own language” (Ledbetter 13).  Better-educated women could provide better cultural, moral education for their children and hence halt what the late Victorians perceived as the gradual decay of society (Phegley 16). Because men often delayed marriage to spend more time professionalizing to enter the comfortable middle class, education became a productive task for women to engage in as they waited for marriage (84).  Even if some women could not marry, they still needed to participate in the civilizing mission.  Since the 1860s, the Victorians worried about what they called “redundant women” (Phegley 88).  Because of the higher survival rate of female babies, the immigration of men to the colonies, and male deaths in war, women outnumbered men (88). Many of the careers for girls suggested in Atalanta, such as sick-nursing in the November 1887 issue (Volume 1: 112) and teaching needlework in September 1888 (Volume 1: 715), played into the growing assumption that single women’s jobs would function as charitable outreach (Phegley 153).  ).  Rossetti herself participated in this kind of charitable work when she helped rescue fallen women in the Magdalen Movement (Ledbetter 85). Even as the culture gave women more advantages, it demanded that women return these advantages through motherhood, financial independence, and charity work.  This receiving of gifts only to surrender them again mirrors the surrender to God’s will in “A Candlemas Dialogue” and “Victus Victor.”

The more spiritual surrender in “Exultate Deo” and “In Winter” also fit into the broader context of women as saviors.  Ledbetter identifies an essential connection between women, poetry and religion (1).  Since women possessed a more simplistic faith, they could attain the most perfect expression of divine grace (73).  This expression of “a calm surrender to life’s events” (78), according to Ledbetter, was the real treasure God demanded from women (74). If women could accomplish surrender socially and expressively, perhaps they could teach men to do the same.  Poetry provided a medium for women to express Christian morals (2), but it also provided a place to practice the surrender of the soul, since, as Dinah Roe argues in Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination (12), both religion and poetry demand the curbing of freedoms (either in lifestyle or form) in acknowledgement of a greater mystery (faith or poetic meaning). The Victorians did not only wish to progress in terms of finance, intellect and social justice.  They also wanted to progress in their ability to connect to God.  This connection would allow for progress in all other aspects of life (Ledbetter 69-70).  And women and their writing held the key to that salvation.

While Rossetti Macleod’s poems in Atalanta do mirror these contemporary realities, they also take on a more active role than reflection: they wrestle with the stresses young readers of Atalanta faced in surrendering their newly educated minds to society, their individual souls to God. In “A Candlemas Dialogue” and “Victus Victor” the strict forms of the poems occasionally inhibit expression.  The individual will, represented by the content of the poem, should fully complement the form of the poem, representative of God’s will.  However, in “A Candlemas Dialogue” and “Victus Victor” some of the rhymes indicate that the conformity makes the expression of content awkward or repetitive.  In the fourth stanza of Rossetti’s poem the syntax of the sentence fumbles to incorporate the rhyme.  Lines 29 and 20 read, “not empty, Lord, to-day / Send me away” when the sense of these lines would read, “Lord, to-day do not send me away empty.”  Similarly, lines four and five of “Victus Victor” confuse verb and object: “O knight of god, than death a deadlier foe / With poisoned breath shall lay thy valor low.”  If the poem did not have to rhyme in triplets these lines could read “O knight of God, a deadlier foe than death / With poisoned breath shall lay thy valor low.”  The persistence of single rhymes in both these poems also results in repetition.  Rossetti reuses “thee,” “me,” “voice,” “rejoice,” “bough,” “thou,” “fulfill” and “store,” again and again throughout “A Candlemas Dialogue.”  Macleod repeats “foe” and “low.”  Even as these repetitions and syntax inversions muddle the sense of the poem, they add to the religious significance of the form.  The repetition creates a meditative effect; the inversion mimics the syntax of Latin, the language of the early Church.

“Exultate Deo” and “In Winter” contain conflicts between ideas rather than form.  In “Exultate Deo,” the comparison of the faith of flowers, birds and sheep with the faith of man reveals a complex relationship.   Man’s faith, “deep unto deep responsive” (11), provides a more rewarding relationship.  The faith of the natural world, while more shallow, is easier to attain.  The flowers, birds, and sheep attain their faith by default, simply by being what they are.  Man has to “mount” up to faith, indicating a struggle.  He must rise to God as  “fire” rises  “unto fire” (10) and “height to height” (11).  Man must continually face his near-equality to God and renounce his own power.   The line “fire unto fire” implies a burning of the fire of man in the fire of God.  Just as a fire burns to white ash, so must man burn “until he walk in white” (12).  For Man, and for the presumably female speaker, the surrender to God requires labor and pain.  The speaker’s intimate knowledge of the struggle in human faith challenges the idea that women, like the natural world, serve God without strain. The poem’s simultaneous pity and envy for simpler faith distances the speaker from it and instead identifies her with man’s experience.   In “In Winter” the speaker also acknowledges the pain in spiritual surrender. Though winter’s peace relieves her of the “fretting cares of life” (18), it also removes “the idle wishes thronging” (19).  To attain the peace of winter—the peace of God—the speaker must deny her wishes and dispose of them with her cares just as “the thorns and roses” enclose in “one grave…beneath the winter snow” (23-24).  While the speaker praises the calmness of winter, she also mentions the “autumn gales” that mark its beginning and “reft us / of all we loved on earth.”  As in “A Candlemas Dialogue,” while the outcome of surrender allows peace and connection, the process of undergoing this surrender pains the speaker.

When placed in dialogue with Rossetti’s religious poetry and the tradition of women’s periodical poetry in the late nineteenth century, Mary MacLeod’s work sheds light on how religious surrender in the “high culture” poems of Rossetti may have found a wider audience in the periodicals.  Most importantly, the poems in Atalanta do not merely reflect these concerns, but also provide a model for working through them.

-Raya M, Research Assistant for VPN at the University of Victoria

           Works Cited

Ledbetter, Kathryn.  British Victorian Women’s Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization and

            Poetry.  New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.  Palgrave Connect.  15

November 2012.  Online.

