Abstract
This paper is situated within debates surrounding modes of “close” and
“distant reading”
[Moretti 2000] as they are played out in both the fields of world
literature and digital literary studies. It proposes an alternative digital
humanities approach to the study of world literature, advocating new methods of close
comparative reading rather than the mode of “distant reading” endorsed by Franco
Moretti and Alan Liu [Liu 2012]. Specifically, the research method
proposed here is focused on a close reading of the novel The
Secret Scripture (2008) by Irish author Sebastian Barry, with comparative
reference to Pat Barker’s well-known war novel Regeneration (1997). Through the development and implementation of a
digital humanities research method which facilitates new forms of digital literary
analysis, we demonstrate that close reading and digital humanities can too be
“practicing partners” in a way that serves to advance work in both the fields
of world literature and digital literary studies.
Introduction: World Literature, Distant Reading and the Digital Humanities
Since the publication of Franco Moretti’s controversial essay “Conjectures on World Literature”
[
Moretti 2000], “distant reading” has become a buzzword among
scholars in the literary studies community. Distant reading, understood in opposition
to “close reading” is, according to Moretti, a method of analysis which “allows you to focus on units that are
much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes – or genres
and systems”
[
Moretti 2000, 51]. In tracing patterns as they occur across large corpora of texts, Moretti’s
methodology is increasingly dependent on quantitative research methods and data
visualization techniques. Owing to the close affinity between Moretti’s distant
reading and these methods, Alan Liu has recently suggested that the concept has
brought the digital humanities into closer proximity with the traditional humanities
discipline of literary studies: “the digital
humanities are now what may be called the
practicing partner of
distant reading”
[
Liu 2012, 492–3]. Interestingly, however, few literary scholars
have acknowledged or addressed the digital humanities methodologies underlying
Moretti’s concept.
[1]Similarly, few digital humanists consider
distant reading within the context it was first proposed, namely, within the field of
world literature. Subsequently we find that while members within both the literary
and the digital humanities communities are purportedly addressing the same concept,
they are doing so in quite different ways and from still divergent standpoints.
This paper aims to bring together the two strands of these debates and by doing so to
advance current understandings of the relationship between digital humanities and the
literary practices of distant and close reading — the latter practice, we argue,
being too quickly jettisoned within recent studies. Taking a work of contemporary
Irish fiction,
The Secret Scripture
[
Barry 2008], as a case study, we describe the evolution and
implementation of an innovative new research method, incorporating digital humanities
and traditional literary methodologies which enable an enhanced form of close reading
of the novel within a world literature framework. Situating our research within the
debate between modes of close and distant reading, we focus on what Moretti has
identified as the element of literary texts for which modes of distant reading are
unable to account, i.e.“local narrative voice”
[
Moretti 2000]. We describe the development and implementation of a
digital humanities tool and methodology which support a close reading of this
particular textual feature within a comparative framework. In its second iteration,
the software is expanded to include the input of multiple literary scholars as they
engage with the text. In concluding, we argue that the digital humanities approach
endorsed in our case study shows that close reading and digital humanities can too be
“practicing partners”
[
Liu 2012, 493] in a way that serves to advance work in both the
fields of world literature and digital literary studies.
Distant Reading and World Literature
In the field of literary studies, the methodological debates regarding close and
distant readings have become inescapably intertwined with questions as to the
relative status of national and world literatures respectively. In “Conjectures on World Literature”, Moretti takes issue with
the tendency in literary scholarship to study literature within national contexts
only and to endorse practices of close reading which he describes as the “very solemn treatment of very few texts
taken very seriously”
[
Moretti 2000, 57]. Against such limited approaches to the diverse
and vast field of the world’s literature, Moretti maintains that the main goal of
distant reading and of world literature is to provide a “thorn in the side, a permanent intellectual challenge to
national literatures”
[
Moretti 2000, 68]. Distant reading, according to Moretti, “allows you to focus on units that are much
smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes — or genres and
systems”
[
Moretti 2000, 57] and, in so doing, to comprehend the literary
system as a whole rather than as it manifests in national contexts only.
In
What is World Literature? (2003), David Damrosch,
another leading figure in the world literature debate, establishes the labels
“specialist” and “generalist” readings to distinguish between national
and global approaches to literary scholarship respectively. The term
“specialist” refers to an approach or an individual concerned with studying
literary works within their culture of origins and national literary tradition;
practitioners endorsing specialist methodologies are characterized by a concern with
close textual reading and the endorsement of modes of microcriticism. Conversely,
“generalist” refers to approaches characterized by a “high level of cultural abstraction”
[
Damrosch 2003b, 329] and a refusal to engage with the
specificities of individual literary works or their place within a specific national
literature. In recent years, the generalist approach has become most readily
identified with Moretti’s mode of “distant reading.”
However, even within Moretti’s arguments for extending analysis beyond the confines
of national literature, the necessity for a specialist, local knowledge is
occasionally acknowledged. In “Conjunctures on World
Literature,” he concedes that “the narrator’s voice” is the “key variable element” that disrupts a
distant or generalist approach to literature [
Moretti 2000, 65–6].
