Texty Texty

In this blog entry, I would like to respond to Jeffrey T. Schnapp's "Crowds," a research project in the digital humanities that was included in Volume 2 Issue 1 of Vectors Journal, a Special Issue on "Ephemera." In first navigating to "Crowds," I was really grateful for the statements by the author and the designer. While it's always good policy in projects of this magnitude to acknowledge your collaborators (and Schnapp does just that with the Project Credits page), it was interesting to get some insight from the designers themselves about their general perspective and design choices in "Crowds."

As I opened the project, I really liked the incorporation of sound to the project with the squabble of overlapping voices. It offered a nice aural representation of the project's subject, crowds, and it set a precedent for matching subject with other sensory data throughout the project. Sadly, that wasn't necessarily the case. While the images and videos from the various galleries were embedded and presented in very creative and interesting ways, perhaps I was expecting a bit more insofar as extending these galleries to the idea of "crowds" in more creative (or meaningful?) ways. I might be a bit too harsh or demanding in that critique, though, because I was sincerely blown away with the breadth and comprehensiveness of the project as a whole.

The pages for Crowd Theorists and Semantic Histories offer insight into the conceptual framework that informs Schnapp's approach to "Crowds." It was certainly important to complement the case studies from the Galleries page with this theoretical backdrop, but I did feel a bit overwhelmed by the sheer number of theorists and histories included in these pages. In approaching a subject as robust and fraught with meaning(s), I see all sorts of value in both gaining and demonstrating an understanding of the conversations surrounding the subject in question, but I may have liked for the overwhelming amount of text from these theorists and histories to be supplemented by and with a section that attempted to synthesize this information and/or connect the dots, so to speak. Which is not to say that I wasn't grateful for how comprehensive all of these entries actually were, but I would've really liked to have understood the selection process Schnapp engaged in as well as the correlations he saw or made in putting all of these entries into conversation. While Schnapp does some of this in his Author's Statement, I felt that each of the components of his projects might have benefited from this sort of synthesis.

The Testimonies page itself also provides more personalized and context-specific lenses into various crowd movements. This was a welcoming and vital component of his project and it offered a nice complement to the rest of "Crowds." That being said, I might have liked for this section to be less text-heavy and to perhaps be distinguished in a significant way from the other pages included in Schnapp's project. Honestly, I guess I would've liked to have seen more variation in the manner and media in which text and information was presented. In my mind, this would've lent a great deal more personality and depth to Schnapp's project.

In terms of what I took from Schnapp's approach to "Crowds" and how I might apply it to my own work, I would really like to keep the following in mind:

1) Give voice(s) to collaborators AND subjects: As I said before, I really appreciated the fact that Schnapp gave the designers space in which to articulate their general perspective and design choices in "Spaces." I would like to extend that gesture as much to my own collaborators as my own subjects, as I found myself kind of discouraged by the seeming lack of personality in the Testimonies page as compared to the entries in the pages for Crowd Theorists and Semantic Histories.

2) Find creative ways to match the presentation of content with the subject itself: I'd really like to do some interesting things with the digital tools I am using to create my project, things that might help crystallize and complement what I've already researched and organized into contained components for my particular project.

3) Employ different manners and media in presenting text and information: As collaborators, subjects, and end-users are incredibly important to me in terms of how I organize content into my particular project, I would really like for the media I use to introduce and expand upon content to be as varied and context-specific as possible. Simply put, I don't want to make these rhetorical and design choices unilaterally, so I will try to make it a point to draw on my collaborators, subjects, and prospective end-users in making these decisions and/or have different media be featured for the same content. This might perhaps sound insane on the surface, but it's something I will place a lot of stock as I shift towards becoming more of a practitioner in the digital humanities.