Macleod, Mary.  “The Death of Abel.”  Kind Words for Young People (January 1879):

14-15.  19^th Century UK Periodicals.  15 November 2012.  Online.

— .“The Garden of Sleep.”  Atalanta Volume 4. Issue 41 (February 1891): 331.

— .  In Winter.”  Atalanta Volume 1. Issue 4 (January 1888): 186

— . “Victus Victor.”  Atalanta Volume 2. Issue 10. (July 1889): 503..

Phegley, Jennifer.  Educating the Proper Woman Reader: Victorian Family Literary

            Magazines and the Cultural Health of the Nation.  Columbus, Ohio: the Ohio

State University Press, 2004.

Roe, Dinah.  Christina Rossetti’s Faithful Imagination: Devotional Poetry and Prose. 

London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Rossetti, Christina.  “A Candlemas Dialogue.”  Atalanta Volume 1. Issue 5 (February

1888): 264.

— .  “Exultate Deo.”  Atalanta Volume 2. Issue 1 (October 1888): 3.

Joanna Baillie (engraving after a portrait by William Newton, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

How many teachers of Victorian poetry ensure they represent Scottish poetry in their syllabus? Probably women feature heavily on course reading lists, but what about Scottish women poets? And how to define Victorian Scottish women writers in any case?

My friend and former colleague Dorothy McMillan edited (with Michael Byrne) the definitive edition of Modern Scottish Women Poets. But their sense of “modern” begins with the Gaelic poet Oighrig (nÌ ‘Illeasabaig) Dhòmhnallach (Euphemia MacDonald) (1842-1936) and Violet Jacob (1863-1943). This anthology is bursting with a huge variety of Scottish women’s poetry, but most of the poets flourished in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What about poets writing in the previous century?

Catherine Kerrigan’s Anthology of Scottish Women Poets, published in 1991, has a broader historical sweep, and includes a particularly interesting selection of anonymous folksong, but the material from the nineteenth century makes up only a fraction of the overall poems.

What would a canon of Victorian Scottish women poets look like?

This is the first of two years as UVic’s Faculty Fellowship in Scottish Studies Fellow, and part of the requirements of the fellowship is to put more Scottish courses on the books. This semester I’m teaching a course on Scottish women’s poetry from the early nineteenth century to the present (the website for the course, currently in-progress and created by my enthusiastic and diligent students, is available here). This course has made me think more closely about what it means to identify a poet as Scottish, about the construction of Scottish nationhood (especially post-Union), and whether there are identifiable traditions of Scottish women’s poetry across class and regional boundaries. But, perhaps even more pressingly, there are clear lines of contact between women’s poetry in Scots, Anglo-Scots, and Gaelic, and women’s poetry considered canonical in Victorian Britain, especially in relation to issues of voice, community and orality (in particular as Scottish women’s poetry negotiates the heavy shadow of Burns and Scott).

The nineteenth-century poets I’m including in my course are Joanna Baillie, Carolina Oliphant (Lady Nairne), Janet Hamilton, Ellen Johnston,  Mairi Nic A’ Pheasrsain (Mary MacPherson), Eliza Ogilvy, Isa Craig, Marion Burnstein, plus periodical poets who published in Good Words and Chambers’ Edinburgh Journal. But there were many more I was tempted to squeeze in. (The digital resource Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, for example, illustrates the richness of the pre-Victorian era; I wish there was an equivalent for the Victorian period).

Creating a comprehensive anthology of Victorian — or indeed of nineteenth-century — women poets would, however, be challenging. Firstly, many women published songs and ballads (key genres for the period and part of the post-Union Scottish literary revival) as anonymous or pseudonymous writers, often passing their texts to collectors and antiquarians through a third party. In addition, many poems based on oral poetry involve sometimes complex re-tellings, revisions, and additions to traditional folk ballads and songs, which makes tracing authorship a tricky business (many of these poems are collaborative and collective, in fact). Finally, with the rise of periodical titles in the nineteenth century as a major venue for poetry publishing and consumption, many Scottish women poets took advantage of serial titles as an avenue for publication, and most of these women never published in volume form and often published unsigned periodical poetry. Creating a full and complete sense of poetry by Scottish women writers (say, tentatively, those born in Scotland, those who moved to Scotland, those who wrote in Scots dialects/Anglo-Scots/Gaelic) may be impossible.

But that’s not, of course, a reason to ignore them in research and teaching. The poetry of Scottish women is fascinating, and forces us to rethinking Victorian British poetry in terms of the four nations, concurrent with the push to consider international and colonial Victorian poetry in English.

Works Cited

Catherine Kerrigan (ed.). An Anthology of Scottish Women Poets. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991.

Dorothy McMillan and Michael Byrne (eds.). Modern Scottish Women Poets. Edinburgh: Canongate Classics, 2003.

Poets whose information has been recently updated include a wide range of names, from occasional poets (who were often reader-contributors of the periodical, as found in the “Brown Owl” section of Atalanta), prolific periodical poets who are largely unknown to us today (e.g. Edward Capern’s contributions to Good Words), co-authors (such as Menella Bute Smedley and her sister Elizabeth Anna Hart), pseudonymous poets (“By a Railway Surfaceman” is a compelling example), and more canonical Victorian poets (including Sydney Dobell, Charles [Tennyson] Turner William Morris, Edith Nesbit, Augusta Webster, and Rosamund Marriott Watson). While the biographical information for many periodical poets can be uncovered (the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Orlando Project, and Catherine W. Reilly’s bibliographies have been some of the essential tools for this detective work), there are poets about whom little will probably ever be known. In particular, those who published with initials (a common practice in periodical poetry publishing) are tricky to identify, and there are many, many of them (A. D., A. E. G., A. H. J.,  A. F., A. B. H., A. L., A. M. ‘K, A. M. ‘L……..and these are just some examples from those poets whose initials begin with “A”). That being said, if you do know anything about any of the authors unidentified in the database, I should be very glad to hear from you!