As the embodiment of “local form” through “local narrative voice,”
“the narrator is the pole of comment, of
explanation, of evaluation”
[
Moretti 2000, 66]; when “foreign ‘formal patterns’ (or actual foreign
presence, for that matter) make characters behave in strange ways […] then of
course comment becomes uneasy — garrulous, erratic, rudderless”
[
Moretti 2000, 66]. Tellingly, it is at this point — that of
“local narrative voice” — that the generalist must yield to the specialist’s
knowledge and methods of close reading in order to make sense of the “erratic”
comment that the local narrator relays.
Having called attention to both the potential value and the limitations of both
generalist and specialist approaches, Damrosch notes that the key challenge facing
scholars concerned with the study of world literature is the establishment of a
methodology which enables the researcher to “mediate between broad, but often reductive, overviews
and intensive, but often atomistic, close readings”
[
Damrosch 2003a, 26]. The solution he proposes is that world
literature can best be read by combining both specialist and generalist approaches:
rather than adapting the role of either generalist or specialist in the study of
world literature, Damrosch suggests it is more useful to endorse a both / and
approach. He points out that when our purpose is not to delve into a culture in
detail, “the reader and even the work
itself may benefit from being spared the full force of our local
knowledge,” and that the generalist “will find much of the specialist’s information about the
work’s origins is no longer relevant and not only can be but should be set
aside”
[
Damrosch 2003c, 517]. Conversely, the specialist’s knowledge
serves as the major safeguard against the generalist’s “own will to power over texts that otherwise become all
too easily grist for the mill of a preformed historical argument or theoretical
system”
[
Damrosch 2003c]. Hence Damrosch argues that “systemic approaches need to be counter balanced with
close attention to particular languages and specific texts”
[
Damrosch 2003a, 26] which will enable the generalist to
understand the work effectively in its new cultural and theoretical context while at
the same time having a fundamental comprehension of its relation to the source
culture.
Digital Humanities Methodologies and Modes of Readings
Damrosch’s aspirations for a combined generalist/specialist methodology have a
particular, though as yet largely unacknowledged, relevance for newly emerging
digital humanities literary methodologies. Instead, Moretti’s terms have tended to
dominate the field and in recent years a growing number of works in digital literary
studies have explicitly endorsed modes of distant reading [
Clement 2008]
[
Wilkens 2012]. The most common strategy has been to analyze large
corpora of texts in order to identify patterns as they occur within the wider
literary field, and thus to move literary studies beyond the confines of literary
canons [
Moretti 2005], [
Wilkens 2012], [
Heuser 2011]. Conversely, Tanya Clement has employed text mining and
data visualization techniques to enable a reading of an individual text, Gertrude
Stein’s
The Making of Americans, “from a distance”
[
Clement 2008, 361]. In most instances, however, the formal
features of the text or texts under examination are read at a remove from the
cultural context in which they are either produced or read.
In his article “Where is Cultural Criticism
in the Digital Humanities?”, Alan Liu has termed the lack of engagement
with cultural criticism as a key “deficit” for digital humanities. In this
scenario, distant reading — understood as a “catch-all” for long-established
“cultural-critical methods” — becomes the post-Cold War savior and the means
to break an earlier formalist-culturalist détente: “Sophisticated digital humanities methods that require explicit
programmatic instructions and metadata schema now take the ground of elemental
practice previously occupied by equally sophisticated but tacit close reading
methods”
[
Liu 2012, 493–4]. For Liu, the contrast in new practice is so
“stark” as to change “the very nature
of the ground being fought over: the text” as “block quotations serving as a middle ground for fluid movement
between close and distant reading are disappearing from view,” and are
increasingly replaced as “objects of
sustained focus” by “data
visualizations of large patterns”
[
Liu 2012, 494]. While Liu’s arguments concerning cultural
criticism have a compelling and mobilizing force, his jettisoning of close reading
and of block quotations as subjects of enquiry for digital humanities is, in our
view, premature. Nor, as this paper will show, need a partnership of close reading
and digital humanities, informed by recent developments in world literature, operate
in isolation from “cultural-critical” methods.
Case Study: Local Narrative Voice in The Secret
Scripture
The subject of this case study, Sebastian Barry’s 2008 novel The
Secret Scripture, is set in present-day Ireland and tells the story of the
100-year old Roseanne Clear who was incarcerated in the Sligo Mental Asylum at some
point during the mid-twentieth century. The story is relayed through a double
narrative: the personal recollections of Roseanne relayed in her “Testimony of Herself” and the observations made by her psychiatrist, Dr.
Grene, in his own investigation into Roseanne’s admittance into the hospital, which
are recorded in his “Commonplace Book.” Although the novel
shifts between the first-person narratives of Roseanne and that of Dr. Grene,
Roseanne’s voice is the more prominent of the two throughout the novel.
While
The Secret Scripturehas enjoyed a very positive
reception and a number of literary awards, some divergence exists among critics in
their evaluation of the efficacy of the narrative voice. For many critics and
readers, Roseanne’s voice is what renders the story being recounted so powerful.
