Collecting fragments in the 21st century - LECTIO › Laboratory for Critical Text Editing
May 14, 2012

In recent years the attitude of scholars towards Greek and Roman authors transmitted in fragmentary form has changed. The optimism of earlier generations that one may be able to reconstruct their works by collecting and combining their ‘remains’ and, if possible, by supplementing these ‘remains’ by means of ‘Quellenforschung’ has given way to a more realistic awareness of our limits.

Building on the fundamental contributions by Brunt, Most, Lenfant, Schepens and others, a series of workshops will address various questions raised by fragmentary prose writers such as: What is a fragment? To what extent are we able to establish its degree of authenticity? To what extent is a reconstruction of a lost work possible? What role can ‘Quellenforschung’ play today? Why should we (not) collect fragments? How should a collection of fragments be organized? Are there fundamental differences between fragments of works that belong to different genres (historiography, oratory, philosophy etc.), and how are they (to be) reflected in the various collections of fragments? What is to be expected of the commentary?

Program

• Monica Berti (Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata/Tufts University), Collecting quotations by topic: degrees of preservation and transtextual relations among genres
• Dominique Lenfant (Université de Strasbourg), The study of intermediate authors and its role in the interpretation of historical fragments
• Charlotte Roueché (King’s College London), Examining relationships: understanding and expressing citations
• Moderator: Stefan Schorn (KU Leuven)

We are very pleased to post this announcement from Celia Krause:
Official Release of the Virtual Research Environment TextGrid

TextGrid is a platform for scholars in the humanities, which makes possible the collaborative analysis, evaluation and publication of cultural remains (literary sources, images and codices) in a standardized way.

The central idea was to bring together instruments for the dealing with texts under a common user interface. The workbench offers a range of tools and services for scholarly editing and linguistic research, which are extensible by open interfaces, such as editors for the linkage between texts or between text sequences and images, tools for musical score edition, for gloss editing, for automatic collation etc.

On the occasion of the official release of TextGrid 2.0 a summit will take place from the 14th to the 15th of May 2012. On the 14th the summit will start with a workshop day on which the participants can get an insight into some of the new tools. For the following day lectures and a discussion group are planned.
For more information and registration see this German website TextGrid Summit 2012.

Le papyrus et l’hypertexte. Athénée dans la cuisine du savoir. The Papyrus and the Hypertext. Athenaeus in the Scholarly Kitchen
05.05.2012, ANHIMA (INHA, salle Vasari, 9h-17h)

Organisateurs | Organisers: Aurélien BERRA & Christian JACOB (contact)

This one-day conference aims at fostering a dialogue about Athenaeus’ Deipnosophists between classicists – whether philologists or historians – and digital humanists. The study of this complex work has been renewed and intensified for fifteen years: international conferences; editions and translations; projects dealing with intertextuality and fragmentary traditions; relevance for a historical anthropology of scholarly practices and erudition techniques.

As an occasion to share our reflections, this conference will combine a specific state of the art and prospective discussions about the horizon of our disciplines: what methods, tools and environments do we think adequate to study Athenaeus today?
More generally, our ambition is to enhance closer relationships between researchers and teams interested in this author. In order to build such an international network, it seems worth while to express our needs, problems and scholarly dreams.

Participants

Aurélien BERRA Université Paris-Ouest & ANHIMA
Federico BOSCHETTI CNR Pisa
Gregory CRANE Tufts University
Christian JACOB CNRS & EHESS
Dominique LENFANT Université de Strasbourg
Francesco MAMBRINI Universität zu Köln
S. Douglas OLSON University of Minnesota
Lucía RODRÍGUEZ-NORIEGA GUILLÉN Universidad de Oviedo
Matteo ROMANELLO DAI Berlin & King’s College London
Alexandra TRACHSEL Universität Hamburg
John WILKINS University of Exeter

Ruth Finnegan, Why Do We Quote? The Culture and History of Quotation, Open Book Publishers 2011

Quoting is all around us. But do we really know what it means? How do people actually quote today, and how did our present systems come about? This book brings together a down-to-earth account of contemporary quoting with an examination of the comparative and historical background that lies behind it and the characteristic way that quoting links past and present, the far and the near.

