Hyperrhiz 15

Rime of the Reagan Library: Remixing Digital Literature as a Critical Method

Richard Ness

Margaret Bertucci Hamper

Lauren Gottlieb-Miller

Citation: Ness, Richard, Margaret Bertucci Hamper and Lauren Gottlieb-Miller. “Rime of the Reagan Library: Remixing Digital Literature as a Critical Method.” Hyperrhiz: New Media Cultures, no. 15, 2016. doi:10.20415/hyp/015.e04

The Remix

“Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it let me free.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Rime of the Ancient Mariner

We remixed Reagan Library to learn more about it through getting into its mechanisms and uncovering its expressive processes. Abandoning conventional interpretive frameworks freed us to experience Reagan Library effectively and on its own terms. The resulting artifact is also a mash-up, or rather two remixes in one. We took two texts and stripped the narrative from one and the poetic structure from the other and laid them on top of one another. This process allowed us to understand Reagan Library differently than conventional methodologies, like close reading, are able to. Our experiment produced an artifact that revealed how the code expresses and disrupts conventional narrative and operates like poetic forms. In this section we will discuss the process of approaching web coding language as novices, learning how to read and interpret Reagan Library’s JavaScript, and executing the remix itself. We will conclude our discussion by proposing the remix as an essential scholarly methodology for interpreting electronic literature and texts. Ultimately, our project took the opportunity to create questions for further inquiry at the same time that we gesture at greater understanding.

We were web coding amateurs before undertaking our remix and producing our website. We knew enough to open the source code for the pages of Reagan Library and peak around, but we didn’t always know what we were looking at. We were only able to understand the mechanisms and the expressive processes underlying Reagan Library when we started manipulating, experimenting, and inventing within the confines of Stuart Moulthrop’s code.
We took a .zip file from the Electronic Literature Collection of Reagan Library and made a copy of the files. From here we were able to look at how the hierarchy operated, how the pages related to one another, and how the narrative came together. We won’t reiterate here what we already discussed earlier in our “Structural Overview” but we will say that we were able to learn everything about the structure through experimenting and testing things out.

Before we overlaid the text of Rime of the Ancient Mariner we created a version of Reagan Library that replaced all of the variant text with the titles of the various functions “numeric,” “advice,” “sententious,” “fragmentary,” and “nominal” and the numbers of the arrays that they referred to. When we played Reagan Library with these references in place of the original narratives we were able to see for the first time how the JavaScript arrays operated the narrative structure and how we might manipulate these processes to create something new. We were not able to experiment with the “nominal” functions because they were embedded in the VR QuickTime panoramas which we were not able to change and alter. Because of this quirk, when playing our new version it is possible to get stuck in loops, something that the arrays embedded in the original panoramas prevented from happening. Without getting into the code and altering the narrative text we may have never realized how much the narrative structure relies on each JavaScript array for Reagan Library to function at all.

For our second intervention we chose to replace both the static and the variant narrative text in Reagan Library with the text of Rime of the Ancient Mariner. We chose it because we felt a kinship between the two texts and because Rime of the Ancient Mariner had enough text to mine for the project. Ultimately, any text we chose of similar length would have served the purpose, though would have created very different final artifacts.

First, we stripped Moulthrop’s text out of the arrays and input lines from the poem that were structurally similar to the fragments that Moulthrop used so that, theoretically, sentences that were pieced together using the arrays would still make sense in our version. Once this process was complete we moved on to the individual pages. Each page in the Reagan Library narrative consists of four levels. As the text progresses it becomes more coherent as the pages are populated with more static text and less narrative text. Because we were not able to alter the VR panoramas and were not working with large blocks of prose, our remix is most interesting in the beginning where there is more randomized text and less coherent as it is “played”.

While Reagan Library uses the expressive processes that Moulthrop wrote to form a coherent narrative over time, we were able to use these same processes to create flash fictions. Though the original poem is a coherent narrative, breaking it up and allowing the code to reconstruct new narratives opens up the possibility for new meaning to emerge from a familiar work of literature. In the future we would like to experiment with remixing the VR panoramas. They were important to Stuart Moulthrop when he built the narratives for Reagan Library and we wonder what constructing them from scratch could tell us about the things that, for now, remain hidden about this text.

Creating the remix was and empowering act. Electronic literature like Reagan Library upsets the sovereignty of the fictive form and imagines new forms and experiences for writers, authors, and critics. It creates space to interpret text in new ways, like remixing. It is tempting to ignore new media and electronic literature as humanities scholars because they operate in ways we’re not comfortable unpacking. We are drawn to the codex, the poem, the serial, with their predictable paratexts and architectures. How should we refer to lines within a piece of electronic literature when it is never the same? It is now obvious that we cannot leave encoding languages to be the sole province of programmers and web developers. At the code level Reagan Library is just as static as any 18th century novel, and perhaps even more so. We are experiencing more and more of our world each day through texts and artifacts that create meaning through encoded processes. Doing remixes can allow scholars to claim authority over web languages as if they were any other language. Remixing Reagan Library reminded us of dealing with poetic structures and meter. If we can agree that structured poetic forms are expressive then why not code?

Electronic literature, and Reagan Library in particular, does not benefit from screen essentialist readings. Hypertext novels shift, change and manifest for individual readers in unique ways. Close readings are contingent on static text which does not lend itself methodologically to handling electronic literature at the screen level. While some might argue that this proves that electronic literature is undeserving of scholarly consideration, we argue the opposite. We propose that our current methods for engaging texts are inadequate and do not accommodate new media artifacts. We propose the remix as a methodology for interpreting ergodic work and electronic literature in particular. Performing a remix on Reagan Library allowed us to understand its expressive processes and to interrogate the very ways in which the code written by Stuart Moulthrop enables the narrative to fluctuate and make meaning. Remixes, mash-ups, and other inventive interventions allow scholars to ask new questions, create new artifacts, and explore literature in engaged and exciting ways.

Coda

Our essay is the second remix that came from our intervention. As an essay with hyperlinks we believe that we open the possibility for our work to operate non-sequentially, to allow for readers to move around fluidly between our findings and places where they connect to a larger network of ideas. To borrow from Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s The Exploit, our website acts as a node within the larger scholarly network, connecting our reader to places where we sought information and to invite them to explore beyond the boundaries of our findings.

We found a kinship with two long form journalistic pieces, one recent, and one several years old. The most recent was a project by NPR’s Planet Money titled “Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt”. This piece uses the t-shirt to explore the global implications for manufacturing ubiquitous objects and uses personal narratives told by the people involved at each part of the manufacturing process to illustrate the effects our consumer goods have on the lives of others. To tell this story compellingly their piece mixes documentary filmmaking, reportage, traditional narrative, hypertext, embedded images and videos, and a serialized format that allows for readers to customize their experience. The second piece featured as a serial publication in the digital edition of the New York Times is titled “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek”. To tell the story of an avalanche the reporters used data visualization, interviews, mapping, traditional reporting and narrative, hypertext and imbedded images and videos. The paratexts of both allow them to be navigated either sequentially or a la carte. It is hard to imagine either piece being as compelling in a traditional format. They are just as rigorous, if not more so, than traditionally presented journalism. Likewise, we cannot imagine presenting this essay in a format other than the digital version we have presented here just as it is hard to imagine Reagan Library operating as an effective codex. We hope that our project can be an example of how academic scholarship can utilize and exploit the tools of new media to create engaging artifacts that are better equipped to handle the demands of electronic literature and new media texts in general.

VIEW PROJECT: Rime of the Reagan Library

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