The 19 Voyages of Henry James

Shawna RossArizona State University

June 11, 2015

Twitter handle: @ShawnaRoss

Larger projecttransatlantic travel institutions

• Literature foregrounds the institutions of transatlantic travel to critique transnational political, economic, and demographic systems.

• Writers put the ocean liner to work as a machine for transnational thought by recovering the international tensions at play in ships whose construction attempted to hide these tensions.

Why Henry James?

19 transatlantic crossings, 19 ships

“I am utterly unfit for the sea.”

Why Henry James?• Content– “The Patagonia,” “Pandora,” letters

• Style– Figurative language, model of

consciousness

The Spreadsheet

Preliminary chartsWhat is this information capable of?

Preliminary chartsWhat is this information capable of?

Preliminary chartsWhat is this information capable of?

Preliminary chartsWhat is this information capable of?

Why an interactive map?

• Multiple audiences: scholars, students, public

• New currents in literary criticism– Transnational modernism, oceanic

studies

• Digital humanities– Non-empirical approach to data– Archive-centered app design

So, Neatline

Richly textured archival approach…

“The Arabia, and Cunard Steamships,” Scientific American (8.25): 5 March 1853.

…enough gratifying design decisions

Upload: A “take all comers” model

• http://color.hailpixel.com/• Stories, letters, criticism• Wikimedia commons– http://commons.wikimedia.org/

• NYC Passenger Lists – Internet Archive

• My Aunt Robin’s cool silhouette of Henry James (Katherine McLellen, 1911 [not 1905], Smith College Museum of Art)

Nifty picture? LET’S DO THIS THING.

“History of American Steam Navigation,” Illustrated London News, vol. 16, May 1850: 368.

Psychological QHow to maintain desire?

• So. Much. Time– No progress no reward

• Discovery by interacting with data? No more.– Research: me-facing– Presentation: public-facing

• Must we script what people learn?– Exhibits & expertise– Spreadsheets & spontaneity

Psychological A

• Each platform has ideal time per day• Public buy-in– Casual learning a high possibility– Don’t use public buy-in as an excuse for

laziness in app/site/exhibit design

• Basic job as a teacher– Structuring but not controlling learning

• But not wholly a teacher– K-12: possible doesn’t mean you must do it

Technical Q:Tools reveal my conceptual shallowness

• Overkill– Difficult to ignore, bypass, or switch off

irrelevant Omeka/Neatline features

• What is my unit of analysis?– Literary text, geographic point, voyage,

ship?

• Omeka assumes 1x (item) = 1y (collection)– Ship : James voyage = 1:1– Ship : shipyard ≠ 1:1

Technical A:

• Understand that technical mastery will not lead automatically to humanistic insight– But I still must understand various steam engines in

each issue of Popular Mechanics!

• “What is my unit of analysis?” still rules– Decide whether to foreground discrete unit (each

journey) or comparison (technology, nationality, formality?)

• Theory of Data Relativity– My items are sometimes particles, sometimes waves– Dublin core: all particles, all the time

Results:Embrace the idiosyncrasy!

• Not a map? It’s not fundamentally geographical?– Level of intervention (work by hand) may not

necessarily be the same as the mode of presentation

– Most “shiny” part might be automated

• Interactive ships– Draw me silhouettes!

• My unit of analysis may be a ship• My only 1:1 relationship = voyage:ship

• Radical subjectivity of archive– Indulgent metadata as scholarship