Writing for
The Daily Telegraph, David Robson goes so
far as to argue that in Roseanne Clear, Barry has “created one of the most memorable narrators in recent
fiction”
[
Robson 2008]. Robson’s claim was echoed by Matthew Parris, chair of
the 2008 Costa Book Award judging panel, who argues that in Roseanne, “Sebastian Barry has created one of the great
narrative voices in contemporary fiction” (Parris quoted in
The Daily Telegraph, 2 May 2008). However, curiously, and as
recorded by the
IndependentArts Correspondent on 28
January 2009, the judges awarded the prize to Barry in spite of their explicit
acknowledgement that the book was “flawed
in many ways.” The strongest criticism was generated by the novel’s ending
while another critique centred on the “voice” of Dr. Grene. For Parris, “it was the narrative strength of the central
character, Roseanne, which helped Barry triumph…. In Roseanne, a narrator had been
created that is so transcendent that it redeems all of the structural weaknesses
of the book” (
Independent, 28 January
2009).
However, Barry’s use of Roseanne as first-person narrator has also generated strong
critical scepticism regarding the credibility of her voice. Writer Adam Roberts takes
issue with the plausibility of the prose allocated to Roseanne, arguing that
I’ve only known one 100-year old, and she hardly spoke at
all. Most centurions, I’d wager, limit themselves to “pardon?” and “the nurses are stealing my clothes,” and few
if any are capable of eloquence like this: “There
was a black river that flowed through the town, and if it had no grace for the
mortal beings, it did for swans and many swans resorted there, and even rode
the river like some kind of plunging animals, in floods. (The Valve, 29 September 2008)”
In
The New Statesman, Robert Hanks also questions the
success of the narrative voice on account of “Barry’s failure to give his two narrators sufficiently
distinct voices”
[
Hanks 2008]. According to Hanks, Dr Grene was educated in England, and
at one point says that nobody could mistake him for an Irishman, whereas he is at
times almost stage Irish. The book is also marred by a self-consciously literary
quality, manifested in Roseanne’s improbable attachment to Sir Thomas Browne’s
Religio Medici and the predictable unreliability of the narrators [
Hanks 2008].
A second and related significant thread within critical reception of the novel is its
status as “national narrative.” While Roseanne’s narrative relays a subjective
account of her own personal history, numerous critics have noted the conflation
between personal history and Irish history that occurs in
The
Secret Scripture. Anna Leach calls attention to the fact that “as the country of Ireland, or Éire, is often
represented as a woman, it is not difficult to see parallels between the plight of
Roseanne, beautiful and abused, and the plight of the country”
[
Leach 2008]. Writing for
The New York
Times, Art Winslow notes that in
The Secret
Scripture, “personal fate and
national fate are incestuously bound” (16 January 2009). And according to
the publishing blurb circulated by publisher Faber and Faber, “Roseanne’s story becomes an alternative, secret, history of
Ireland” (faberandfaber.co.uk, 2008).
The extent, however, to which Barry has been successful in combining personal history
with national history has also produced disagreement among critics and readers. For
Leach, Roseanne’s story is at times “rendered more symbolic than human,” which she sees as ultimately weakening
the credibility of Barry’s plot [
Leach 2008]. Similarly, Deborah
Cameron, writing for ABC Sydney, also questions the degree to which Barry
successfully portrays both a personal and a national narrative through Roseanne’s
first-person narrative: she asks whether Roseanne “live[s] and breathe[s] as an independent character”
or if she is “a puppet, jerked around to
illustrate various events from Ireland’s past”
[
Cameron 2009]. Underlying this particular issue is a suggestive and
significant debate regarding the novel’s attempt to convey both a personal and
national trauma, not only as a historical event but one of acute relevance to
contemporary Ireland.
Introduction to Digital Humanities Research Method
The case study constructed by this paper is thus shaped by the analytic crossover of
current debates in digital humanities and world literature regarding modes of reading
(close and distant) and interpretative approaches (general and specialist). Owing to
the debates surrounding narrative technique in The Secret
Scripture and its status as a national novel, it provides an interesting
case study for examining how the formal feature of “narrative voice” employed by
the author affects the content of the novel and its reception. This literary enquiry
informs our specialist approach and the construction of a related digital humanities
methodology.
In order to move our analysis of
The Secret
Scripturebeyond an Irish context and tradition, following Damrosch, we employ
a comparative approach [
Damrosch 2003b, 329]. As Damrosch notes,
“to be effective, a comparison of
disparate works needs to be grounded in some third term or set of concerns that
can provide a common basis for analysis”
[
Damrosch 2009, 46]. Specifically, we include a comparison of
Barry’s work to Pat Barker’s well-known novel,
Regeneration (1995) as a narrative also structured around the dialogical
relationship of patient and therapist. Set in Britain in the early twentieth century,
Regeneration is based on the real-life experiences of
British army officers being treated for shell shock during World War I at
Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. Its narrative relays the treatment of
soldiers suffering mental breakdown and is shaped predominantly around the
discussions which the psychiatrist Dr. Rivers has with a number of patients within
the asylum in which he works, most notably those with the war poet, Siegfried
Sassoon. In narratological terms, Barker’s novel utilizes the narrative technique of
“free-indirect discourse,” which shifts between various characters’
perspectives throughout and which facilitates an especially complex and layered
narrative. Thus, like
The Secret Scripture,
Regeneration provides an account of an individual trauma
which is also intimately related to a wider historical trauma inherent within its
culture of origins, and whose successful narrative realisation depends on a subtle
use of voice and focalized discourse. Our comparative approach is therefore
deliberately situated in and constructed through the specificities of texts — in
thematic content and in narrative form — from which contrasts and similarities
emerge. In this case study, the two novels under discussion each offer a fictional
depiction of personal and cultural trauma, conveyed through extended narrative
dialogue, and a key objective is to advance readers’ understanding of the complex
interoperation of form and theme in these novels.