Drawing from anthropology, cultural history, folklore, cultural studies, sociolinguistics, literary studies and the ethnography of speaking, Ruth Finnegan’s fascinating study sets our present conventions into cross-cultural and historical perspective. She traces the curious history of quotation marks, examines the long tradition of quotation collections with their remarkable recycling across the centuries, and explores the uses of quotation in literary, visual and oral traditions. The book tracks the changing definitions and control of quoting over the millennia and in doing so throws new light on ideas such as ‘imitation’, ‘allusion’, ‘authorship’, ‘originality’ and ‘plagiarism’.

The mission of the Digital Classics Association (DCA) is to foster digital methods that can enhance our understanding of classical antiquity, its legacy, and associated cultures. DCA membership is open to all those with interests in advancing this mission.

The DCA is currently in its formative stage and looking for new members. We welcome interest and input from all quarters.

The immediate goal of the organization is to create a venue for the informal and formal discussion of digital classics at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association (APA), including a poster / demonstration session. In such discussions at the largest annual meeting of classicists in North America, scholars working on digital projects can compare methods and results, and scholars unfamiliar with digital methods can gain an acquaintance with them. This venue is meant to complement other existing in-person and online sites for digital humanities and digital classics discussions.

For the purposes of the APA application, the following 5-person Interim Steering Committee has been formed:

Co-Chairs: Neil Coffee (University at Buffalo) and Gregory Crane (Perseus, Tufts University)
Secretary-Treasurer: Allen Romano (Florida State University)
Steering Committee Member: Charlotte Roueché (King’s College London)
Steering Committee Member: Christopher Blackwell (Furman University, Center for Hellenic Studies)

If the APA charter application is successful, the DCA will hold its first meeting at the January 2-5, 2014 APA conference in Chicago. All aspects of the organization will be open to discussion and vote at that meeting. There will be a full and open vote on leadership, as well as on the structure and activities of the Association.

If you are interested in becoming a DCA member and supporting the group’s application to the APA, please submit your name and email address in the boxes to the left (under “Join our mailing list”; you do not need to follow the “sign-up” link). Your information will be used for no other purposes than 1) to submit the membership list to the APA, and 2) to send you occasional email updates on DCA activities.

Textus is an open source platform for working with collections of texts. It harnesses the power of semantic web technologies and delivers them in a simple and intuitive interface so that students, researchers and teachers can share and collaborate around collections of texts. TEXTUS is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation.

The dream of a unified text is one in which you would be able to explore, seamlessly, online, every text ever written. With the click of a button I can go from Pynchon to Proust, from Musil to Machiavelli, from Homer to Hugo.

In this dream not only can you read, but you are able to contribute, to write upon these texts — to annotate, to anthologize, to interlink, to translate, to borrow — and to share what you do with others.

You can see what others have shared, what notes they have added, what selections they have made. You can see the interweaving of these texts created by borrowing, by inspiration, by reference, all made concrete by the insight and efforts of myself and others and their ability to layer their insights freely upon those original texts — just as those writers built upon the works that had gone before them.

And while each text still can stand still stand alone we have something new, a single unified corpus woven together out of this multitude of separate text.

A whole that is a concrete instantiation in an immaterial realm of the cultural achievement of mankind as expressed in the written word.

We have within our grasp, the realisation of the dream of a unified text. Combining text and technology we can create something truly extraordinary.

Interedition Symposium – Scholarly Digital Editions, Tools and Infrastructure
Huygens ING, The Hague, The Netherlands, 19-20 March 2012

Program online

Huygens ING is pleased to host a symposium to mark the achievements of Interedition, COST (European Cooperation in Science and Technology) Action IS0704. This event will also serve as a springboard for further work based on the principles of interoperability promoted by Interedition within the domain of digital scholarly editing and research.

One of the key objectives of Interedition has been to produce a ‘roadmap’ conceptualizing the development of a technical infrastructure for collaborative digital preparation, editing, publication, analysis and visualization of literary research materials. Interedition has approached the problem of interoperable infrastructure from the perspectives of methodology, technology, and community. At present Interedition is realizing the ‘nuts and bolts’ of a bottom-up generalizable architecture, focusing on the development community and the prototyping of distributed lightweight services. This grassroots approach is emerging from the ‘engine rooms’ where Web 2.0 digital editions are being built and embodies a generalizable and viable approach to collaborative digital humanities tool building.

