Recent Papers and Projects

Textual Explorations and Literary Architecture

Animating the Archive: The 3D Rendering of Emily Dickinson’s Pinned Poems

Animating the Archive: The 3D Rendering of Emily Dickinson’s Pinned Poems

In Dickinson’s pinned poems — i.e., those late poems she made via the association/ pinning together of materially separate manuscripts — this standard display renders readers blind both to the poet’s radical practice of making, unmaking and re-making works from the multiple fragments of her archive and to the combinatory possibilities of the lyric form itself. Here we focus on the limited case of Dickinson’s pinned poems, combining transcription with 3D rendering and animation to digitally recreate the process by which they were composed and reveal the multiple possible material and temporal relations among the manuscript fragments composing a poem and its versions. In so doing, this presentation makes manifest previous shortcomings in digital display methods and proposes new ways of reading Dickinson’s work that embrace the complications that materiality brings to literary interpretation.

Evidence of a Different Order: Forms and Fashions, Procedures and Papers of Mid-Nineteenth Century Police Work

Evidence of a Different Order: Forms and Fashions, Procedures and Papers of Mid-Nineteenth Century Police Work

The service of the “fill-in-the-blank” formatted document is situated in space and time. The ways in which a document's life and bureaucratic calling manifest in the pressures of its design, its systemic detail and use, and its function as a plotting point of information to be filed and processed in the order of office and legal operations. The document is simultaneously a product and producer of the patterns and qualities of information that commissioned its specific kind of use.

Poetics and The Archive: Sound Space and Silence

Poetics and The Archive: Sound Space and Silence

The archive is typically thought of as a climate-controlled space highly organized by a logical filing system of object collection identifiers and descriptions for the artifacts contained on their shelves, in boxes, or in acid free folders.This idea of the archive perpetuates the classic understanding that the archive serves as a place of preservation built for access and retrieval. The question becomes, what exactly are we accessing, and does its presentation there matter? Works of poetry and other archives of the nontraditional sense serve similar purposes as archives of the traditional sense and encounter similar problems of presentation and access.