[I delivered the Annual Whalley Lecture on March 11, 2016, at Queen’s University. All the links I mentioned in my talk can be found here in order of mention. Once more, I would like to thank Shelley King, Brooke Cameron, John Pierce, and the entire Queen’s English Department for this opportunity and a wonderful visit.]
You may recognize the first part of my title since the Open Syllabus Project tells us that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein appears on more syllabi than any other work of English literature. For those who may not recall Frankenstein, it begins with Captain Walton’s sea voyage from England to the North Pole to find the Northwest passage. The poster image for this talk is meant to convey the setting of Walton’s boat in the Arctic Ocean under the northern lights. While ice-locked in the Arctic, his crew spies a curious figure of “gigantic stature” on a dog sled crossing the ice. The next morning, sailors find a man on an ice floe also with a dog team, and all but one of the dogs are dead. The man, like the sole living dog, was, in the words of Billy Crystal, mostly dead, or slightly alive. Shelley describes him as being “nearly frozen” and “dreadfully emaciated” from exposure and exertion. This is Victor Frankenstein we’re meeting for the first time. The crew begins to help him off the ice and onto the deck of the ship, but Victor stops them. He says: “Before I come on board your vessel, will you have the kindness to inform me whither you are bound?” (I.letter IV.7). This is funny because for a man in such poor shape, he is surprisingly eloquent and polite. His words don’t sound the way he looks. He doesn’t think he needs to be saved, and he forgot about the needs of his own body while he follows the path set by his creation.
I invoke Victor’s first words to start my talk because he offers us some insight into the Romantic Digital Humanities today. Victor is myopically focused on chasing something that he’s made, his creature, and it is no longer his experiment but a living, thriving body with a life of its own. I suggest that most of us working on Romantic DH projects do the same: we’re following a course that early experiments set for us, a bold and worthy course, but our focus has shifted from experimentation to the course itself.
I argue that as we have grown more prolific in our contributions to the Romantic Digital Humanities, we have become overall less experimental; a trend important to notice for scholars of a literary period known for its radical experimentation. With a few exceptions, Romantic digital humanists have not focused on innovating new kinds of DH projects; rather, we are entrenched in long journeys with established genres either to improve or maintain electronic editions or digital archives, or to survive the enduro-journey that is building a new edition or archive. In no way do I want to belittle the important work that digital editions and archives do to increase access to and critical awareness of certain texts and authors; I’m in the very long haul of making one myself as I direct The Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing, which I believe to be an important recovery project for women writers that follows in the tradition of the Orlando Project and the Women Writers Project. I recognize that each edition and archive offers access to new texts and images, new encoding theories for structuring and publishing those works, and new technical solutions for a host of features or problems. But these endeavors, I argue, are not Romantic DH experiments at the level of the project. In other words, we are not trying out or testing many new kinds of projects besides editions or archives, and there is less uncertainty about whether or not a venture will succeed.
There are many good reasons for this: for one, we want to augment and preserve those archives we have worked so hard to build, like the monumental William Blake Archive, and smaller archives like Elizabeth Fay’s Bluestocking Archive that has a twenty-year history. Additionally, digital humanists have fought hard for DH projects to count toward tenure and promotion, and for those projects to count they need to follow established project models and guidelines for peer review. Experimental projects may also have a more difficult time obtaining funding since they are high-risk endeavors. Romanticists’ focus on improving digital archives and editions is evident in recent updates from major projects. For example, the Blake Archive announced the publication of an electronic edition of the Genesis manuscript from the Huntington Library. The Shelley-Godwin Archive announced the public release of Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound fair copy notebooks from the Bodlein. And Elisa Bashero-Bondar’s announcement of the Fourth Annual Summer Coding Camp for the Digital Mitford project will also generate new material for that archive. Some might even go so far as to argue that we have developed a digital Romantic canon that would certainly include those projects already mentioned as well as Romantic Circles and its many important digital editions, including Stuart Curran’s edition of Frankenstein and Bruce Graver and Ron Tetrault’s Lyrical Ballads; Laura Mandell’s Poetess Archive; NINES and 18thConnect; Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net or RaVoN; Katherine Harris’s Forget Me Not Archive; Stephen Behrendt and Nancy Kushigian’s Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period; and Peter Garside, James Raven, and Rainer Schöwerling’s database of the English Novel, just to name a few of our many seminal works. That the landscape of Romantic DH is populated largely with digital editions and archives might indicate that we have reached a disciplinary tipping point where our newly established infrastructure to fund, support, evaluate, circulate, and preserve this kind of work deters scholars from trying something entirely new and risky.