As an interdisciplinary humanities and computer science team, we conducted a case
study that initially sought to develop a digital humanities tool and methodology that
enabled a) a close reading of The Secret Scripture’s
“narrative voice” and b) reading the text through a comparative analysis with
Pat Barker’s Regeneration (1995), again through a focus
on narrative voice. In the second stage of the case study, as detailed below, we
sought to compare specialist readings of one text — the Irish novel The Secret Scripture — in order to provide the literary
analyst with additional insight into the work when read within its culture of origins
by diverse readers.
Our aim was to develop and implement a digital humanities research method, based on
close textual reading of blocks of selected text. Specifically, we chose to pay
particular attention to the interrelation of narrative voice and narrative theme,
and, within the area of theme, to references to trauma and to cultural context with a
view to elucidating not only the text’s “generalist” and “specialist”
dimensions but, crucially, also their interrelationship. As will be discussed in more
detail below, we developed a visualization of the markup of the narrative structure
of both The Secret Scriptureand Regenerationto enable the literary analyst in the first instance to (a)
identify the degree to which the various characters dominate the dialogue; (b)
identify the degree to which the omniscient narrator is utilized in the passages of
dialogue between patient and therapist; and (c) identify the degree to which the
narrative is autodiegetic. Secondly, the visualization allows the markup of instances
of theme, thus significantly extending the existing possibilities of literary
annotation and comparative analysis, as will be examined in the next section.
Digital Humanities Methodologies and Tool Design
Once the literary research question was established, the software tools were designed
to support the scholar/analyst in its investigation. The research aimed to
investigate the following three elements: 1) narrative structure, 2) trauma and 3)
cultural context, by firstly identifying these characteristics within the text, and
then examining their relationship to one another. Investigation of the relationships
was undertaken with the aid of a visualization tool, designed to render XML-encoded
data, and support the practices in comparative analysis.
Initially, an analysis of researcher activities led to four primary use cases
providing key design requirements and constraints for the visualization tool, i.e. it
should be web-based to support sharing and collaborative viewing or working; it
should support simultaneous rendering of XML-encoded narrative for two texts (for
example, two encodings of the same text or two encodings of different texts); it
should render annotations associated with encoded elements; and it should provide a
means for visual overlapping functionality to support inspection of encoding
differences and similarities, for example, overlapping encoded segments of cultural
and trauma indicators within a single text. The associated XML schema was also
derived from these use cases.
Both novels were to be examined for their narrative structure: thus the first phase
of encoding utilised a single schema designed for marking the type of narrator being
used, e.g. an omniscient narrator, or the deployment of one of the characters as
narrator. The narrative techniques employed in both texts are intricate and complex.
For example, inThe Secret Scripture, the auto-diegetic
nature of the narrative required a means of distinguishing between when the narrator
was narrating or speaking to another character. In Regenerationan omniscient narrator sporadically appears, with extensive
focalizing through a character’s viewpoint. Responding to these challenges, in a
reflexive and iterative process, we developed the encoding scheme to include an
activity attribute, which was introduced to record whether the narrator was
“doing” (i.e. moving, looking away and so forth), “speaking,”
“thinking,” or “narrating.” In addition, a “focalizing” activity was
further introduced to enable the analyst to indicate when free-indirect discourse was
being employed in Barker’s novel. This was deemed a necessary development as,
although the omniscient narrator is employed frequently throughout the text, it is
most often focalized through the perspective of Dr. Rivers. Hence in order to
determine the degree to which a particular character serves as the “pole of
comment” within the novel, it was necessary to establish a means of indicating
where the narrative is relayed through their perspective. An example of the encoding
for narrative structure can be seen in Figure 1, which shows an excerpt from Regenerationwhere Sassoon is discussing hallucinations with
his therapist.
The second phase of encoding involved marking characteristics of “trauma and
cultural context” within the text. One of the aims of the research was to
investigate the textual relationship between these two characteristics; as such they
wereindependently marked into the text that had already been marked for narrative
structure (as above). This process produced two encodings for each novel. One
encoding made explicit the text associated with trauma (see Figure 2), the other
encoding made explicit the text associated with cultural context (see Figure 3). The
relationship between the two themes could then be compared and contrasted either
within a single novel, or each theme could be examined across the two novels. This
was achieved by rendering these encodings within the software environment.
The aforementioned developments are examples of the enhanced attention to the
literary conventions and functions of narrative structure demanded by the encoding
process. As the act of encoding demanded that the analyst identify and name the
various narrative techniques employed in the two novels under examination, through
this digital humanities process, she was brought into a deeper engagement with the
formal features of the texts, thus bringing her to an increased awareness of how the
perspectives generated by both novels were constructed and the complexity of their
structure.