Searching for the identities of poets aside, a more important aspect of the range of poets represented in the Database — which currently aims to offer only a representative sample of the periodicals that published poetry in the Victorian period — is what it tells us about the culture of Victorian poetry, about what was popularly consumed, about changing trends in poetry publishing, and about shifts in the kinds of poetry illustration. For example, currently the Database has 857 poems known to be by women and 1,191 known to be by men. While this number (and probably also the ratio) will change as we gather more information, the Database will make possible quantitative data about Victorian poetry, and make accessible the poetry and illustrations themselves.

Next year marks the 20th anniversary of Isobel Armstrong’s monumental study Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics, and it’s hard to underestimate the impact the book has had on the field. When I noticed that the study — which I read and cite regularly, and frequently recommend to students — was almost 20 years old, I was taken rather aback. After all, I first devoured the book as a fresh-faced graduate student, and was immediately in awe of the book’s capacious breadth, close engagement with deep structures of Victorian poetic language, and bold assertion that the study of Victorian poetics is inherently political. More established scholars agreed. The special panel at the 2002 MLA Convention dedicated to her work on poetry, and the conference in her honour held at Birkbeck College on 21 June 2002 (Radical Aesthetics: The Work of Isobel Armstrong), as well as the frequency with which Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, Politics is still cited and debated, speak volumes.

But what has been the influence of the book’s concept of Victorian poetics? What are the major publications in Victorian poetry studies since her book was published, and how has our understanding of poetry, poetics and politics shifted?

I’ve been thinking too about how these questions relate to scholarly editions of Victorian poetry as well as to digital initiatives. What does the poetry canon look like now? How would we teach a course on Victorian poetry AND poetics?

At the moment I’m working on a review essay of Victorian poetry studies in the last twenty years, so these issues are very much on my mind. I’ve devised the beginnings of a timeline of important Victorian poetry studies contributions since 1993 and although it’s very incomplete (even as I type this I think of books and digital projects that I need to add), I think it might begin to suggest possible swerves, shifts and trends in the field.

You can see the timeline here. Comments, suggestions, additions welcome.

The only significant downside was the platform used, which made navigation through the wiki a tricky business. There are two new developments this semester, which we’re really excited about. First, the wiki platform has moved to wikispaces, where you will find the new home of The Victorian Poetry, Poetics and Contexts Wiki. And, second, the wiki is a collaborative effort of a team of multi-institutional Victorian poetry instructors (the editors and vetters) and their students. Our team so far is myself, as general editor, with the enthusiastic and adventurous editor-instructors Caley Ehnes, Melissa Gregory, Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi, Yisrael Levin and Andrea Rehn.

Over the last few months we’ve been planning out the wiki and thinking over some thorny pedagogical issues. This phase of the wiki is experimental, and that future versions will probably involve more student team work and peer editing — something which a cross-institutional project makes particularly appealing. We’re still thinking over what role graduate students might play in the wiki in the future. We’re also figuring out to what extent the wiki needs rules, protocols, and frameworks to make it academically useful to other students, but balancing this with the wiki tradition of a community of author-centred writing. Ultimately the editors would hope to write about what we’ve learned from the wiki project in a collaborative essay on digital pedagogy.

Our aim overall is (1) to create a one-stop resource specifically for Victorian poetry readers and students (undergraduate and graduate) on wide number of topics on the poetry, poetics and contexts of the period; (2) to offer students the opportunity of writing encyclopedic-style essays, fact-driven and explanatory (some instructors are positioning the wiki entry as the lead assignment in a course, and others using the entry as preparation for a longer, more interpretative research essay); (3) to increase the profile of Victorian poetry studies on the web.

We would like to hear from any other instructor who would like to collaborate with us in the future.

Until this semester my experience has been hit and miss. I’ve often found a radical disconnect between the world of the blog — with its often well-researched, feisty and extensive blog posts and comments from students, responding both to my blog posts and to each other’s — and the world of the seminar. Even when I’ve tried to intervene overtly to bring the blog and the live classroom together (by photocopying and distributing paper copies of comment streams in class, or prompting classroom discussion on the website) there’s often an awkward tension between the students’ digital presence and their contributions in person.

And then I decided not to fight this disconnect, especially after hearing from other colleagues that it was common. Instead, this semester, I’ve set up a Victorian poetry wordpress blog to fulfil more limited functions: to create an archive of course material, to blog my summaries of class discussion and pose further questions, to offer more research material and resources, and to try to support student poetry reading and comprehension. Although I’ve invited students to comment, I’m not expected it or requiring it. Let’s see what happens. Sometimes, students are so overloaded with course reading, preparing for assignments, getting their thoughts straight for classroom discussion and workshops, that remembering to post blog comments can be too much pressure. Perhaps in the future I’ll require that student blog posts and comments are part of the course assignments, but at the moment I feel more committed to my assignment mixture of close readings, wiki entries (more about this coming soon) and research essays. I’m content to experiment with this course blog as a supplementary resource rather than a required student talking-shop. Perhaps that’s one of the problems with new pedagogical digital tools, that the expectation of (or pressure to) participate can be counter productive.

My post-game-release thoughts are structured more as a report upon a research-creation project than as a formal argument about the two primary elements that informed this project, these being:

1) historical materials about Victorian elocution practices and

2) digital games

If I were to make an argument it would have to do with two things.  The first is the relationship between Victorian elocutionary practice as a remediating activity that functions at the intersection of manuscript composition, mechanical print and embodied performance, on the one hand, and screen-based mobile devices as multi-modal sites for the development of digital applications (apps) that explore the convergence of text, touch, motion and speech, on the other.  In short, this first category about which I will make some design-based observations, has to do with the status of interface as it relates to cultural and literary historical practice. The second area this project has forced me to think about is that of the possible role design, interactivity and ludic engagement can play in a practice-based branch of digital humanities research and creation.  By this, I’m asking, simply, what role can the design of an interactive interface have for literary historical research and pedagogy, alongside our more common uses of digital technologies for data mining, mapping, and other analytical purposes in our reseach?