In today’s talk, I look back at some of the earliest Romantic DH projects to explore the ways in which they are self-consciously experimental, compared to the majority of our current library of Romantic DH projects. These three projects are not often addressed in contemporary scholarship, and they are very different in nature: one is a videodisc digital archive of Blake’s works that displays and links text and image files; the second is a series of text analysis experiments on Austen’s novels; and the third is an early virtual reality hypertext pedagogy project. They are linked by their devotion to literary experimentation with computing technologies as well as their connection to Romantic-era artists’ and writers’ theories of experimentation in literature and art. One goal of presenting these early projects in the context of digital and Romantic-era experimentation will be to recover and share some of the genealogies of Romantic humanities computing. Additionally, these projects pose timely and challenging questions: How is the definition of literary experimentation changing over time? What makes a DH project experimental now? How do the digital humanities benefit from experimental projects? And within the parameters of DH work that is now recognized as scholarship that counts, how can we make room for experimentation, for projects that might and sometimes do fail?
Part I of my talk will illustrate what “experimentation” meant for Romantic-era writers and artists, namely William Wordsworth and Louis Daguerre. I focus on three aspects of their experiments: recursion, mixed-media or combinations of text-and-image, and virtual reality invention. In Part II, I describe three early DH projects on Romantic topics that were ground-breaking and experimental for their time, but that also have pronounced roots in Romantic-era artistic experimentation. And I close with a few current examples of experimentation and questions for discussion.
According to a recent article by Robert Mitchell, William Wordsworth was the first person in the English language to treat and describe poetry as “experimental” when he did so in Lyrical Ballads in 1798 (132).
The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. (i)
Wordsworth lays out clearly at the start of the preface to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads that the “experiments” in that volume mean to prove if the absolute truth of the common experiences of conversation and everyday human characters and events could, together, produce “poetic pleasure.” To clarify: the language of the common man in these ballads is not meant to be subjective; rather, it is an absolute, non-anthropocentric truth. What is at stake in Wordsworth’s experiments in verse is whether or not the language of common men is pleasurable. After he explains his experiment, Wordsworth asks readers to test his theory on a series of poems that, if he is correct, should each be pleasurable. The experiment requires a process of recursion to carry itself out. 
In computing, a recursive operation or function is one that repeatedly calls itself in order to run subsequent iterations. By “calling itself” I mean that the program returns to an earlier piece of its own code in order to move forward. Recursion is built into the process of reading Lyrical Ballads and evaluating its poems such that the reader carries out Wordsworth and Coleridge’s experiment. For each poem in the collection, the reader starts with the goal of evaluating its pleasure, therefore each poem is linked to the preface that introduces the volume. After reading and evaluating a poem according to the preface, the reader moves on to the next poem by looking back at the grade of the previous poems as well as the suggested instructions from the preface. She recalls the goal of measuring pleasure and begins the process of reading and evaluating again. When the volume ends, the experiment and its recursions end, too.
Not only did they ask their readers to run the experiment across their poems in 1798, but Wordsworth and Coleridge created four different editions of Lyrical Ballads between 1798 and 1805, thus creating a recursive experiment that challenges readers to “search for poetic pleasure” in each poem and again in each subsequent edition with new poems and with older poems that at times were substantially revised, as was the case with “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Romanticism’s first literary experiment, then, was an activity associated with pleasure sought by recursion and return to a textual beginning, an unsurprisingly romantic procedure that alludes to the period’s traditional obsession with origins.
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s common language for producing poetic pleasure also weds the experience of reading language to seeing. The poems in Lyrical Ballads convey language that is both text- and image-based. The preface to the 1802 edition expands the statement of experimentation from the 1798 edition, which began, “the majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure” (i). By 1802, Wordsworth revised and augmented this statement to read:
The principal object, then, which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to chuse [sic] incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible, in a selection of language really used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way (vii, emphases mine).
Wordsworth proposes that the usual things described in text on the page should be changed, or “coloured,” so that they appear differently when they are “presented” to the mind. His diction indicates that he thinks of language as correlative to images in the imagination, usually those of nature as rendered more memorable as they are, for example, in a reflection shaped and tinted by a Claude mirror. 