The process of encoding further served to enhance the analyst’s engagement with the
manner in which cultural context is made manifest throughout the two novels. In
marking the indicators of cultural context, it was discovered that there were various
types thereof within the passages. For example, within both novels there are direct
references to specific place names, such as Lough Gill in The
Secret Scriptureand Craiglockhart in Regeneration. However, there are also less explicit indicators such as
the use of colloquialisms within the dialogue. Similarly, when marking up indicators
of trauma it emerged that the trauma tag was also being applied to both overt and
covert indicators of trauma. For example, in The Secret
Scripture, Dr. Grene explicitly refers to traumatic events in Roseanne’s
life, such as her incarceration. Such
indicators are notably different in kind to the silence that the patient displays
in
response to Dr. Grene’s suggestion of releasing Roseanne back into society [
Barry 2008, 78].
As these two types of indicators of cultural context and trauma are not one and the
same, it became necessary to distinguish between the various types. Subsequently,
“implicit” and “explicit” descriptors were included, and implemented as
attributes on the relevant tags in order to allow the encoder to specify the
differences between the various types of indicators. Again the process of encoding
and the degree of specificity that was permitted by the development of appropriate
XML tags brought the analyst into a deeper engagement with how cultural context and
trauma are interlinked throughout bothThe Secret
Scriptureand Regeneration (to be discussed in
detail under Critical Analysis).
The schema design was undertaken using an iterative design process where a basic
design is enhanced over time through engagement with the source and the project
collaborators. This well-established approach to data modelling takes cognisance of
the hermeneutic spiral created as soon as a source is examined through a certain lens
(in this case, for markers of trauma and cultural context), and seeks to account for
the expected requirement drift associated with this growing understanding. For
instance, through this iterative process, differences emerged as to what the various
researchers considered to be indicators of cultural context and trauma and whether
they were explicit or implicit. The discussions and debates that ensued brought to
light the subjective nature of this interpretative process; thus we considered it
useful and necessary to capture the reasoning behind each markup decision. Hence, a
“comment” attribute was added to the cultural context and trauma tags to
record such content. This form of annotation seemed more appropriate for this
research, rather than adopting, or developing a complete annotation system.
Furthermore, this approach aligned well with the researcher’s modus operandi of
simultaneously identifying some indicator and giving a reason, rather than annotating
some textual element afterwards which is a different use case.
Visualisation of the encodings was achieved using a custom-designed and developed
software tool. The design was driven using standard web-development software
engineering techniques and paradigms, for example, use case analysis, iterative
design and design patterns. In order to enhance the comparative analysis of the
various encodings both within and across texts, we determined that the interface
should be divided to contain two scroll panes. This approach would provide the
researcher with a method to quickly navigate pairs of XML-encoded documents. Each
pane was given an associated dropbox providing the user with a list of available, and
uniquely identifiable, encodings. The user can select which novels and which
encodings (trauma or cultural context) he/she wishes to compare (Figure 4). The
choice of novels and encodings is determined by whether the user wishes to compare
the encodings as they appear within an individual text or to conduct a comparative
analysis of either cultural context or trauma as they appear in both novels.
The technologies used were XHTML, XML, XSLT and JavaScript, and Perl; all deployed in
a client-server architecture. The panels were realised in XHTML. Many of the
interactive elements of the tool were realised using JavaScript. The panels used
updatable <div> elements that had accompanying JavaScript functions for
repositioning, changing the z-index (overlapping order), and adjusting the
transparency of the text background. Both the text and the visual-aid colours and
symbols within the panels were generated from the XML encodings using XSLT. When the
panels are overlapped in the centre of the page, the backgrounds become transparent
in order to view overlapping color-coded markup segments. Transparency management was
achieved by manipulating the the z-index of the panels, and the transparency of the
panel <div> elements. Both panels also implement co-operative JavaScript
scrolling event handlers which, if selected, automatically scroll the other panel if
the user is examining the same text (but different encodings) in both panels. The
tooltip feature was also custom developed using Javascript.
Colored speech bubbles were deployed to designate the various narrator participants:
green for the therapists’ speech, orange for the patients’ and red for that of the
omniscient narrator. When the narrator participants are engaged in dialogue, two
overlapping speech bubbles denote this, with the speech bubble of the character that
is speaking being the larger of the two. While a user engaging with the softwarecan
shift between encodings of cultural context and trauma, the visualisation of the
narrative structure in both novels remains permanent (see Figure 5).
The segments of text that have been marked up as indicators of cultural context and
trauma appear as highlighted text. The sections of text marked as cultural context
are highlighted in yellow, and those of trauma in light purple. These colors were
chosen since: a) they are easy on the eye; b) they allow the highlighted text to be
easily read, and: c) when the two are overlapped, one color does not dominate over
the other (see Figure 6.).
Using the scroll function, the user can a) compare and contrast the degree to which
cultural context and trauma appear within the one text; or b) compare the extent to
which markers of cultural context or trauma appear in The Secret
Scriptureor Regeneration. The simultaneous
scroll function enables the user to examine the respective encodings on a
line-by-line basis. The overlap function was designed in order to permit the literary
analyst to see where the various forms of encoding overlap. For example, by setting
both scroll panes to The Secret Scripture, the user can
utilize the overlap function to see which segments of texts have been marked as both
indicators of cultural context and as trauma (Figure 7). This permits a comparative
analysis of two thematic readings of an individual text not possible in codex
form.
The comments inserted by the encoder during the mark up process are visualized in a
comment box, headed with the name of the user who carried out the encoding (similar
to the insert comment function available in modern document processing applications).
