Having performed a term of research doing all kinds of operations on the Brut – applying transcription tools on the text itself and on secondary texts, using it in accordance with artificial intelligence, and documenting my experience, I find m yself back in this project, without being able to read the Brut. Though I have been “working with” the text from various angles, a crucial experience that is lacking in the center of it is a most canonical one that one associates with books – reading.
In my first meeting with Professor Warren, I asked for some factual knowledge on the past research done on the chronicle. What I have discovered was that except for a few past students who have read The Brut, most people who partook in Remix could not read Middle English. Considering that the main group of people who are constantly working with The Brut is the Remix project group, I have discovered that the relationship between us researchers and The Brut is essentially one of not reading – rather than reading.
Franco Moretti, in his Distant Reading theory, proposes that close reading is problematic, and it is because: “But the trouble with close reading (in aIl of its incarnations, from the new criticism to deconstruction) is that it necessarily depends on an extremely small canon. This may have become an unconscious and invisible premise by now, but it is an iron one nonetheless: you invest so much in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter.” (Moretti, 48). Moretti claims that with the abundance of text available to the readers – the expanse of which is greatly enlarged by the introduction of works outside the anglosphere – the reader does not have the capacity to closely engage with enough texts that will equip them with the necessary picture of the reality of texts in the world. The only way to access that kind of picture, to understand, as Moretti says, “the system in its entirety”, is to resort to the literary canon (Moretti, 49). Moretti proposes that, “At bottom, it’s a theological exercise-very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously-whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them.” (Moretti, 48).
By distant reading, Moretti means: “Distant reading: where distance, let me repeat it, is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes-or genres and systems.” (Moretti, 49-50). Smaller units – frequency of word occurrences, topics, themes, names, and time stamps that can be categorized into systems, and larger units – cultural milieu, the larger historical reality under which the text was produced – are not the text itself. The ultimate goal is the “system” as Moretti calls it, which is the sphere, the manners, and the genealogy of the production of texts, and Moretti imagines that distant readings – by looking at small fragments or larger structures than the text itself – will take researchers to this understanding.
FromThePage.com is doing exactly this operation. Under the “subjects” section, fragments that are smaller than the texts are collected, and categorized into sections called “author/people”, “document title”, etc. The belief that metadata schemes reveal certain things about the text and the endeavor to extract meaning from the study of these metadata schemes are means of distant reading.
Michael Gavin’s essay, “Why Distant Reading Works”, follows up on Moretti’s judgment by continuing to place values on – and gives us another way to look into what Moretti means by – the idea of the “entirety of the system”, and the vision that Moretti wants to gain from distant reading. Gavin explains such visions through the scope of relevance, and he uses Dan Sperber and Deirdue Wilson’s definition of relevance: “There is a single property,” they write, “. . . which makes information worth processing for a human being.”13 That property is relevance: “Every act of ostensive com- munication communicates a presumption of its own optimal relevance” (Gavin, 620). Gavin expands on Moretti’s vision by arguing that “If it’s true that discourse is optimally directed toward the cognitive environments of its readers, then words naming the most contextually relevant facts are precisely those words most likely to appear in syntagmatic relation.” (Gavin, 625).
Through the parallel and proportional relationship between the frequency of words and their relevance to the people of a given time and space and their linguistic system, understanding those frequencies on an expansive level will equip the reader with the historical realities of such time and space – such reality operates not only on the material level but also on the linguistic level, which concerns the way that people used language.
Looking back at FromThePage, when one clicks on a subject that is frequent enough or appears multiple times, FromThePage offers something like this:
Here, the subject is “Ella Wheeler Wilcox”, and it disperses into different subjects that are mentioned frequently with it through topic modelling. On the right side are pages with mentions of the subject, and the project, after extracting data from the raw material, organize them into the graph on the left. It is possible for the viewers to see the graph as its own coherent body of text, revealing a series of linguistic units – smaller than the text itself – organized by the principle of relevance.
At this point, we get enough conceptual understanding about distant reading in order to compare it to our – similar but different – endeavor at Remix. First, distant reading focuses on units that are smaller and larger than the texts themselves; and second, distant reading is supposed to give rise to an understanding of a greater picture – for Moretti, such a picture is “world literature”, and for Gavin, “relevance”. Both of these concepts, however, depend on the existence of an extensive corpus of textual materials that allows distant readers to formulate certain claims about a certain period in (literary) history. Remix, on the other hand, uses one text as its object of study across almost a decade.
A critique by Katherine Bode on distant reading is also helpful for us to decide two ways in which the project of Remix differs from Moretti’s methods: “In my view, these criticisms describe the symptoms—not the essence—of a problem, which in fact inheres in Moretti’s and Jockers’s common neglect of the activities and insights of textual scholarship: the bibliographical and editorial approaches that explore and explicate the literary-historical record.” (Bode). This study of literary scholarship which is lacking in Moretti’s method, for Bode, renders distant reading accomplice with close reading – one only studies the textual information in the original sense, even if distant reading allows a machine to process this textual information. It only focuses on the text at the moment of its production – on the author’s side – and ignores the way readership and literary scholarship potentially grant a text new meanings. Remix, on the other hand, cares about the literary scholarship, as secondary texts like provenance documents, as well as the notes on the margins of pages by earlier readers – one of the notes say “It ys to harde for my lernyng”, and one of the provenance texts addresses this complaint.