For example, “Lines Left upon a Seat in a Yew Tree” is a poem about the dangers of leaving community and honest communication with others for prideful solitude with “visionary views” that “fancy feed[s]”. Half of the poem creates those visionary views in text and the rest of it features dialogue between the narrator and a traveler, thereby forming a poem built both of text and of image or views. Similarly, Wordsworth defends his poem The Excursion in an 1814 letter, “Do you not perceive that my conversations almost all take place out of Doors, and all with grand objects of nature surrounding the speakers for the express purpose of their being alluded to in the illustration of the subjects treated of?” (qtd in Purkis, 145). Nevermind the snark; here, as in Lyrical Ballads, we find Wordsworth using images of nature to, as he says, “illustrate” the text of his poetic language.
The Lyrical Ballads experiments in poetic language may be the first and therefore the most foundational for Romanticism studies, but they represent just one instance in a literary era defined by experimentation with text and image—some legendary and enduring, like Frankenstein, and others more obscure, like James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824). One of the most experimental aspects of Hogg’s novel is that it incorporates the brand new, high-tech show called a Diorama into its text to enhance the historical-fiction world building that drives his Scottish gothic plot. No Romantic-era invention accomplished world-building like the Diorama, invented by Louis Daguerre and Charles Bouton in the 1820s in Paris and London.
Like some scientific experiments in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Diorama was first and foremost a show. The show began for crowds of up to 300 spectators gazing through a very large aperture in the theater wall, behind which was a long corridor with a mural-sized realistic picturesque painting at the end. After 10-15 minutes of watching the lighting change in a three-dimensional view of a cathedral or a picturesque landscape, attendees heard a bell ring and the churnings of gears below them. A worker beneath the arena turned a crank and rotated the whole auditorium 73 degrees clockwise to point viewers at a second aperture in the wall and a second scene. (Gernsheim 19-20)
Daguerre experimented primarily with optical effects of light intensity, movement, and color. He even had a dedicated laboratory for his experiments near his Paris Diorama theater. By gradually blocking the light from the skylight above or side windows, or letting it creep in from behind a shade, Daguerre made shadows and light rays play across his canvases, which were thin cotton screens painted in oil mixed with turpentine (Pinson 69). At the time, this was considered cutting-edge animation. Thanks to YouTube, I can demonstrate these effects for you. Here are two short clips of a recent reproduction of the lighting effects in Daguerre’s last remaining diorama painting, which permanently lives in a chapel in a small village in France called Bry sur Marne. Both clips are from he same short documentary, and they show in just a few seconds changes in light that took about 10 minutes during the actual show. [Clip 1. Clip 2]
While subtle animations that modulated the light dazzled the audience, the Diorama’s three-dimensional illusions of depth pulled viewers into an alarmingly realistic experience of virtual reality and virtual travel that spectators had never experienced like this before 1822. Optical illusions made it difficult for attendees to discern the painted surface’s precise distance from their seats, which effectively erased the gap between them and the place depicted (“Making Visible” Thomas 8). For example, a spectator “was so fully convinced that [Charles Bouton’s painted] church … was real, that she asked to be conducted down the steps to walk in the building” (qtd in Huhtamo 151).
Lyrical Ballads and Daguerre and Bouton’s Dioramas constitute a small percentage of Romantic-era artistic experimentation. However, here they are concrete examples of what literary and artistic experimentation meant in the context of Romantic humanists, and they provide some ancestry for early computer-generated Romantic literary experiments that involve recursion, text and image compilations, and world-building.
The second part of my talk will show that there is a uniquely Romantic ethos of experimentation that undergirds early Romantic digital humanities projects. We can use these projects to help us think about the value that experimentation has especially for Romantic digital humanities projects now and for DH as a whole.
The language digital humanists use to theorize our work reflects a desire to experiment. In the preface to a volume called Digital_Humanities, Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Peter Lunenfeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp describe DH as an “experimental” “model” of scholarship (viii). They return to this idea again at the end of the preface in reference to “the precarious, experimental and undefined future of the humanities in a world fundamentally transformed by everything digital” (x). Lisa Spiro writes about DH and experimentation at greater length:
The language of experimentation runs throughout the digital humanities, demonstrating its support of risk taking, entrepreneurship, and innovation. What is the effect of modeling the data in a particular way? What happens when we visualize data or use text mining tools to discover patterns in it? . . . As Willard McCarty suggests, ‘ours is an experimental practice, using equipment and instantiating definite methods.’ As in the sciences, digital humanities projects often use data, tools, and methods to examine particular questions, but the work supports interpretation and exploration. (28)
If, as Mitchell asserts, Wordsworth was the first writer to perform a literary “experiment” with Lyrical Ballads and use the term “experiment” in that context, then DH as a field premised upon literary experimentation has some Romantic ancestry. Indeed, some of the earliest and longest lasting DH projects are devoted to Romantic authors and their works that are considered the most experimental and, therefore, the best suited or perhaps most in need of alternative forms of scholarship to study and teach them.