This box appears when the user places the cursor over any of the highlighted text in
any of the encodings of trauma or cultural context in either The
Secret Scripture or Regeneration (figure 8.). If required, the comments can be utilised in
“sticky” manner and remain in view throughout analysis.
Evolution of Research Project
The software was first presented at the Digital Humanities Conference 2010 [
Howell, Keating and Kelleher 2010]. At this point, we had determined that a useful further
development of the software would be to enable the input of multiple markers. Our
future design goal was corroborated by feedback received at the Digital Humanities
Conference, where attendees expressed interest in the possibility of having multiple
scholars comment on a text or texts. In order to accommodate this evolved research
concern, and shortly after its initial dissemination, the software was developed
further to include the input of multiple scholars engaging with
The Secret Scripture. Expanding the commenting functionality, we deployed
contributions by nine literary scholars of various nationalities who were asked to
mark up the same segment of text from
The Secret
Scriptureand to specify the reasoning behind their choice of markup.
Having collected this data from the various participants, the analyst sought to
utilize the software to investigate the degree to which variation or conformity
occurred among scholars considered to be specialists in the field of Irish literary
studies as they engaged with the text under examination.
The selected participants for this exercise were chosen from the confirmed list of
attendees who would be present at the IASIL(The International Association for the
Study of Irish Literatures) Conference held in Maynooth in July 2010. In selecting
participants from the IASIL attendee list, we consciously limited our sample to
specialists in the field of Irish studies as this would ensure an average familiarity
with the cultural context in which the text is situated across the respondents.
However, while all the participants were specialists in the area of Irish literature,
they were of differing nationalities.
[2] Within this small sample of
nine participants, we were interested in establishing how this specialist expertise
differed within the interpretative community and how this could be represented by our
project.
[3]
As the participants had limited, if any, experience in XML encoding, they were asked
to conduct the exercise using Microsoft Word’s highlighting and insert comment
features: had we requested that they carry out the exercise in XML, it is unlikely
that any of the contributors would have agreed to partake, due to lack of familiarity
with the encoding language and the time it would take in order to develop a working
knowledge thereof. In the appropriate Word files, the participants were asked to
highlight what they considered to be indicators of trauma by setting the highlighter
to pink, and to yellow for those of cultural context. They were further asked to
utilize the insert comment function on Microsoft Word to specify whether they thought
the indicator of trauma or cultural context to be implicit and to provide a brief
commentary on their reasoning behind their choice of markup (Figure 9).
The completed exercises were examined and then used to XML-encode the plain text in
separate XML files, with each participant having provided both a trauma and a
cultural context file, thereby allowing the encoded narrative to be visualised using
the software tool. As with the encodings of the initial marker, the encodings of the
nine participants were realized using yellow to indicate markup of cultural
contextand pink for that of trauma. No further changes to the visualization software
were required other than changing the detail in the dropbox options to reflect the
“Author” associated with a particular encoding.
The software and schema development cycle was typical of a digital humanities project
in that sometimes the software provided insight into what might be possible (i.e. new
use cases) and at other times, new emerging use cases (e.g. following discourse at
conferences) prompted changing features in the software. There were also some
interesting challenges associated with the actual development, for example, most
browsers were unable to dynamically apply XSLT to an XML encoding, and then apply CSS
to the resultant XHTML, within a <div> element. This meant that a two-step
process was developed, whereby the XSL stylesheets were applied to the encodings and
then saved as XHTML in order to support dynamically changing the encoding of interest
in one of the panels. There are other reasonable, and more elegant solutions, of
course, and could be easily implemented should a collaborative, larger-scale
deployment be required.
Critical Evaluation
While the original version of the software was developed in order to enhance the
comparison of thematic approaches to The Secret
Scripture, the software as presented at IASIL was concerned with enabling
the comparison of various responses by literary scholars to an individual literary
work. As the software was presented in two forms, it is necessary to discuss what it
enabled in its initial state before proceeding to outline its capabilities when it
was expanded to include the contributions of ten literary scholars.
Version 1
- The visualization of the markup of the narrative structure enables
- the analyst to:
- a. identify the degree to which the various characters dominate the
dialogue.
- b. identify the degree to which the omniscient narrator is utilized in
the passages of dialogue between patient and therapist.
- c. identify the degree to which the narrative is autodiegetic.
- As the cultural context and trauma encodings are embedded within that of the
narrative structure, the software enables the analyst to identify within whose
narrative voice and how frequently the indicators of cultural context and
trauma appear.
- The overlap function enables the analyst to identify the segments of text
where indicators of cultural context and trauma co-occur within either of the
novels.
- By setting the panes to either trauma or cultural context, the analyst can
visually compare the degree to which they appear in either of the
novels.
- The visualization of the markup also permits the analyst to identify the
elements of the text that were not marked as significant indicators of either
cultural context or trauma.
Version 2
- This version enables the analyst to examine the response of an individual
participant to the novel by setting the scroll panes to their encodings of
trauma and cultural context.
- The analyst may then:
- a) compare either the cultural context or trauma encodings of various
participants.
- b) overlap the various encodings of the participants in order to
identify where their respective markup overlaps.
- The visualization of the commentary by the various encoders provides the
analyst with additional information upon which to compare choice of markup
along with the rationale provided by each participant.