Techniques and applications for interfacing with digital media are rapidly expanding.  Increasingly ubiquitous computing technologies in the marketplace and new kinds of interface controllers for popular entertainment (Wii, Kinect, the iPhone accelerometer/gyroscope) raise new questions about critical interface and software design, the cultural meanings of technology, and social patterns of use.  While design interests in new media interfaces are not new, the game design project I came to develop took up this component of interactive design in order to consider, specifically, the remediation of performative practice from the Victorian period into the context of a game-structured digital interface.  From my perspective as a researcher interested in Victorian recitation practice, my approach to this game design project arose initially from a simple question about methodology:  How might we, as 21^st century readers, fruitfully interpret the instructions we find in Victorian elocution manuals?  Interpret is, of course, a loaded term here, and I mean to use it so that both the hermeneutical and performative senses of the word are kept in play.  What did prescriptions for elocutionary gesture mean in the historical context of 19c rhetorical philosophy and pedagogy, in relation to Victorian literature and culture?  And, what might we do with them, or, better, what can we possibly do with them, now, in the context of digital game design?  While I have published work on the former topic before, and I’ll spend a little bit of time discussing Victorian recitation practice and elocution handbooks below, the present post will mostly focus on the latter question about the potential of integrating such materials into games on devices that are built for everyday use—on the iPhone, to be more specific.

There are numerous video games that have used historical settings for their gameplay and narrative, for example, the popular historical science fiction action-adventure game Assasin’s Creed in which a modern day assassin, the third-person protagonist Desmond Miles, uses an “Animus” device to explore the memories of assassins from his ancestral line of killers, thus transporting us back for extended periods of gameplay to the Crusades and to 15^th Century Italy.  There have been some video-game adaptations of Victorian fictional narrative (especially of Alice in Wonderland and Dracula), as well.  These examples represent one version of historical adaptation to interactive games, an approach that might be described as the augmentation of gameplay with “history-ness.”  In a recent blog post on “history-ness in videogames”, historian Michael O’Malley makes an interesting analogy between the function of historical accuracy and suggestions of verisimilitude in certain videogames like Bioshock (“steeped in an off-kilter history, the world of 1930s America with an overlay of modern genetic engineering”), with the gestures towards history, what he refers to as “fake history”, that we find in a fantasy novel like Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines.  Between Bioshock and King Solomon’s Mines,  Call of Duty and She, O’Malley says, “history plays the same augmenting role.”  The plot may be that of standard adventure romance (with King Solomon’s Mines), or, with Call of Duty, “[t]he underlying software engine [may be] the same as in fantasy games,” but in both instances, “’history’ lends an ‘aura’ to the gameplay” or adventure, it “haunts” the present (O’Malley).  Historical setting gives these videogames a certain temporal valence, but doesn’t really pertain, in any specific way, to the actions the player uses to generate movement for a sprite through the controller. While it’s no great surprise, it is still worth observing that there has been little historically-motivated exploration of Victorian performance in game interface design.  We may (historically) reenact Ringo’s kick drum in Beatles Rock Band and something of the gestures of medieval jousting and sword fighting in Wii Medieval Games, but we don’t yet have Wii Chimney Sweeper or Victorian Recitation Hero, through which we might consider the implications of adapting Victorian-era actions, pasttimes or practices into a contemporary game-play context.  That is what I set out to do, as best I could.

So, first, I will show, briefly, the end result of the project: what we made. And then I will work towards formulating a few ideas about Victorian elocution and digital interface design, that have emerged from the process of making The Victorianator.

1. The Victorianor Described

The Victorianator is an iPhone game that explores the use of gesture to trigger synthetic effects upon speech.

Gesture was a significant part of Victorian elocutionary practice.  To make this game we took specific gestures as prescribed in Victorian elocution manuals and put them at the core of our game-play.

The splash screen that you see just  below (that’s the screen that comes up when you open the game) is a kind of steampunk book cover.

The Victorianator Splash Screen: Front cover of steampunk “book”

We imagined the entire game to take place between the covers of a book, as an interactive iPhone elocution manual.   So the “About”screen is designed as the inside of the back cover of the book.

About Screen: Inside back cover of “book”

Upon entering the game a “Prologue” introduces the player to the protagonist of the game narrative, a character named Silas Shornsong, a man without means who has just arrived in London. Silas’s fate depends upon how well you perform in the game.  The narrative was written within the constraints of the game paths outlined by game designer Steph Bouchard, by creative writing student Jeremy Valentine.  To play the game the player must first select one of three poems, and then recite and record a selection from the chosen poem into the game using the record screen.

Audio recording screen

This recitation of the poem must be done in time with the scrolling brackets that progress word by word through the poem as the steampunk stylus moves down the phonograph cylinder on the right.  The recitation must be done in monotone, with as little intonational variation as possible.  We found that reciting in monotone is a difficult and fun thing to do.  This vocal activity is scored with an implemented pitch tracker which stays green if the needle stays stationary and your pitch remains steady, and turns yellow or red if your intonation changes during the course of reading the selected poem.

The tutorial screen explains the elements of the record portion of the game.

Audio recording tutorial screen

With the poem recorded the player then moves to the gesture part of the game.  Again, we considered the many different kinds of diacritical marks and symbols used in Victorian elocution manuals to annotate texts for reading, and the artist on the project developed symbols for the five gestures and vocal actions we implemented into the game.  You can see from the images below how certain elements of the visual representations of vocal qualities found in Fulton and Bashford’s Practical Elements of Elocution (1893) were integrated into the artist’s rendering of visual cues for the game.