The earliest Romanticism computing project I found in my research was probably the most experimental undertaking I have read about, and maybe unsurprisingly, it treats one of the most experimental authors in the Romantic canon: William Blake. This project is known as the Iowa Blake Videodisc Project. It engages with Romantic experimentation and recursion through Blake’s text and images but also in the process(es) of digital preservation. The project editors were visionary in their efforts to exceed the boundaries of what technology could do for Blake studies. They succeeded at surpassing the limits of what pages and slide projectors could do to display Blake’s illuminations as well as current scholarship on them in an interactive environment. This project’s important legacy is its very process of becoming but also its end.
Blake’s illuminated books exude the property of recursion that refuses traditional notions of a self-contained entity, such as the material or aesthetic literary boundary of a word, an image, or a page. Blake makes those limits the beginning of the next extension of themselves. In this way, recursion in Blake’s illuminated books has the quality of the sublime. Jean-Luc Nancy explicates this:
Form or contour is limitation, which is the concern of the beautiful: the unlimited, to the contrary, is the concern of the sublime. . . . The unlimited as such is that which sets itself off on the border of the limit, that which detaches itself and subtracts itself from limitation (and hence from beauty) by an unlimitation that is coextensive with the external border of limitation. (31)
That is, for Nancy, the sublime is the action of reaching a limit and then having that limit remove itself. What appear to be boundaries are more like way stations that convert the terminal into a new vector that leads toward the next instance of “beyond.” Tilottama Rajan emphasizes that the sublime in Blake is a material performance; it is not merely a mental transcendence of perceived boundaries. It is a “specifically romantic genre [that is] defined by Freidrich Schlegel when he speaks of a metawork that contains not only the text but also the story of its genesis and a self-commentary,” a “reflexive” and self-reflexive genre that has “more to do with the hermeneutics of becoming” and requires a reader to enact its evolution (qtd in Vine, 240). We see in Blake’s pictorial writing the quintessential return to origins that we so often associate with Romanticism, however the return as well as the origins admit to their medium and their materiality, and ultimately, then, their material mortality.
Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant began the Blake Videodisc Project in 1981 at the University of Iowa. I want to give you a sense of how early and radical this project is. Johnson and Grant decided to jettison their slide projector for videodiscs just 30 years after Roberto Busa made the famous lemmatized concordance of St. Thomas Aquinas’ works that began humanities computing in 1949. Throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the use of computing to create concordances and perform text analysis grew ever more common and advanced. However, in 1981, the idea of using a videodisc, or any electronic display technology for that matter, to dynamically link, display, and share literary texts from an archive paired with images was nearly unheard of.[1]
Johnson and Grant’s goal was to increase access to Blake’s captivating illustrations along with associated critical commentary for teaching as well as research. When videodisc prototypes launched around 1980, they bought one and planned “to fill an inexpensive, mass-produced videodisc with every image Blake created, close-ups of selected details, related works by other artists, and perhaps video clips of academic symposia, so that scholars and students everywhere could sample the riches of Blake collections in libraries and museums around the world” (Johnson 131). In her essay about the project, Johnson describes a videodisc as being like a “suped-up” slide projector, able to hold 54,000 moving or still images, which she equates to the memory of 20 CD-Roms.
In 1985, their system was comprised of a 256K IBM-XT dual-disk-drive computer acting as the user’s terminal, which linked by modem through one serial port to a database program on a Prime computer housed in the university’s main computing center, and through a second serial port to a Pioneer videodisc player which was connected to a high-end Sony monitor to display the images (Johnson 131). Additionally, a Mitsubishi Video Printer captured thumbnail images (Johnson 131).
While the Videodisc images of Blake’s pages were high quality and mesmerizing, the real innovation and power of the project was a user’s ability to call up a videodisc image linked to one or more data files and display the data in text and images together. The image and text files were called together by a command called “RELATE” that linked them through a common ID, as if linked by hypertext before its invention (Johnson 132). With all of the hardware and programming working together, the PIs created a system indebted to a Blakean idea of romantic recursion that sought to do more than any single technology could at the time to demonstrate the interplay between Blake’s page images, his poetry, and associated critical commentary. But like all good computer programming recursions, this project defined its eventual end.