The symposium promises to give a good and comprehensive overview of current trends in practices of building digital editions, related digital tools and infrastructures, digital text analysis and annotation, and community aspects.

The symposium will be held in conjunction to a bootcamp and Management Committee meeting, from 19-20 March 2011. Venue is the Huygens Institute for the History of The Netherlands (Huygens ING, Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) The Hague, The Netherlands.

 Small Demons is a new beta site dedicated to opening up the worlds inside of books by connecting all their details (people, places, and things). Small Demons is a Los Angeles based company that believes powerful and interesting things can happen when you connect all the details of books.
This site is the first step in showing what happens when you do just that.

Not just another search engine for what’s inside your favorite novel, Small Demons collects and catalogs the millions of references to real-world and fictional music, movies, people, and objects that are found in literature. Your new favorite restaurant could be on the next page of the book you’re reading, and Small Demons hopes to provide a place where you can draw meaningful connections between stories and everyday life.

See comments on Cool Hunting.

From Stylianos Chronopoulos:

We are very pleased to post the invitation to participate in the conference “Commenting Fragments: the Case of Ancient Comedy”, that will be held at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau – July 2-7, 2012.

The project “Kommentierung der Fragmente der altgriechischen Komödie” (“A Commentary on the Fragments of Ancient Greek Comedy”) invites applications to participate in a one-week conference/workshop, “Commenting Fragments: The Case of Ancient Comedy”, to be held July 2–7, 2012 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. The workshop is part of a multi-year research project supported by the Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften and directed by Bernhard Zimmermann. The goal of the project, which has been underway at the Albert Ludwigs University since January 1, 2011, is to produce commentaries on all surviving fragments of Greek comedy.

Applications are open to all, but younger scholars (including graduate students) and other individuals interested in producing commentaries on individual comic poets are particularly encouraged to apply. Further information on the project (which builds on the textual work of R. Kassel and C. Austin, Poetae Comici Graeci), and on its publications to date, is available at the homepage of the Seminar for Classical Philology: http://www.altphil.uni-freiburg.de/komfrag

The workshop will have two separate but related agenda.

Mornings (9-12 AM) will be occupied with a series of round-table style discussions of some of the challenges of commenting on fragmentary comedies. The first two sessions will be devoted to sample commentaries produced collectively by the participants, and will consider methodological and practical problems such as the use of parallels, argumentative structure, textual matters, handling of sources, citation practices, reconstruction of scenes and plays, and the like. More information will be provided with the application, but every participant in the conference will be expected to produce a sample commentary on 5–6 lines of Greek text. These samples will be due June 1, and will be combined and precirculated to all workshop participants. The final three morning sessions will be devoted to close discussion of substantial samples of draft commentaries produced by individual workshop participants. The precise number and arrangement of these sessions will depend on the number of samples submitted. These samples (25–30 doublespaced pages) will be due April 30, and will be similarly precirculated to all workshop participants. A final round-up session will be held on Saturday, 7 July.

Afternoons (3-7 PM) will be devoted to talks by recognized experts in the field on the general theme: “The Periodization and Dramatic Form of Greek Comedy”.
The provisional schedule of afternoon talks is as follows:

Monday July 2:
Bernhard Zimmermann (University of Freiburg) – “The Periodisation of Greek Comedy as Necessary – and Problematic.” (the talk will be in German)
Eric Csapo (University of Sydney) – “The Earliest Phase of Ancient Greek Comedy.”

Tuesday July 3:
Andreas Willi (University of Oxford, Worcester College) – “Epicharmos and Attic Comedy.”
Jeffrey Henderson (Boston University) – “Pherecrates and Athenian Comedy between 450 and 420 BC.”

