Annotation, Collaboration and the New Poem

This is an exercise in distraction, I’m supposed to be proof-reading the Annotated Trigons and revamping the currently chaotic navigation for the rest of arduity. Regular readers of both bebrowed and arduity will know that I’m really bad at proofing and I’m daunted by the navigation task because it needs to be much more intuitive than is currently the case. With this in mind I will instead spend time today reflecting on the completed project (apart from the proofing, obvs) especially in terms of what John has said in his updated introduction:

I do want to record that I’ve had a similar pleasure in our own dialogue and the resulting new version of Trigons. Because it is a new version. “The Poem” is different from “The Poem-With-Notes,” as it should be. There are now two texts, two ways of reading the work. I would hope that readers would want to own the printed version of Trigons, available from Shearsman Books, and after that access the annotations available here. I should note that sales of the Shearsman Trigons increased after the annotation project began.

Whilst working on the project I decided to focus on the work rather than thinking too deeply about the wider implications/aspects of what we were doing but now it’s probably time to think a bit more broadly.

When we set out I asked on the blog whether or not the notes become part of the poem and I still haven’t got to the bottom of this. In my head, as a reasonably attentive reader, I think I can make a case for EK’s notes to the Shepheard’s Calendar but that may be because I’m convinced that EK is a thin cover for Edmeund Spenser and the whole device is an attempt to launch himself into the Elizabethan literay ‘scene’. David Jones’ notes to both In Parenthesis and The Anathemata because they say what the poet wanted to say in terms of giving them a broader context.

So, in these instances, the poet’s annotation, or at least the poet’s involvement does suggest an additional part of the text which is a little more than an appendix or supplement. I’d like to illustrate this from my own recent experience. One of the things I need to do today is to check with John whether he’s happy with an early
note I made about the dubious role played by the British SOE in supporting the Cretan resistance during the German occupation. I’d developed the notion that one of John’s themes for the Islands, Inlands section of the work was the tragedy of Greek history during the twentieth century. I rapidly discovered that this wasn’t the case and amended the note. Reading it again yesterday I’ve come to the conclusion that it says much more about my interests than it should and that it spoils that particular poem. This is the note:

General Heinrich Kreipe, commander of the German troops on Crete was captured on April 26th 1944 by a group of Cretan resistance fighters led by Patrick Leigh Fermor and W Stanley Moss of the British Special Operations Executive. The group moved South across the mountains of Crete and were picked up by a British motor launch on May 14th 1944 and taken to Egypt.

The majority view today is that this was a heroic act carried out by heroes who would risk everything to strike at the occupiers. Moss wrote his account as Ill met by moonlight which was made into a film in 1956. Both Fermor and Moss were decorated for this act and remain revered figures on Crete. However, some members of the Greek left point to the murky role of the SOE in withdrawing support from the main resistance group (EAM) and forming a group with more right wing tendencies because of its leftist affiliations. Some hold the view that the kidnap was of limited value and an attempt to bring reprisals on those villages controlled by the EAM. Whilst this is unlikely, what can be said is that the role of the British in Greece from 1943 through to the end of the especially brutal Greek civil war served British and American interests primarily at the cost of many Greek lives.

Youtube has a remrakable (dubbed) Greek documentary on the kidnap with interviews with both Kreipe and Leigh Fermor. The patrickleighfermor blog is building a formidable archive of material including photographs of the kidnapper’s journey across the island with Kreipe. The blog is an excellent example of how the web can enhance and contextualize biography.

I now see that the middle paragraph, which was amended after discussion with John, is completely irrelevant to the poem because it has nothing to do with John’s intention and still puts a misleading gloss on things. My only excuse is that Trigons as a whole does have a doppelganger theme and that both Leigh
Fermor and Moss may have been playing a double game. I’m not sure either that the last sentence is approriate either, it says what I feel about the interweb but nothing more.

The point that I’m trying to make is that these kind of flaws detract from the work as well as the notes and when they are useful for the reader they enhance both too.

This neatly leads on to ‘new version’ and what that might imply. I need to say that the content has been amended only once and that was in terms of accuracy. This version is adorned with links to external and internal pages and to notes that appear alongside most of the links. So, we have links to film, photographs, music and text in an attempt to make things easier for the reader. I’ll try and give an example. In Aruski Rehab 4 you have “and a sunblast on your retinas transmutes the cycles into cyclotron. The last word is coloured blue to indicate that it’s a link. Hovering over the word produces a short note which defines the word and provides a further link to a short film which explains in greater detail. In the bad old days before the interweb a note would be placed at the bottom of the page or at the end of the work which would define and possibly cite a reference to a more detailed explanation. We’ve added hundreds of these kinds of devices throughout the work and have thus created a version that changes the readerly experience. I’m hoping that, as the web gets broader, there will be a second edition to take advantage of both the additional available material and the techical innovations that will enable us to further refines the way the notes can be accessed and used.

There is also the possibility of other new versions in that what we’ve done could be amended and further developed by others so that there are many annotated Trigons rather than just the one

So, in conclusion it would appear that the notes are a part of the poem in that they can make it richer or they can detract from it. With the reference to the Greek video above, this note manages to do both. It’s also apparent that this isn’t a new poem but an augmented version of the same poem. I hope this makes some kind of sense. Now, back to the proofing. Sigh.