Though it was a resounding success both in the classroom at Iowa and also on the academic lecture circuit, what remains of this project is Johnson’s article on the project’s denouement. Problems started with the vast quantity of memory needed for the computing center database, which Iowa’s Vice President for Research eventually stopped paying for. To make matters worse, the university computing center had an automatic archiving program that discouraged the use of too much memory; it detected files that had not been recently used and auto-archived them. To prevent lesser-used Blake images from being recycled, the editors had to regularly print out the lists of titles that were going to be archived and reset the date flag for each file by hand, one at a time. By 1987, the editors grew tired of trying to beat the auto-archiver, and they let the university put their archive into tape storage. Following this, Iowa phased out the hardware that the Blake Videodisc project ran on, and the editors grew daunted by upgrades needed for both the hardware and their code. The final nail in the coffin was the discovery that administrators imposed a two-year limit on all files automatically archived on tape, unless users first make a case for indefinite storage. They learned about the limit after two years had elapsed, far too late to make their case for perpetual storage. (Johnson 132-33)
The Iowa Blake Videodisc project succeeded before it slipped away, but there were other Romantic computing experiments to take up the torch. 
In 1987, J. F. Burrows published a book titled Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels and an Experiment in Method. This is the earliest Romantic text analysis project I was able to find a record of; there may be others I did not find, and I hope you’ll share those if you know of any. Burrows’ book comprises a set of statistical analyses of Austen’s works that he accomplished with computing. He uses a set of concordances prepared in 1979 in Newcastle, his institution in Australia, and Cambridge University, and he employed the Oxford Concordance Program to run the concordances. The data set includes Austen’s six novels worked into a single concordance as well as a few non-Austen novels that function as “controls”.[2]
Like Wordsworth, Burrows went into this study with an explicit plan, which he states clearly in the introduction. His statistical experiments use distant reading to analyze the use of “invisible” or “common” words in Austen’s dialogue. By “invisible” and “common” language he means words like “the” and “it.” If you’ve done some text analysis or topic modelling you know that we call these words “stop words,” and we usually take them out of the analysis so that we can focus on other presumably richer words, like nouns and adjectives. Burrows disagrees with this strategy.
These various proceedings are united by the assumption, not always made so explicit, that, within the verbal universe of any novel, the very common words constitute a largely inert medium while all the real activity emanates from more visible and more energetic bodies. [. . .] The neglected third, two-fifths, or half of our material has light of its own to shed on the meaning of one novel or another; on subtle relationships between narrative and dialogue, character and character, on less direct and less limited comparison between novels and between novelists; and ultimately on the very processes of reading itself. (2, my emphasis)
Burrows uses a host of methods of statistical analyses on these energetic common words, including chi-square tests as a register of significant differences, normal distribution as a method of comparison, linear regression as a test of relationships, and correlation matrices. In addition to analytical and critical, this book is also didactic: each time he introduces a new computational method for statistical text analysis, he teaches the reader how to perform the method and what it offers his larger literary experiment.
There are two examples of Burrows’ analyses that I want to share. The first is a quote from Pride and Prejudice from which he excerpts all but the most common words in Austen’s corpus. He pairs the words found only in this speech with the most frequently used words per character in the novel (table 8, p.104), and he can then deduce the speaker.
The passage in the slide above shows Collins’ marriage proposal to Elizabeth. The second example is one of his many graphs, and it’s one of the most accessible.