From: Fulton and Bashford, Practical elements of elocution. Designed as a text-book for the guidance of teachers and students of expression (1893)

Artist’s adaptation of Victorian elocutionary diacritical marks

The artist on the project also designed a feedback screen that helps the player gesture at just the right moment, as the poem is played back on the iPhone.

Gesture feedback screen

We also developed a gallery of gestures that the player can visit to learn the gestures and symbols in relation to each other (from a steampunk gesturing robot).

Stills from animated gesture tutorial gallery

Performing these Victorian elocutionary gestures during the playback triggers “Victorian style” (in bold quotation marks) elocutionary effects upon the original monotone recording that the player had made.  If you perform your gestures properly, on cue, then you “Victorianate” your voice, and succeed in the game.  Framing the actual voice and gesture-play screens are additional spaces to explore in the book (such as the Diary of Silas Shornsong, pages of which are unlocked if you score well during the game), and an elaborate neo-Victorian narrative chronicling the life of Silas whose fate is determined by the user’s successes and failures in the course of playing the game.

As I mentioned above, and as you have already seen in the images provided, the design developed for the interface is in a steam-punk style, a stylistic mode that suggests anachronistic engagement from the present with an earlier historical period.

That is the game, in a nutshell.

This research-creation project involved students and professional consultants from English, Creative Writing, Computation Arts, Design, Interactive Audio Engineering, and Computer Science.  Funding for the project is a long story worth considering because it illustrates how complex funding and infrastructure support for different kinds of digital humanities research-creation projects like this can be.  I will return to the question of funding for design-oriented digital humanities projects, and the potential that digital design-oriented  projects might have for literary studies, at the very end of this post.  It’s enough to say, for now, that the goals that defined the work on this project were diverse, depending on a given team member’s home discipline.  While the collective goal of the team was to adapt certain protocols for performance from Victorian elocution manuals into an interactive game to be played on a mobile device, the more technical and task-oriented goals, beyond that of embodied historical adaptation, included the development of functional Gesture Recognition, Real-Time Voice Modification, a compelling GUI Design, and the plotting of a framing Game Narrative.

While I am not a programmer or digital designer, I found myself in the role of coordinating and overseeing the work of students who solved technical and design problems for this project, and who performed the work necessary to make this game possible.  In the process of making the game I learned enough about what the coding and design work entailed to be able to say a bit more about the technical and design elements of the game.  Following a survey of some of these technical and design elements, I will return to the development of the concept as it relates to the Victorian source materials.  So, first some more about the technical specs of the game:

Gesture Recognition:  The motions that a player performs in the game are taken directly from images and detailed instructions for gestures to be performed during literary recitation as they appear in nineteenth-century elocution manuals.  The team programmer, Michael Fortin, worked on calibrating a gesture-matching algorithm that measures accuracy of player’s performance in relation to historically paradigmatic gestures built into the game.  This involved the development of a gesture recording and percentage matching application and subsequent analysis of the data, for early testing, and then the integration of visual diacritical cues and audio feedback for gestural action in the game itself.  The questions that were most interesting to the game design students working on the project had to do with the interaction between audio feedback and gestural performance, in terms of the performance problem called “assistive feedback” (see Visell and Cooperstock).  In testing the gesture in relation to the audio, a key design question was:  how much audio can be used to direct the player to improve (even without visual feedback)?

The goals for the Audio Design programmer (Pierre-Alexandre Fournier, President of Carré Technologies Inc., our main industry partner), were to program a simple scorable pitch tracking interface for the ‘record’ mode of the game, and to generate synthetic vocal effects that are based on descriptions found in Victorian elocution manuals (the five we settled on—selected purely on the basis of what we could approximate synthetically—were: pitch-rise, pitch-fall, tremor, prolongation, and falsetto).  This entailed writing a real-time voice modification engine from the bottom up to produce the five voice effects.  Further, this engine had to process CD quality audio and had to work in real-time with what was basically the computing power of a 1994 486 CPU (Central Processing Unit:  the brain of the computer), which is not far off, in the history of computing, from one of Charles Babbage’s difference engines.  This voice engine deploys voice synthesis concepts for the pitch effects and is capable of scoring singing pitch as in a video karaoke game.  The synthetic speech “actions” generated by the voice engine function as audible, assistive feedback in the game, and are delivered with greater amplitude as the player’s gestural accuracy increases.

The audio code in Victorianator is made up of two parts:  The effects and the chaining.  The effects are what is audibly heard: the pitch, time skewing, intensity, and echo.  The chaining takes a request from the iPhone to generate audio and goes from effect to effect asking each to manipulate the spoken voice.  The pitch effect (and pitch detection) function to change the pitch of the input voice. The time distortion effects increase or decrease the amount of time that is taken to play back a sequence of audio.  This is used in pitch-rise and pitch-fall in conjunction with pitch adjustments to make the voice slightly faster (high-pitched) and slightly slower (low pitched).  The echo effect is used for vibrato.  It literally adds an echo.  We tried other algorithms to get something closer to a dry vibrato effect, but they didn’t work properly.  None of the synthetic effects that are triggered by gesture to “Victorianate” the players voice are very Victorian in quality.  For example, we were aiming for a Tremor akin to that of Victorian actor Lewis Waller reciting Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade”.  But what we ended up with is something closer to Peter Frampton’s talkbox guitar solo in “Do You Feel Like We Do”.

The chaining of the audio accomplished the more mundane task of ordering the application of the effects to the audio signal, among other things.