Findings
In this study, the analyst was primarily interested in the implications of
“narrative voice”; as noted earlier, in the case ofThe
Secret Scripture this was a contested aspect in evaluations of the novel
and, more generally, an important fault-line for distant and close readings of texts.
While some analysis of the respective narrative structures would be possible without
the software, the visualization thereof enabled the user to compare more readily the
various narrative techniques and, in this case study, some illuminating and dynamic
textual features emerged.
The visualization of the narrative structure in both texts revealed that although the
passages selected from the two novels were chosen on the basis that they contained
dialogue between the patient and therapist, the amount of information that is relayed
in conversation between the patient and therapist is notably less inThe Secret Scripturethan in Regeneration. This was somewhat surprising as unlike Regeneration, an omniscient narrator does not feature in The Secret Scripture. However, the visualization of the
encoding of the narrative structure also highlights the degree to which The Secret Scriptureis autodiegetic, whereby Roseanne, the
novel’s protagonist, narrates the story in which she herself is a character.
The autodiegetic nature of the narrative is significant in that Roseanne, while
refusing to dispense much information to Dr. Grene, provides the reader with the
details of her story. Hence, the reader becomes the narrator’s confidant. This
intimate relationship between narrator and reader created through the use of a
specific narrative technique calls attention to the powerful function of a local
narrative voice within the novel. By visualizing the encodings of cultural context
and trauma within those of the novels’ narrative structures, the software further
enabled the analyst to examine visually how the formal features of narrative, or the
“style,” interact with the narratological “discourse,” that is, with the
precise details of the story being told (see [
Shen 2008, 136–149]).
Interestingly, in Version 1 of the software, the segments of texts marked up as
indicative of trauma inThe Secret Scriptureappear most
frequently either in Dr. Grene’s dialogue or within Roseanne’s narration, not, as one
might expect, in her response to the therapist who questions her on the very matter.
The interaction of form and content thus revealed emphasizes Roseanne’s unwillingness
to voice her trauma. As Roseanne’s trauma was due in part to a patriarchal, Irish
society denying her a voice with which to assert herself or her rights, the narrative
structure directly supports the thematic content of the novel. More generally, it
reflects the physical and social silencing of women in Ireland in the early to mid
twentieth century and the difficulties in accessing their stories. Here, then, the
status of Barry’s novel as national narrative is directly related to, and dependent
upon, the power of the personal narrative. Our digital method makes visible not only
this intricate relationship but further illuminates the subtle effect of Barry’s
technique; contrary to the views of some critics that his style is
“overwritten”, it is at crucial times “underwritten” — operating through
telling gaps and silences as well as through what is directly expressed.
Conversely, in
Regeneration, trauma indicators are
distributed more evenly across the discourse between the patient and the therapist
and the omniscient narration. However, on closer inspection, one notices that when
omniscient narration is employed, it is focalized predominantly through the character
of Dr. Rivers due to the author’s use of free-indirect discourse. Thus, the
indicators of trauma in
Regeneration are presented more
frequently through the therapist’s perspective. Once again, a key aspect of Barker’s
style, and one which has strong thematic significance, is made visible and explicable
by our method. It is worth noting in this regard that Barker’s use of narrative
structure in turn exemplifies the approach to psychotherapy actually employed by the
historical Dr. Rivers. As Robert Hemmings has noted:
Rivers developed a therapeutic treatment based upon the
principle of catharsis whereby the patient was encouraged to eschew repressive
tendencies and give voice to the traumatic memories […] without dwelling
excessively upon them. Patient and physician would work together to construct from
these painful memories a narrative that found some tolerable, or redeeming, even
pleasant association for the trauma. [Hemmings 2005, 114]
Utilizing the visualization aspect more extensively, the analyst overlapped the
encodings for both novels in order to compare to what extent the traumas depicted in
Regenerationand The Secret
Scripturewere culturally specific. As both novels are related to events
that have caused a “cultural trauma” to the respective nations in which they are
set, the analyst expected to discover a significant degree of overlap between the
encodings of trauma and cultural context. However, it emerged that the degree of
overlap was relatively small. The lack thereof inspired the analyst to re-examine the
segments of text marked as cultural context; this was an act of critical
self-reflexivity that was made possible by the fact that her encodings had been
captured and visualized by the software.
Of the two novels, the overlap occurred most frequently in Regeneration. On closer inspection, the analyst discovered that her
criteria for marking cultural context were based predominantly on explicit
indicators, such as place names, historical personage and colloquialisms, more
readily identifiable when one reads a novel set in a location less immediately
familiar to the reader. As Regeneration is a more
overtly historical novel than The Secret Scripture, it
utilizes factual information more frequently, which could also account for the fact
that the analyst marked more indicators of cultural context in Barker’s novel than in
the Irish text. However, on returning to her markup of The
Secret Scripture, the analyst noticed that she had failed to encode a
number of significant elements of the text that were related to cultural context due
to her limited definition of indicators of cultural context. More so than Barker,
Sebastian Barry employs a prose style which is “full of gleaming images” (Gatti,
The Times 1 May 2008) and it is through his creative
use of images that he ties his novel more implicitly to an Irish cultural context.