Graph 11 plots the correlation between Elizabeth and Darcy’s most common words. The diagonal line represents the parity of incidence. If the words fall to the right of the line, Darcy uses them more; if they fall to the left of the line, Elizabeth says them more often. Burrows notes that “was” offers the highest divergence in usage, and Darcy uses the present tense, “is,” sparingly, which he explains by pointing to the text in Darcy’s letter to Elizabeth about the past. His analysis continues:
No one pronoun runs strongly either way: but those of the first person all lie on Darcy’s side, those of the third person on Elizabeth’s. On the other side of the diagonal, Elizabeth has significantly more recourse to the weakly emphatic verb-form, ‘do’. But, all in all, Graph 11 illustrates a suitably close resemblance between the idiolects of two strong-minded, intelligent, and essentially well-mannered characters whose disputes are conducted on even terms and whose eventual rapprochement is entirely credible. (83, emphasis in original)
Burrows’ study of the energy that pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, and articles provide in characterization looks directly back at Lyrical Ballads and its experiment to study the “common” language of lower and middle class men who are sometimes invisible to more “tasteful” society. In a telling parenthetical aside in his introduction, Burrows admits that his study has a similar aim to Wordsworth’s:
(It seems likely, too, that the evidence of the very common words can enhance our understanding of the connections between the language of literature and the ‘natural language’ of more everyday discourse.) (2)
I did a tiny research jig when I found this passage nestled in the introduction because it reinforces my hypothesis: these early experiments that use computing for Romanticism scholarship continue to show their fidelity to Romantic-era theories and methods of literary experimentation. Wordsworth uses the word “common” 13 times in his 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads, some of them very close in meaning to Burrows’, where common means shared but also undervalued. Burrows also alludes to Wordsworth where he valorizes “language really used by men” and “natural language” to describe these “common” or “invisible” words featured in his study.[3] Though a reader can sense Burrows’ unease with literary or scholarly influence on his analyses—he barely cites any scholarship in his entire book—his text, his creation, gets away from him in this parenthetical moment and communicates a debt to Wordsworth’s experiments with “the real language of men.”
My third and last example comes from a project that is only twenty years old: Ron Broglio and F. William Ruegg’s “Point Rash Judgment” MOO begun in 1996 at the University of Florida. It recalls the Romantic-era desire to invent immersive virtual worlds, like those in the Diorama, that are community environments comprised of interactive texts and images. In the early 1990s, MOOs, or “Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), Object-Oriented” games, debuted as a variety of text-based “MUD” games, which were invented much earlier, in 1978. These two kinds of text-based games, MOOs and MUDs, look very similar on a screen, but differ in the way players play them. Both kinds of games have a purely textual interface, and they create a virtual reality by structuring your experience within rooms and with a community of users reacting to their virtual environment and to each other. While MUDs tend to have a narrative structure more like a game that you strive to win or complete, as you would in a game like Zelda, MOOs are characterized by having the goals of exploring the virtual space, playfulness, and interaction with other players and the virtual environment. This is hard to imagine, so here’s an example:
This screenshot is the start to an older MUD, but it shows what an older MOO would also look like. An example of a current robust MOO that you can still play is TriadCity, which boasts on its homepage that The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism describes it as a new form of literature. The “Player’s Guide” for TriadCity will help you imagine how the experience works.
Professors like Broglio and Ruegg quickly identified MOOs as able to facilitate studies of “the relation between inner landscapes, the outer social sphere, and ‘Nature,’ where authors often seek spaces to resonate with their visions” (“Purpose”). To this end, Broglio designed and taught a course at the University of Florida called “Writing About Visionary Selves and Virtual Landscapes,” in which the final project assignment challenges students to create a hypertextual tour guide of Atlanta, akin to a sketch of a MOO. He considers the electronic coursework his assignments produced to be experimental performances that have the power to construct realities the same way that literature does: “through language and play” (“Living Inside”).
Players enter the “Point Rash Judgment” MOO through an interface that lived on the Romantic Circles website called the “Villa Diodatti MOO,” and the above slide is an image of that very same interface, which was also used for the Frankenstein MOO or FrankenMOO. (I was unable to find any remaining screenshots of the “Point Rash Judgment” MOO, but I’m guessing it looked a lot like the interface depicted above.) The MOO space itself forms a digital interpretation or performance of Wordsworth’s poem “Point Rash Judgment.”
In a poetic turn, this brings us back to Lyrical Ballads, as this poem was published in the 1800 edition of this collection that sets the standard for Romantic-era experimentation with language. The poem translates incredibly well into the experimental environment of the MOO in which language creates a virtual world for the reader. An excerpt from the poem demonstrates this:
A narrow girdle of rough stones and crags,
A rude and natural causeway, interpos’d
Between the water and a winding slope
Of copse and thicket, leaves the eastern shore
Of Grasmere safe in its own privacy.
And there, myself and two beloved Friends,
One calm September morning, ere the mist
Had altogether yielded to the sun,
Saunter’d on this retir’d and difficult way.