The Steam Punk GUI:  Steampunk is a style associated, initially, with science fiction of the 1980s, but has it roots in popular fiction of the late nineteenth-century, as well (see Nevins, 3-12).  The style approaches the technological icons and visual motifs of this first full-fledged industrialized culture analogically in order to trace ideological and sociological continuities between this early period of modernity and our own.  This style of GUI was quickly determined to be the most appropriate for a digital game that draws upon social and performative practices from the nineteenth century, in part because such an imagined historical design converged nicely with questions I am interested in about the historical transformation of the poetry reading from the Victorian period to the present.  The primary challenge of the game’s art director was to render compelling and seemingly tangible adaptations of Victorian communication technologies (such as the phonograph and the mass produced codex) for the various sections of the game in a manner that made the gameplay intuitive and historically “auratic”, to use O’Malley’s phrase.  As a digital representation of what is an actual contemporary material-based modding practice, one might say that the game offers a digital remediation of a steampunk aesthetic.  So, where Giovanni James, member of the James Gang Steampunk Vaudeville troup has steampunked his iphone  by encasing it in wood and burnished brass, The Victorianator digitizes the materials and motifs that are associated with this pre-digital aesthetic.

Steampunked iPhone by Giovanni James

We have not steampunked an iPhone but have made a digital steampunk iPhone game.  In this sense, the GUI of the game is self-consciously historiographical.

Despite the fact that the player must perform gestures that do come directly from Victorian elocution manuals, the game is in no sense “realistic”.  The most obvious difference between playing The Victorianator and performing a poem according to nineteenth-century elocutionary protocols (apart from the iPhone in your hand), is the separation of real-time speech and gesture in the game.  Another key difference is the one I already mentioned:  the inaccuracy of the vocal effects that are generated synthetically through the gesturing action.  While I grew to understand these elements to “work” within the game concept as our development progressed—and I especially came to like the separation of voice and gesture—these design elements were largely the result of what Nick Montfort and Ian Bogost describe—in their study of game design for the early Atari videogame system—as “platform constraints”.  These constraints became an important part of the process for developing the game, and had a significant impact on the space between my original motivation and concept and the end result, and are largely responsible for some of the ideas about historical reading and interface that have emerged from that gap.  So, in the remainder of this post, I will describe the significance of this design process as I have come to understand it.

2. Thoughts on Interface Generated by The Victorianator

In computer science, interface is a concept concerned with a nexus of interaction. It may refer to both hardware and software.  As I’ve already said, in making The Victoriantor, I wanted to explore the development of an interface for an interactive Victorian poetry recitation game.  This entailed an exploration of the modern history of sound games (and the models of interface they provide), including:

• Memory Games (Touch Me, Simon, Merlin…)
• Music Games (Sandbox, Mixing, Peformance)
• Rhythm Games (Dance Dance Revolution, PaRappa the Rappa)
• Pitch Games (Karaoke Revolution)
• Volume Games (Mad Maestro!, Wii Music)
• Gamebook/Radio Drama (Real Sound: Kaze no Regret)
• Social Sound Games (Rock Band)

It entailed thinking about the social element associated with the particular media interfaces, both in the nineteenth century (such as the way the phonograph and gramophone were often marketed as a social, parlor activity, akin to what actual parlor recitation might have been), and in contemporary digital games, as in the way Wii has been marketed as an activity that the whole family can enjoy together.

Magazine advertisement for the gramophone as form of social, parlor entertainment c1915

Family playing with Wii c2010

Most importantly, it entailed thinking about the difference between poetry reading in the nineteenth-century and today, and elocution as a practice that is in many ways about interface.  The technical and design-oriented elements of the project naturally pushed me to think about interface in relation to Victorian elocution and the iPhone.

As we know, modes of recitation that combined prescribed vocal actions with gesture and facial expression were once an important part of the experience and study of literature.  Elocution as a prescriptive, performative practice developed in the eighteenth century as a method for a public reader (other than the author) to convey to the Hearer the meaning of the writer.  It was, in the words of John Rice (as he put it in his work An Introduction to the Art of Reading [1865]), a method for “converting Writing into Speech” (cited in George 375). The process of this conversion involved a self-conscious performance of natural expression.  As Jacqueline George has put it, in elocution, “The reader must be at once self-consciously constructed and perfectly natural, adhering to the proper rules for reading—pronunciation, pitch, pauses, gestures—without revealing his reading to be a performance, as such” (374).  The reader, in short, attempts to function as a good (that is to say, natural, immediate) vehicle of delivery between text and audience.  In this sense elocution is all about interface. George has usefully sketched out some models for the structure of this interface, depicting relations among the participants in the public scene of reading as “quadrangular, mediated by the text and determined by the participant’s various engagements with it” (386).

Gestures as depicted in selected Victorian elocution manuals

Similarly, Ben McCorkle, has shown how “the elocutionary movement and belletristic tradition of the nineteenth century’s New Rhetoric worked in tandem as parallel and educational and cultural forces in order to naturalize the printed page…[and to render] the print interface invisible to an increasingly literate society via the remediation of handwriting and oral speech” (27).  It seems counter-intuitive to us today, when we examine the pages of elocution manuals, with their extensive categories and instructions for vocal manipulation, bodily gesture, facial expression, and symbolic systems of annotating texts for performance, to think of them as handbooks for the naturalization of print. In his introduction to the collection, Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, Charles Bernstein proposes that we look at the poetry reading not as an extension of written texts, but as a medium unto itself.  The essence of the poetry reading, according to his definition, is “its lack of spectacle, drama, and dynamic range, as exemplified especially in a certain minimal—anti-expressivist—mode of reading” (11).  We as 21st-Century readers are estranged, in significant ways, from understanding what an elocutionary model of reading meant in the nineteenth-century: what it meant in relation to print media and written composition, social decorum, and the faculty psychology that informed the particular kind of communication circuit it entailed.