Wednesday July 4:
Guiseppe Mastromarco (University of Bari) – “Euripidaristophanizein (Cratinus, fr. 342 K.-A.): Aristophanes and Euripidean Paratragedy.” (the talk will be in Italian)
Heinz-Günther Nesselrath (University of Göttingen) – “Periodisation of Ancient Greek Comedy in Hellenistic Philology.” (the talk will be in German)

Thursday July 5:
Ioannis Konstantakos (University of Athens) – “Tendencies and Variety in Middle Comedy.”
Benjamin Millis (University of Oxford) – “Comedy in- and outside of Athens in the 4th Century BC.”
S. Douglas Olson (University of Minnesota / University of Freiburg) – “And on to Rome. Aristophanes and Athenaeus.” (Key-note lecture)

Friday July 6:
Antonis Petridis (Open University of Cyprus) – “Before and after Menander.”
Michael Scott Fontaine (Cornell University) – “From Athens to Rome: From Greek to Latin Comedy.”

Talks will last 45-50 min. and will be followed by a one-hour discussion period. Those interested in participating should submit proposals by March 30, 2012. Proposals must include
(1) a short CV (no more than one A4-page)
(2) a statement of purpose (no more than 600 words) describing why you want to participate; if you have any previous experience working with fragmentary texts, ancient Greek Comedy or writing a commentary; and how you intend to use participation to advance your research.

Applicants who also wish to have their own work discussed in one of the morning sessions are invited to send a 20-pages sample of their work by April 30. No participation fee for the workshop is required. A presentation of the project “Kommentierung der Fragmente der griechischen Komödie” and a grand conference banquet will be held after the talks on the first day. Various free-time activities (e.g. city tours of old Freiburg, hiking in the Black Forest, a guided visit to the Freiburg Cathedral, collective readings of aristophanic comedies) will be offered as part of the unofficial program.
The working languages for the conference and workshop will be English, German and Italian.

Due-dates:
Applications for participation March 30, 2012
Sample commentary (on 5-6 lines of Greek text), that each participant has to submit as basis for the discussion in the first two morning sessions June 1, 2012
Samples of draft commentaries (work in progress) to be discussed in the final three morning sessions April 30, 2012

Invitation for Participation (pdf)

For more information or to submit applications, please contact stylianos.chronopoulos@altphil.uni-freiburg.de

Here is an interesting article by Guy Patrick Cunningham on modern digital writing, which is fragmentary in all its forms:
Fragmentary: Writing in a Digital Age (The Millions, 01, 2012).

Here is a quote from the article:
“It’s not that fragmentary writing is the only acceptable form of writing today — I have no intention of breaking this essay into tweets — but it is the form best suited to address the conundrum Carr is so concerned about in The Shallows. We all read online, and the rise of smartphones, tablets, and e-readers means we will be doing so even more. This means we will all be spending ever more time reading with a medium that encourages distracted, fragmented reading. Fragmentary writing — work that accumulates fragments of text and presents them in a way that encourages introspection and contemplation — seems like a logical response to that experience. And that makes me incredibly curious to see where people will take it.”

More and more, I read in pieces. So do you. Digital media, in all its forms, is fragmentary. Even the longest stretches of text online are broken up with hyperlinks or other interactive elements (or even ads). This is neither a good nor bad thing, necessarily — it is simply a part of modern reading. And because of that, works that deal with fragmentation, that eschew not only a traditional narrative structure but the very idea of a work comprising a single, linear whole — take on a special kind of relevance. Fragmentary writing is (or at least feels) like the one avant-garde literary approach that best fits our particular moment. It’s not that it’s the only form of writing that matters of course, just that it captures the tension between “digital” and “analog” reading better than anything else out there. And that tension, in many ways, is the defining feature of the contemporary reading experience.

What is fragmentary writing? To answer that, it helps to first look at how writers wrestled with fragmentation in an earlier, pre-digital context. The approach  played a major role in twentieth-century modernist literature, for example, and the very best modernists utilized fragments in particularly revealing ways. Few writers of the period, or any other, understood the nature of fragmentary writing better than Samuel Beckett, who experimented with short, nonlinear forms throughout his career. My favorite example of these fragmentary experiments is a series of thirteen nonlinear prose shorts he wrote called Texts for Nothing.

The Texts are not stories or essays, at least not in the traditional sense. They are instead focused on images/symbols and on the often-prevaricating “voice” (or is it “voices”?) behind each Text. Images and phrases appear in a particular context, and nearly every word is essential to understanding the Text. The voice of each Text often doubles back, contradicts itself, or moves from image to image in no discernible pattern, as in Text 2:

Is this stuff air that permits you to suffocate still, almost audibly at times, it’s possible, a kind of air. What exactly is going on, exactly, ah, old xanthic laugh, no farewell mirth, good riddance, it was never droll. No, but one more memory, one last memory, it may help, to abort again.