Remix, on one hand, instead of aiming at studying a large corpus of texts in a short period of time, dedicates long, extensive research periods to one text. While we have the Handlist of Brut Manuscripts, which fits the Dartmouth Brut within a corpus, we nonetheless dedicate a long time to the Dartmouth Brut itself. On the other hand, Remix does not limit its own focus to the textual content of the Brut, and instead studies its materiality and readership, and how current and future readers – the ones with the digital tools – might interact with the text differently and create a new kind of literary scholarship.
Remix, thus, has a claim of a kind of fidelity to the text, and strangely without requiring one to do close reading. One can argue that the methodologies and maneuver of Remix invents a new kind of proximity and fidelity to the text that is different from the Russian Formalists and the New Critics. When a Remix researcher examines the bindings, the handwriting, and the captions of the Dartmouth Brut instead of the textual content itself, Remix arguably has a closer level of fidelity towards the text than the formalists, in the sense that textual content itself is mass-producible, while the idea of a unique and original manuscript is not. Walter Benjamin’s argument of the contrast between theater and film can be borrowed here to contrast manuscripts and printed text: “Any thorough study proves that there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like the film, founded in, mechanical reproduction.” (Benjamin, 10-11). The textual information itself, in its form, is reproducible – pure textual information has no sense of originality. There is no original version that one can claim fidelity to. For manuscripts, however, the idea of originality is very much alive. One argument posited by Benjamin helps illustrate this idea: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be. This unique existence of the work of art determined the history to which it was subject throughout the time of its existence. This includes the changes which it may have suffered in physical condition over the years as well as the various changes in its ownership.” (Benjamin, 3). The presence in time and space of the Dartmouth Brut is ubiquitous in our study, and we’ve invested much energy into the changes of its physical condition and ownership.
Benjamin criticized “high art” in favor of mass-reproduced texts, which he uses film as an example, he argues: “It is inherent in the technique of the film as well as that of sports that everybody who witnesses its accomplishments is somewhat of an expert.” (Benjamin, 12). He thinks that these mass-producible media will democratize the public’s involvement radically and distribute some form of expertise to all of them, while “high art” – like painting – does not allow this kind of engagement. While Benjamin made his criticism, we are working with a manuscript – and one of canonical British history – which would’ve been part of high culture. Strangely, we undergraduates who (mostly) can’t read a sentence in Middle English are valorized as the experts. Despite the exclusivity of the idea of “Original” and the object of our study, our project of democratization through digital means is placing the tasking of democratization on not the object of study itself, but on the way we study it and engage with it. Remix fosters the idea that expertise is just practice, and it fosters a different kind of expertise. Most Remix researchers conclude their projects without knowing how to read Middle English but gain some kind of expertise in the tools that they use to engage with the Brut. The close reading of a text that is usually pursued in research is here substituted by the close reading of the tools themselves. The tools take less time to learn than Middle English, or at least, takes less time to learn to the extent to engage meaningfully with the Brut.
Partially, this democratization of the expertise of the researchers comes from the conditions under which the Remix project occurs. One of the very earliest projects of Remix was to transcribe the text into a full, textual form. Remix scholars tried using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to help transcribe, but it generated too much garbage text, and the researchers needed to transcribe manually. Transcribing even with the help of digital tools is very time-consuming and exhausting for the researchers, who are primarily undergraduate students. The transcription project was thus never finished and the Dartmouth Brut never had a full-text digital version. Dartmouth’s quarter system makes the students very conscious of how much time and dedication they can afford to spend on Remix. There are rarely graduate students who participate in Remix, and considering that the Comparative Literature program lasts for only a year, many graduate students who are interested in Remix are in a more hasty situation than undergraduates. Remix itself is a long, expansive project in which the researchers put together an archive. Archival work is often slow, and researchers might not have a clear sense of progress in the short run. Researchers who only have a short amount of time to spend on the project don’t tend to engage with long and arduous works like transcription. What the inaccessibility of the full transcribed text means for the students is not the creation of aura and elitist condition of critical agency as Benjamin suggests, but the shift in the research focus. The students are constantly in a position of distraction so Remix needs to find a way so the students can engage with the texts critically in this state of distraction.
So what have we accomplished? Professor Warren insists that it’s curiosity. It’s the engagement of each student. Remix has continued for almost a decade and has been through the hands of different researchers. The constant involvement of students makes Remix their own projects. In the end, it is about the process more than the result. Other than the archive that we form that whoever is interested might look into, it’s what each student takes with them when they leave the project that counts.
My inquiry about the lack of experience in reading the manuscript as a Remix researcher ended up as a homage to the decade of their hard work. The inquiry started with a question about the kind of intellectual material that a researcher can cultivate from Remix, and I have arrived at some kind of an answer. I joined Remix during my sophomore summer, which was the start of my junior year, with academic confusion about where my theoretical interest lies. Partaking in Remix has given me quite a lot of incentive and time to think about these questions. I think that the answer to the question I posted at the beginning of the investigation is arguably in the question itself.
Works Cited:
Benjamin, Walter, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt, translated by Harry Zohn, Schocken Books, 1969, pp.1-26
Bode, Katherine. “The equivalence of “close” and “distant” reading; or, toward a new object for data-rich literary history.” Modern Language Quarterly 78.1 (2017): 77-106.
Foucault, Michel. “What is an Author?.” The Critical Tradition, edited by David H. Richter, Publisher, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016, pp.520-530.
Gavin, Michael. “Why Distant Reading Works.” New Literary History, Volume 53, Number 4, Autumn 2022 / Volume 54, Number 1, Winter 2023, pp. 613-633.
Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature.” Distant Reading, Verso Books, 2013, pp. 43-62.