—Ill suits the road with one in haste, but we
Play’d with our time; and, as we stroll’d along,
It was our occupation to observe
Such objects as the waves had toss’d ashore,
Feather, or leaf, or weed, or wither’d bough,
Each on the other heap’d along the line
Of the dry wreck. (ll. 1-16)
Though the narrator creates this world, he invites the reader to be one of his companions on their meandering walk. The plot of the poem follows the friends as they wander and then spy a man fishing dressed in peasant’s garb. As they walk toward him they talk about him, imagining that he is angling for pleasure and not working in the fields because he can afford a day off. When they reach him, they are surprised to find that he is, like Victor Frankenstein on the ice raft, gaunt and skinny, and they then assume that he is sick and poor. The poem ends as the friends reproach themselves for giving voice to their hasty judgment of the fisherman, and they name the place where they saw him “Point Rash Judgment.”
The MOO version of the poem enables students to participate in Wordsworth’s experiment that tests if verse composed in “common language” is pleasing. The MOO has three rooms: the first follows the “narrow girdle of rough stones and crags” that starts the poem, and students can investigate objects along the lake shore, like water, plants, and seeds.[4] The second room begins at the shift in the poem when the friends see the fisherman, walk toward him, and talk about him to one another. The things you can interact with here transition from natural objects to human, including “the noise of peasants” and the fisherman himself. In the third and last room, students enter a cottage together and find a copy of the actual poem as journal entries by Wordsworth and Coleridge, a few chairs, and writing implements; they’re meant to treat this room as a reflection space. Broglio and Ruegg’s pedagogy rationale emphasizes that the Networked Writing Environment or NWE that generated the MOO was a very new technology in the 1990s, and it facilitated new approaches to learning by using cutting-edge tools such as online discussions, e-mail, electronic texts, and virtual spaces like MOOs (“Purpose”). The NWE at the University of Florida was a Unix-based system of 12 servers and 186 terminals used by 2600 students and 80 instructors.
[Its suite of] tools help reconfigure our interaction with the literary text because the text is represented in a new mode—a mode better characterized as “performative” than as “interactive”—as well as in a new medium. We wish to emphasize that our approach is experimental, an attempt to put theory into practice in the electronic classroom. Ultimately, we hope that our students’ engagement with the electronic text will lead them to rethink the production and representation of subjectivity and social space in the Romantic period and in our own. (“Purpose”, emphases mine)
The NWE’s MOO technology and experiment activates the idea of the performative text as students discover that their textual engagement is what turns the text of the poem into a virtual world. It also reaffirms the importance of community and communication for learning and producing art for social engagement, ideals that Wordsworth places front and center in Lyrical Ballads.
To conclude, we’ve just completed a short tour of three early DH projects focused on Romanticism: the Iowa Blake Videodisc project, Burrows’ text analysis experiments on Austen’s corpus, and Ruegg and Broglio’s “Point Rash Judgment” pedagogical MOO. All three use experimental technologies and methods for their time, and they also incorporate Romantic-era notions of experimentation with language. I want to return to a set of questions I asked earlier: How has the definition of literary experimentation changed over time? What makes a DH project experimental now? How do the digital humanities benefit from experimental projects? And within the parameters of DH work that is now recognized as scholarship that counts, how do we make room for experimentation, for projects that might fail or that are harder to maintain?
Together, we are executing a recursion to think about the future of digital Romanticism scholarship: we have called on our past work in the field in order to look ahead. One reason why we turned back thirty years to find experimental computational DH projects in Romanticism studies is that digital humanists who are now experimenting are often (but not exclusively) doing so outside of the parameters of literary periods. These scholars take advantage of DH’s interdisciplinarity to produce new kinds of digital public scholarship as well as projects that serve the humanities in less traditional ways, that is, by not conforming to institutional norms of confining our work to a single literary period.
For example, Kindred Britain visualizes networks of British families from the 15th century to the 21st century and enables users to view connections between specific people of different classes, professions, genders, and more. In another project that is underway at the Stanford Literary Lab, Mark Algee-Hewitt, who is a Romanticist by training, uses computational methods to “trace the experience of suspense as it is felt by a reader back to the formal features that create the conditions of possibility for this experience” (“Machinery”). Their sample set of 300 works range in publication date from 1764 to 2013. Using reader-derived tags and a “neural network”—which is “a model capable of processing both a large number and variety of features within a classification-based model”—they are fine-tuning a “virtual reader” that will predict the measure of suspense in passages, akin to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s desire to measure poetic pleasure. With the current model, the virtual reader’s prediction success rate is already quite high at 80.6% (“Machinery”).