The images contained in Text 2 (though not necessarily the other Texts) could be interpreted as a series of “memories,” ranging from a woman digging through a trash can to a man “with only one leg and a half” ringing a bell. Memory often works piecemeal — after all, people don’t really remember an entire experience, instead they hold on to particular images, emotions, or impressions. In that way, the Texts resemble human memory — and human thinking. Their fragmentary nature therefore reflects the fragmentary nature of memory, and of the human mind.

Writing about Franz Kafka — another writer given to fragments, whose work served as a key influence on Beckett’s — Albert Camus declared, “The whole art in Kafka consists in forcing the reader to reread.” The Texts certainly live up to this dictum — they are meant to be looked at more than once, from different points of view. The attentive reader spends time with each Text as a distinct object, since there is not linear narrative or argument to follow forward. Meaning suggests itself indirectly, through the accumulation of phrases and images.

However, while Beckett wrote at a time when rereading was widely encouraged, contemporary media often pulls us in a very different direction. In his recent book about digital reading, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr calls the Net our society’s “communication and information medium of choice,” and says that, “The scope of its use is unprecedented, even by the standards of the mass media.” And he claims that this new medium has changed reading as profoundly as did the bound codex.

He points to a series of studies that indicate “people who read linear text comprehend more, remember more, and learn more than those who read text peppered with links.” Essentially, hypertext distracts the reader enough to change the reading experience — even a long, linear text becomes fragmented with the addition of links, because the unconscious mind is forced to devote energy determining the value of the link (and whether or not to click on it). In Carr’s telling, the Internet creates not fragmentary but fragmented reading, where the mind is so distracted that it is difficult to become fully immersed in a given text. This is a different process than what happens when we read a fragmentary work — as Carr explains, “When transcribed to a page, a stream of consciousness becomes literary and linear.” The structure of a print book — its existence as a discrete, finite object, the lack of distractions built in to the format — creates a contemplative atmosphere that allows the reader to “merge” with a text; or as Carr puts it, “The reader becomes the book.” Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, with their emphasis on contemplation, accumulation, and rereading, are firmly rooted in the quieter, more contemplative world of “analog” media. For a writer interested in engaging the digital world, however, there are different challenges and that calls for a different kind of fragmentary writing.

The most prominent fragmentary work in recent years is probably David Shields’ Reality Hunger, a book made up primarily of quotations from other texts. While most critics focused on its two most controversial assertions — that the linear novel is an obsolete form, and that writers should feel free to “borrow” text from other works, the way a DJ might sample a piece of music — the book’s fragmentary structure is far more compelling. It is intended as a “literary collage,” in keeping with Shields’ belief that, “Collage, the art of reassembling fragments of preexisting images in such a way as to form a new image, was the most important innovation in the art of the twentieth century.” Shields wants “a literature built entirely out of contemplation and revelation,” in effect, a literature that reflects the workings of the human mind. And his collection of fragments is his effort to produce that kind of work. If Shields fails in this effort — and I think he does, though understandably so — he is able to give the reader an idea of how his mind processes the written word. The breadth of his reading is evident not only from the wide range of writers “appropriated” into Reality Hunger — Walter Pater, James Joyce, and Walter Benjamin, among others — but from the obvious restlessness visible on the page.

Like Beckett’s Text 2, the fragmentary nature of Reality Hunger has its roots in human memory. As Shields points out, his interest in the essay stems from his belief that, “The essay consists of double translation: memory translates experience; essay translates memory.” And his essay resembles the way many of us remember the books we read — we hold on to particular ideas, images, and quotes, which hold the place of the larger work in our memories. I’ve read Hamlet three times in the last year and a half — and many times before then — but I can’t recite the entire play by heart. Instead, certain lines stand out (“The rest is silence,” etc.), and when I “remember” the play, it is those lines that spring to mind. In that way, Shields’ book gives us a window into how he reads — it shows us not only the works he gravitates too, but what pieces of those works he keeps with him.