But (shifting into quasi-ironic huckster voice) The Victorianator can help!  Such a game renders the player aware, not of the historical nature of elocution, so much as of the status of his or her own voice and body as it relates to expressive performance.  A Victorian recitation game for the iPhone is a most unnatural thing, and works to denaturalize the player’s experience of reading, expression, and finally of the very device upon which the game is played.  By demanding the player record a text in monotone to begin with—in getting her to speak into her iPhone like a robot—it asks her to become aware of her voice as an instrument of expression.  The very creation of a game out of elocutionary practice highlights player skill over expression as the primary goal of the action, which positions the poem as a vehicle for scored performance rather than as a repository of expression and meaning.  Further, the platform and software constraints that the iPhone posed, forced us to separate vocal action from gesture, thus decoupling two performative elements that were supposed to function in seamless unity to manifest a natural performance of printed expression.  These contraints also resulted in the less than accurate synthetic production of “Victorian” speech inflection, again, making the player aware of speech as a made artifact.  The game as a whole, delivered on the iPhone, raises questions about how the iPhone interface has so quickly become naturalized.  So much so that our immersion in the device has become an iconic joke.  (Remember, for example, the 2010 Windows advertisement in which a man drops his iPhone into the urinal he was in the process of using, picks it up, and continues texting, while the less-immersed, more “aware” Windows user  next to him responds, “Really?”)

The Victoriantor denaturalizes the iPhone interface by clumsily wedding the public/private divide, that is, by delivering a public, audience-oriented activity—that of Victorian elocution—on what we perceive to be a private device.  One can certainly play the game in public, but it will not register as a meaningful public activity.  People will wonder why you are swinging your phone boldly into the epic zone, as you wait for your bus.  While it is more comfortable to clutch your phone to your ear in private conversation, or hunch over its miniature screen and flick birds at bricks in relative oblivion to your surroundings, The Victoriantor will not allow that.  It requires you to speak and move.  Finally, the The Victorianator may be seen to address, directly, the increasing naturalization via digital technologies of the STT (speech to text) interface.  The focus of the next generation iPhone, iOS 5, is its incredible voice recognition software that will allow us to convert speech into text even more “naturally” than Nuance’s famous Dragon Naturally Speaking text to speech software.  The Victoriantor, won’t have it.  Rather than turn speech into text, it demands that you speak text in an unnatural manner, record it, and then transform it into even less natural sounding speech.  In this manner, a Victorian practice that deployed the human body as a naturalizing interface between text and audience has been mobilized in our design to denaturalize the assumed humanity of the digital devices we so unselfconsciously speak into, read, jiggle, touch and hold.

Such are the backloaded thoughts on the implications of this particular digital design project.  I came into the project with a lot of questions about digital design as it relates to my own research in Victorian studies.  I’ll close with a few more thoughts about this project as it pertains to questions of funding, and work in the digital humanities, in general.

3. Digressive Conclusion on Project Funding, and The Potential Value of Digital Design for Literary Studies

Questions don’t always enable exploration.  For example, you don’t just write a grant application stating your intention to develop a Victorian recitation and gesture game for the iPhone and expect to get funded.  It takes a certain degree of friendly infrastructure to make a project like this possible.  I have been very involved over the past several years in helping to establish a new research center at my university called the Center for Technoculture, Art and Games.  This Centre (TAG, we call it) serves as an interdisciplinary collaboration platform for research/creation in game studies and design, digital culture and interactive art.  It is a hub for students and faculty from Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computation Arts and Design, Studio Arts, Sociology, Philosophy, History, Film, Communications Studies and English and Creative Writing, among others.  It’s an exciting place, especially, I think, because the people involved are interested in exploring ways in which we can bring disciplinary research questions and creative design questions, together.  Further, through my affiliation with certain colleagues in TAG, I am a collaborator on one of 34 projects that together comprise a very large research program called GRAND (Graphics, Animation and New Media) that is funded by the Canadian federal Networks of Centre of Excellence Program.  GRAND’s self-description sounds like this (from the GRAND website):

 GRAND is a research network and commercialization engine whose goal is to address complex issues in digital media and transform multidisciplinary research into user-centred solutions. GRAND will explore the use and application of digital media in a variety of settings including entertainment, healthcare, education, environmental sustainability, and public policy.

While it is true that there is no specific mention of adapting Victorian recitation practice to the iPhone in the GRAND mission statement, the research team I collaborate with as a part of GRAND, focuses specifically on questions of interface and play.  This research group, working under the GRAND umbrella, is called “Play and Performance Interfaces for Culture and Games”, or PlayPR.  Apologies for all of the acronyms, but it comes with the territory.  Our PlayPR mandate is to explore the relationship between performance and content in digital media through case studies in game design, interactive museums, and cultural installations.  Our research focuses on spatial play, which considers the body’s movement in physical space in relation to digital media, gestural play, which considers discrete movements of bodies in relation to screen-based media and interactive installations that raises questions of how the body and its gestural motion can affect the player’s relationship to digital representations, and vocal/audio play, which considers voice as an important input channel in interfaces and explores vocality as a corporeal practice that enhances engagement and interactivity.  My own LudicVoice team is the vocal part of PlayPR, and is presently funded by GRAND and TAG.  Because I am a small cog in a much larger network of research groups, I have great freedom in how I use my annual PlayPR envelope.  I guess this last statement is obvious, considering I used my funding last year to make The Victorianator.  However, the larger research network of GRAND, which encourages researchers, programmers and artists from different disciplines and universities to share knowledge, is also a “commercialization engine”.  There is a commercialization officer who reads our project reports and tries to make connections between the often strange things we are working on in order to channel elements of them towards more utilitarian goals.  For example, I have been contacted on several occasions about The Victorianator to see if there are elements of its design and technology that might be adapted to use in the development of a game to assist children with speech pathologies.  I have grown increasingly interested in thinking about design projects from the perspective of our commercialization officer, not so much because I’m interested in making useful apps (I have nothing to show for that), but because I like the idea of repurposing layers of technology, and then thinking about the implications of such repurposing.  Where the relationship between my conceptual goals of literary historical adaptation and the limitations of technology often seemed dissonant to me when I started out on this project, I have learned to think about the tech side of things, less as a factor that inhibits the realization of a thought, than as a platform that privileges some forms of thought over others.