The Annotated Trigons: a mid-term report.

Now that we’re more than halfway through with the above, I’ve decided that it may be useful to review progress thus far. The original aim was to create a form for the sequence that could be updated (the links used in the printed edition had died) and to see what the current advantages are to using the interweb as a platform for annotation. A further reason was the sad fact that Trigons is not included in the three volumes of John’s Collected and this was a way of compensating for that omission.

We set ourselves a couple of parameters, the first was to avoid overwhelming the text with too many notes and/or providing extraneous information that has no relevance to the poem. I think that early on we decided that we’d rather inform than explain. preferring to encourage the reader to work out ‘meaning’ whilst providing a degree of context to the characters and events that are mentioned in the work.

With regard to overwhelming, John suggested William Emspon as model to follow: ““There is no longer a reasonably small field which may be taken as general knowledge. It is impertinent to suggest that the reader ought to possess already any odd bit of information one may have picked up in a field where one is oneself ignorant; such a point may be explained in a note without trouble to anybody; and it does not require much fortitude to endure seeing what you already know in a note”. I’m not suggesting that we’ve got everything right in the amount of material that we’ve provided but I think that everything thus far that needs a note has got one.

This brings me some of the more abstract ramifications for this kind of project. At first glance, things seem reasonably clear, you put the sequence into a series of web pages and use a mixture of notes and links to external pages to provide Empson’s odd bits of information. However, links are changed, web pages are modified and updated, other more detailed / objective / better material may be postedso that a significant part of what is provided is very mobile and provisional indeed. It seems to my small brain that this has profound implications for all of us and it took me a couple of months on this project to realise that this is the case. I must stress that isn’t the concern that most of us had about the reliability of information on the interweb, this is about the fundamental nature of that information. I know that this is the case but I haven’t yet been able to fathom the direction that this is taking us.

We now come to reliability and emphasis. The good news is that Wikipedia is becoming increasingly accurate and objective and (as a result) it is much easier to spot the hopelessly biased articles. We decided early on however not to rely on it but to use it as a pointer to other sources of information. The other good news is that more and more ‘established’ resources are putting all of the content on the interweb for free. The even better news is that the google machine has become even more efficient at delivering the pages that you’ve searched for. All of this means that even the most obscure characters, books and events now have a wealth of context and explication almost at the click of a mouse.

The less good news is that some reputable/established sources aren’t always as balanced as perhaps they should be. Some Dictionary of National Biography articles clearly have a very one-sided axe to grind which should either have been more rigorously edited or rejected. This isn’t an argument for he anodyne, just the old-fashioned idea that, with something that purports to be definitive, both sides of an argument need to be presented.

I now have to admit to falling into the ‘explanation’ trap on a couple of occasions. I think I’ve written about the first where, in the notes to Islands, Inlands I was very tempted indeed to present things in a way that pointed to the tragic nature of Greek politics in the 20th century as a major theme. In Hess/Hess I nearly wrote at great length about the rumour that the man imprisoned in Spandau was an impostor and the sightings of Marshall Ney in the United States many years after his death.

In terms of presentation, a friend from Southampton University provided us with the same pop-up gizmo that Wikipedia use. This avoids users having to click to the bottom of the page for each note, the note appears as you roll the cursor over the link. We’ve followed the basic rules of usability and accessibility in that the navigation is ‘clean’ and consistent, there are no tables and each page can be read by screen readers as well as browsers- clicking on the link still displays the note at the bottom of the page. Having just written that sentence I’ve now realised that I need to add many (many) ‘title’ tags to the anchored links. In true bebrowed fashion I designed a navigation scheme at the outset that managed to become cumbersome and confusing before the mid-point and thus had to spend a few days devising a new one which I’ll try not to change.

One of the challenges that we should have recognised at the outset is how often and under what circumstances is it best to rely only on a link to an external page rather than via a note. I can’t pretend that we now have a consistent and rational to this but a kind of pattern is beginning to take shape. In the most recent poem there is this line: “in the days John Denver sang Let us Begin and Russian healers”. We could have explained who John Denver was in a note and then linked to the YouTube clip where Denver explains the background to the song before it is played. The rationale is (probably) that the reader soesn’t need to know who John Denver was but may benefit from knowing something about the song and the clip does that better than a note could.

On a personal note, I’m now of the view that everybody should do this with poems that they like because the exercise gives you so much more pleasure and insight (even when it’s wrong) when you’re preparing something that others might find useful. I’m very fortunate and privileged to have John’s input and sage advice and I’d like to place on record my deep gratitude for both his generosity of spirit and commitment to getting this as right as we can. As a poet John is an exceptionally skilled technician who writes from the soul as well as from the mind and there have been times when my jaw has dropped when these two qualities have come together in an extraordinary and startling way.

The original print version of Trigons is available from Shearsman, at 9 quid there really is no excuse. John and I would like to express our thanks to Tony Frazer at Shearsman for his ongoing support.