Where Shields differs from earlier fragmentary writers, including Beckett, is that Reality Hunger, due to its origin in many different works, not only emphasizes its fragmentary nature, but uses it to connect with the reader. While making my way through the book, I found myself copying out Shields’ most interesting fragments into a separate notebook; when I want to “reread” Reality Hunger, I simply look at my own, private version instead. This seems at least in part to be Shields’ intention — the fragmentary style of his book forces the reader to become an active participant in the work itself. In that way, it draws from online writing styles, including blogging, which encourage readers to comment on, excerpt, or link to an existing text (which, as Carr points out, brings on even more fragmentation). Perhaps the most extreme version of this is the blogging platform Twitter, which both limits users to writing 140-chracters at a time, and encourages them to “retweet” other users’ content.

The most interesting use of the platform that I’ve seen is Masha Tupitsyn’s (print) book Laconia: 1,200 Tweets on Film, which she composed entirely on the site. The end result, however, is presented not as a mere assembly of Tweets, but as an experiment in form. As she explains in the introduction, “I avoided tweeting arbitrarily or simply churning out a collection of tweets that would result in a book. Instead, I wrote and crafted each entry as though it was for and part of a book, rather than the other way around.” One of Carr’s great worries about the digital realm is the way it appropriates and changes print forms. As he explains, “When the Net absorbs a medium, it re-creates that medium in its own image.” With Laconia, Tupitsyn attempts the reverse, re-creating a digital medium (Twitter) in an “analog” space. In a sense, Tupitsyn is appropriating a digital space into print.

What’s especially interesting about that appropriation is the way she toys with Twitter’s 140-character limit. Often, she will break multi-tweet passages abruptly, calling attention to the platform’s tendency toward fragmentation. For example, tweets 782 and 783 (each tweet in the book is numbered and time-stamped) appear this way:

Our feelings and emotions about our lives and our faces are in other people’s faces. Changing movie faces are our feelings and emotions
about our feelings and emotions.

It would be very easy to recast these tweets in a way that keeps both sentences whole:

Our feelings and emotions about our lives and our faces are in other people’s faces.
Changing movie faces are our feelings and emotions about our feelings and emotions.

This would be particularly more readable on Twitter itself, where the more recent tweet — “about our feelings and emotion” — would appear on top. But by breaking them so abruptly, by taking Twitter’s “hard” character count so literally and writing right up until it is reached, Tupitsyn underlines the digital origin of the project.

Where, at least in Carr’s telling, the Web cuts a textual whole into fragments by appropriating it, the print book (at least this particular print book) takes fragments and forces them into a kind of whole. We read tweets 782 and 783 in sequence, and the meaning is obvious. Tupitsyn plays a similar trick with the book’s content. Though the book is ostensibly a work of film criticism, it does not contain anything that resembles a conventional movie review. Instead, it appropriates what social media specializes in — quotations, personal reactions, biographical revelations, and commentary about pop culture — and turns them into something more ambitious. The different fragments are not so much about film as they are about how Tupitsyn watches film. As she puts it, the book “dramatizes the act of thinking through film.”

Reality Hunger and Laconia are very different books, but they share this desire to use fragmentary writing to dramatize the act of thinking through culture (in Shields’ case mostly books, in Tupitsyn’s mostly films). Even this desire has its roots in the digital world, where culture is constantly being repackaged and analyzed. If neither work achieves the majesty of Beckett’s Texts — to be fair, an obscenely high standard — both find an approach to fragmentary writing that pushes the form in a new direction, rather than just rehashing modernism’s innovations. They manage this by drawing on digital forms — Shields by creating a “collage” that mimics the mash-up culture that dominates online media, Tupitsyn by writing her book via Twitter. In so doing, they suggest an interesting new path for both writers and readers, one that takes the clutter of the digital world and transforms it into something quieter and more thoughtful.

It’s not that fragmentary writing is the only acceptable form of writing today — I have no intention of breaking this essay into tweets — but it is the form best suited to address the conundrum Carr is so concerned about in The Shallows. We all read online, and the rise of smartphones, tablets, and e-readers means we will be doing so even more. This means we will all be spending ever more time reading with a medium that encourages distracted, fragmented reading. Fragmentary writing — work that accumulates fragments of text and presents them in a way that encourages introspection and contemplation — seems like a logical response to that experience. And that makes me incredibly curious to see where people will take it.