PlayPR is an example of a GRAND project for which a very significant part of the activity is practice-based, and prototypes and play testing are central rather than peripheral to research outcomes and activities.  My participation in PlayPR projects has  led me to ask what role interactivity and ludic engagement can play alongside more traditional approaches to research, and how design and interactivity might be understood as central, rather than peripheral to literary research and pedagogy.

I am interested in thinking more about possible answers to the question Jan Parker asks in a recent issue of Arts and Humanities in Higher Education on the topic, “Digital Humanities, Digital Futures”:  “In what ways is the digital good to think with?” (Parker 3).  I think that’s a very interesting (if vaguely phrased) question.  I would brocade Parker’s question with a few more that seem to me related, and equally interesting:  “In what ways can design—and, in particular, GUI design—be understood as a critical practice?” and  “How might performance and interactive play factor into literary critical practice?”

To answer these big questions (I won’t really be answering them here) we need first to identify some of the defining characteristics of the “more traditional approaches” taken in our discipline, literary studies.  To start with, I would say that some concept of “critical distance” in relation to what is being studied in literary studies (literary artifacts such as poems, plays, novels) is a key defining element of the “traditional approach” to literature authorized by our discipline.  It may be some variation of aesthetic criticism (which attempts to define, critically, the formal and affective elements of a work of literature), or historical criticism (which attempts to locate the literary work in a material or discursive context in order to better explain its historical meaning), but in both instances the value of critical distance prevails.  (Amanda Anderson’s The Powers of Distance is one good attempt to explain how this position of critical detachment came to accrue value.)

So, one may ask, is there anything ludic about this value of critical distance?  Let’s go to one of the sources of this value for critical practice, Matthew Arnold.  Arguably, Arnold introduced the concept of critical distance in its original, Liberal Humanist form, with his concept of “disinterestedness”.  (David Bromwich’s chapter, “A Genealogy of Disinterestedness” in A Choice of Inheritance provides one account of this intersting story.)  In ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (1865), Arnold asserts that criticism must discern a rule for its course in the future.  And then he goes on to discern it:

The rule may be summed up in one word,–disinterestedness. And how is criticism to show disinterestedness? By keeping aloof from practice; by resolutely following the law of its own nature, which is to be a free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches; by steadily refusing to lend itself to any of those ulterior, political, practical considerations about ideas … which criticism has really nothing to do with. Its business is, as I have said, simply to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas. Its business is to do this with inflexible honesty, with due ability; but its business is to do no more, and to leave alone all questions of practical consequences and applications, questions which will never fail to have due prominence given to them.

We can note the seeming (yet anachronistic) timeliness of some of Arnold’s language—the focus on “play” as a key element of his definition of a disinterested mode of criticism, and his reference to “applications”, although here he’s not talking about apps, but the practical forces that he feels are antithetical to pure critical practice.  Whatever “ludic” aspects we might try to find in Arnold, it’s clear that his conception of “a free play of the mind”–derived from German romantic critical theorists like Friedrich Schiller who argued for a necessary balance between a clear (disinterested) view of the object under critique while, at the same time “giving free play to the imagination”–is motivated by the desire to achieve the fullest critical analysis possible.

The two main branches of digital work in the humanities have been those pertaining to “humanities computing” (tool building, text analysis and encoding, etc.), on the one hand, and “new media studies and design” (often pursued by theorist-practitioners interested in exploring the nature and implications of new media), on the other.  In a recent article on “The State of the Digital Humanities” Alan Liu frames his analysis of the value and potential of both branches just mentioned in terms of their relative degrees of critical awareness.  Observing, first that the expanding domain of digital humanities must “in some manner, for better or for worse, […] serve the postindustrial state,” Liu ultimately decides that “the digital humanities are not ready to take up their full responsibility [within the discipline] because the field does not yet possess an adequate critical awareness of the larger social, economic, and cultural issues at stake” (11). So, as far as “traditional approaches” in literary studies go, the idea of critical distance and critical awareness persists as a core value that are expected of contemporary and digital manifestations of humanities research.

What kind of contribution to knowledge does a digital game design project like The Victorianator represent, and what form of critical practice might it entail?  As I said, I will not even begin to attempt a full answer to such questions here.  I have already exceeded, by a mouthful, the length and parameters deemed appropriate for a blog post.  I’ll simply close with the basic observation that The Victorianator, as well as several other design-oriented ‘digital humanities’ projects I’ve been working on, have led me to think in new ways about problems of “knowledge representation” (a term I first thought about when it was discussed in a paper delivered by Ruth Knechtel at the VSAWC “Victorian Media” conference in 2012).  So, among other contributions that such projects make, design-oriented digital humanities projects are potentially valuable, to quote from Julia Flanders, as a practice based mode of critical “inquiry into how we know things and how we present them to ourselves for study, realized through a variety of tools which make the consequences of that inquiry palpable” (10).  In the process of thinking about how print and paper, voice and body may have informed the Victorians’ experience of poetry, it only makes sense that we work, feel and think our way through the media we presently use to interface with them.

Victorian Poetry: Forms and Fashions

A Conference in Celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Victorian Poetry

19-20 April 2013
West Virginia University

Please send 300-500 word proposals for papers and a 1-page c.v. via email to John.Lamb@mail.wvu.edu by 15 November 2012.

Papers on any aspect of Victorian Poetry and Poetics are invited, especially those devoted to the reconsideration of poetic forms and formal innovations; fashions, trend, and modes in poetry; the publication and commerce of poetry; poetry book history; and Victorian prosody and stanzaic forms. Papers devoted to the “fashions” ofscholarship on Victorian poetry for the last fifty years are also invited.

Keynote address by Linda K. Hughes, Addie Levy Professor of Literature at Texas Christian University. Professor Hughes’ books include The Cambridge Introduction to Victorian Poetry, Graham R.: Rosamund Mariott Watson, Woman of Letters, and The Manyfaced Glass: Tennyson’s Dramatic Monologues.