For example, Roseanne’s references to “salmon” evoke an image that is intimately
bound not only to the Irish environment, but also to Irish mythology owing to its
associations with stories relating to the Irish Fianna and specifically the legend of
the bradán feasaor salmon of knowledge. Contrary to the critique cited
earlier (that Barry’s novel elevates the symbolic over the human), symbolic
references are used to suggest layers of psychological insight and, relatedly,
psychological damage.
An examination of the encoded responses of more than one analyst is a much more
challenging comparative task. In the case of the various participants in The Secret Scripture case study (Version 2), the analyst
found that a significant consensus occurred across the participants in relation to
their selection of moments in the text for markup, and especially so in relation to
cultural context. This relative conformity may be partially attributed to the
criteria set for the exercise. It may also be due in part to the fact that the
contributors were all specialists in the field of Irish studies. While the revelation
of consensus was in itself a research benefit, as it provided evidence as to the
manner in which literary scholars engage with a text, the general conformity also
served to make the differences, and their accompanying rationale, all the more
notable.
In the first paragraph of the novel, only two of the six Irish contributors marked
any of the text as being indicative of cultural context, while all four of the
international participants annotated either specific words or phrases. The majority
of those who did mark some text in this paragraph marked words such as “green
field”s, and “folded farms,” though their reasoning for doing so varied
(“rural imagery,”
“reference to either Flanders or Ireland”, “Ireland or Irish
related-images,” etc). One participant noted that the reference to “green
fields” recalled W. B. Yeats’s account of “four
green fields” in his play Cathleen Ni Houlihan.
In contrast, only one participant selected the phrase “Dear reader! Dear reader,” marking this segment of text as an
“implicit” marker of cultural context, which recalls the “gothic of Poe or even Baudelaire.”
A notable feature of the annotated markup was its frequent substantiation, and
justification, in relation to Irish history and culture. For example, one Irish
scholar marked “the transmigration of the soul” as an implicit indicator of
cultural context, commenting that:
Much is made of
this idea in Ulysses: could possibly be an allusion
to it. But equally possibly not. Certainly this passage has modernist echoes — the
classical and the mundane.
As previously mentioned, another participant situated the text within an Irish
literary and cultural tradition by tracing a connection between Sebastian Barry’s
novel and W. B. Yeats’s play, Cathleen Ni Houlihan. The
impulse to locate the novel within a specific national genealogy — and the related
hesitation — is especially telling since it strikingly re-enacts at the
“micro-level” of individual readings a central tension within the reception
of Barry’s work – between those who seek to absorb his writings within a nationalist
historiographical tradition, reinforcing the status of a national literature, and
those who view his work as presenting a direct challenge to such a unitary national
tradition. In addition to visualizing these alternative interpretations, the digital
methodology can also illuminate the manner in which the text facilitates, and even
invites, both such readings. For example, Figure 10 displays how the references to
World War Two, marked by a number of participants as indicating an internationally
“shared history,” appear in close proximity to the brief textual discussion
of the struggle for liberation in Ireland.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the fusing of digital humanities with literary methodologies of close
reading, which is a fundamental characteristic of our research project, yields
significant findings with regard to a literary-critical analysis of the chosen case
study: Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture. The
complex operations of “narrative voice” in the novel — whereby the most powerful
indicators of trauma are indirectly conveyed, and filtered through the therapist’s
perspective — can be elucidated and the subtlety of the authorial achievement therein
brought to light through the practices of markup and annotation. Such a technique can
in turn inform a wider literary pedagogy, illustrating in close detail how form and
theme work together; this may be particularly useful in teaching undergraduate
students for whom developing a nuanced understanding of narrative technique is often
a difficulty encountered in their initial years in literary studies.
A further critically contested area with regard to Barry’s novel — namely its status
as “national narrative” — is also illuminated through our linked literary and
digital techniques of annotation (recording individual interpretative practices) and
comparative analysis (the overlap function). As shown above, the processes through
which indicators of cultural context, implicit or explicit, operate in the novel are
central to the novel’s effect, not least through the varying ways in which those
potential indicators are identified by readers. Here the reader’s own interpretation
of what constitutes a marker of cultural context becomes the key determinant, and the
degree — or absence — of consensus among different readers, a fruitful subject of
study. Thus our case study demonstrates how digital methodologies can be deployed,
not only to support “generalist” readings, but also to analyse how a novel may
generate differing or shared “specialist” responses. Its wider significance,
within the still evolving field of digital literary analysis, is to argue for the
value of interlinked textual and cultural analysis that delves into the specificities
of texts; contra Liu, “block quotations” still retain value as the “objects of
sustained focus” for digital humanities [
Liu 2012, 494].
The digital humanities objects, that is, the various visualization software, schema
and XML encodings, have evolved in many stages through this iterative design process,
and in step with the evolving research question; as a result, this paper presents an
evolutionary chronicle of the development of our schema and methods. In the
concluding pages of
What is World Literature?, Damrosch
predicts that “those who work on world
literature are increasingly going to find that a significant share of their work
is best done in collaboration with other people”
[
Damrosch 2003c, 286]. Those “other people,” to whom Damrosch
refers, now include colleagues in digital humanities and computer science, working in
collaboration with colleagues in world literature and literary studies; our own case
study demonstrates the rich results that can be yielded for literary criticism by the
collaborative work of an interdisciplinary humanities and computer science team
whereby traditional literary methodologies can be re-activated and regenerated rather
than abandoned.