Lastly, as you know I’m also a Romanticist, and my own project, the Stainforth Library of Women’s Writing, is not a Romanticism project, as much as I desperately wanted it to be when we began—mostly so that it would fit within my dissertation on Romantic-era literature. My project recreates a digital version of the largest private library of women’s writing collected in the 19th century, which was gathered and owned by Francis Stainforth, a British Anglican Curate. He acquired over 7,400 volumes of women’s writing, and the publication dates range from 1546 to 1866. The project has garnered a lot of positive attention and funding in part, I believe, because it is not narrowly Romantic in scope.
Looking back at select DH project examples from the 1980s and 1990s, we see how the definition of experimentation has changed over time as the tools and theories we use to experiment with change. But how will the trend toward experimenting with new technologies and larger data sets that refuse to be classified by literary period affect the future of Romanticism as the digital humanities becomes, as I believe it will eventually become, simply the humanities? [Thank you.]
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[1] A 1982 article in the journal Computers and the Humanities cites The McKay Institute Videodisc Project first toying with a prototype videodisc in 1979 and in 1980 to help teach foreign language classes with a video component (Schneider and Bennion 36-37).
[2] In addition to Austen’s published novels, Burrows’ data set included the manuscript fragment Sanditon; the extension of the fragment into Sanditon, by Jane Austen and Another Lady (1975); Georgette Heyer’s Frederica; Virginia Woolf’s The Waves; Henry James’s The Awkward Age; and E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End. He omits Austen’s juvenilia from his data set and does not mention it in his book.
[3] Wordsworth uses the phrases “natural language” and “the language of nature” in the preface to Lyrical Ballads to describe a shared language among poets.
[4] Thanks to Broglio’s published online documentation, we can find a description of the layout of the “Point Rash Judgment” MOO space here http://homes.lmc.gatech.edu/~broglio/moolay.html.
Works Cited
Algee-Hewitt, Mark. “The Machinery of Suspense.” Personal research blog. http://markalgeehewitt.org/index.php/main-page/projects/the-machinery-of-suspense/. 21 March 2016.
Broglio, Ron. ENGL 1101 English Composition: Visionary Selves and Virtual Landscapes. Online Syllabus. http://homes.lmc.gatech.edu/~broglio/1101/syllabus1101_f01.html. 21 March 2016.
—. “Living Inside the Poem: MOOs and Blake’s Milton.” Romantic Circles Praxis Series: Digital Designs on Blake. Web. 21 March 2016.
—. “Point Rash Judgment: The Exploration of a Wordsworth Text.” http://homes.lmc.gatech.edu/~broglio/moolay.html. 21 March 2016.
Burdick, Ann, et al. Digital_Humanities. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2012.
Gernsheim, Helmut and Alison. L. J. M. Daguerre: The History of the Diorama and the Daguerreotype. New York: Dover, 1968.
Huhtamo, Erkki. Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2013.
Johnson, Mary Lynn. “The Iowa Blake Videodisc Project: A Cautionary History.” Wordsworth Circle 30.3 (Summer 1999): 131-35.
Mitchell, Robert. “Romanticism and the Experience of Experiment.” Wordsworth Circle 46.3: 132-142.
Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Sublime Offering.” Of the Sublime: Presence in Question. SUNY P, 1993. 25-54.
Pinson, Stephen. Speculating Daguerre: Art and Enterprise in the Work of L. J. M. Daguerre. U of Chicago P, 2012.
Purkis, John. A Preface to Wordsworth. Revised edition. London and New York, Routledge, 2014.
Ruegg, F. William, and Ronald S. Broglio. “Purpose and Design.” http://homes.lmc.gatech.edu/~broglio/eromantic/nassrpedagogy.html. 21 March 2016. Web.
Schneider, Edward W., and Junius L. Bennion. “The McKay Institute Videodisc Project: Rationale, History, and Goals.” Computers and the Humanities 16 (1982): 35-37.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; Or, The Modern Prometheus. Ed. Stuart Curran. A Romantic Circles Electronic Edition. May 2009. Web. 21 March 2016.
Spiro, Lisa. “‘This Is Why We Fight’: Defining the Values of the Digital Humanities.” Debates in the Digital Humanities. Ed. Matthew K. Gold. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2012. 16-35.
Vine, Steven. Reinventing the Sublime: Post-Romantic Literature and Theory. Eastbourne, UK: Sussex, 2014.
Wordsworth, William. Lyrical Ballads, With a Few Other Poems. London: J. & A. Arch, 1798.
—. Lyrical Ballads, With Pastoral and Other Poems. 3rd Ed. London: T. N. Longman and O. Rees, 1802.
Kirstyn Leuner, Associate Professor, Santa Clara University 
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