Annotation, JavaScript and Ruby

We currently have a house guest, Chris Gutteridge, who is a web programmer at Southampton University. He’s tken an interest in the Trigons annotation project and has provided us with an additional feature / device that provides further fuel for thought. This particular device displays a box of text once the mouse or pointer is hovered over an anchored link. This has the obvious advntage of not having to click back to the poem after you’ve looked at the note at the bottom of the page. I’ve run this on sections one and two and it seems to work reasonably well.

There are however a number of issues to consider. The first of these is the amount of text that these boxes should contain. The second is whether, in order to be consistently effective, all the links in the body of the poem should be anchored rather than a ‘mix’ of external and anchored links. The third is whether users re more or less likely to click through to other pages from the box or from the bottom of the page.

In order to get my v small brain around any of this I’ve gone back to my own reading of glossed, printed texts. It seems that these fall into three broad types-

1. those with notes at the bottom of the relevant page;
2. those with notes at the end of a particular poem;
3. those with notes at the bottom of the page and definitions in parentheses at the end of the relevant line.

None of these are brilliant and the last is particularly annoying. They all provide a degree of disruption to the reading process. In my limited experience, very few glozers append any indication that there is a note for a particular line- David Jones being an honourable exception. It would seem that for most the reader is expected to read with one eye and monitor the notes at the bottom of the page with the other. When the notes are placed at the back of the book / poem then the reader must keep flicking backwards and forwards or read the poem in full and then read the notes hoping that you can remember what exactly they refer to.

What this device/feature/accessory provides is an opportunity to reduce the flicking backwards and forwards and (without the visual annoyance of superscript) indicate where a note occurs.

I need to point out that this isn’t stunningly original, Wikipedia uses it for numerical superscript links that also occur at the bottom of the page whereas ‘normal’ links are used to access other pages. At the moment, we’re using it for those anchored links that are indicated as ordinary links in the body of the poem. This is primarily because I made the page before I had access to the technology rather than any kind of incisive rationale.

I like to think that this is an improvement because the box is accessed and disappears with only the movement of the cursor, the poem remains in view. Of course, now that I have this additional feature, I’m beginning to see a more uniform approach to this linking rigmarole. In Section One of “Islands, Inlands”, for example, I can see that it may be more appropriate to have “caique” defined in a box and at the bottom of the page rather than by means of a link to the relevant Wikipedia entry. In the same way, It may be less clunky (technical term) to have the initial explanation of “Zero letter” in a box which contains a brief explanation but with a link to more detailed context.

Thinking about this and looking again at the page has led me to query whether there needs to be a brief note on the pornographer that would contain a link to our ‘main’ Henry Miller page and whether I should do the same with the Durrell quote. The only problems thus far are Chris’ choice of background colour (supposedly to match the post-it hue) and that at least one box (but probably two) in section two contain too many words. This is fixable but will require additional pages. Any views of other ways to use this innovation would be very welcome. Others are free to use the script provided Chris and the university are acknowledged.

We now move on to ruby which is defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as “short runs of text alongside the base text, typically used in East Asian documents to indicate pronunciation or to provide a short annotation”. The possibilities with this are intriguing in terms of placing a definition in smaller text above the word in the poem. Currently, however, some browsers require a plug-in to display ruby and the alternative (definition in parenthesis after the word) isn’t feasible here. In an attempt to demonstrate what I mean, here’s an example which identifies the pornographer succinctly but really messes about with consistent line height. There’s also the issue of browser compatibility. I’m given to understand that this example would be rendered reasonably consistently if we all used the latest browser version – but we don’t. I would be prepared to work out the various CSS and ‘pre’ tag variations to try and solve the line height problem if I thought the browser problem was about to be resolved but I don’t and so I won’t. This is an enormous pity because the ruby spec has been around since 2001 and it seems incredible that only the chrome browser has made an attempt to render it reasonably well whilst firefox doesn’t recognize it at all.

If anyone has any suggestions for other uses of the JavaScript device then we’d be very pleased to hear from them.

Annotation, illustration and the movies

(We’ve now completed the notes to Section 4 of “Islands, Inlands”)

One of the main reasons for producing an online full text version of Trigons is the problem of the dead link. The Trigons sequence contains urls pointing to pages that expand on what’s in the text. There’s a link to a youtube clip of Myra Hess playing the Appassionata and there’s another to a page which explains how the signals in the brain can be ‘made’ into music. Both the links that appear in the Shearsman print edition are now dead so we thought that producing an online version would mean that the links could be updated as and when they passed away.

This is not something that’s an optional add on, the poem is quite insistent on the Hess clip:

but reach for something distant in confusion take a look
yourself at youtube.com/watch?v=UNlyxn2Y4 E
before you read
another word..................

In addition to these two, there are others which expand on the text and need to be maintained / updated. Having now completed the first four sections of the first Trigons poem, another element becomes apparent. One of the central events of “Islands Inlands” is the kidnap of General Kriepe on Crete by a band of Cretan partisans led by Patrick Leigh Fermor which I’ve written about before re the dangers of imposing my reading on top of John’s intention. In researching this a bit more I’ve come across a Greek television documentary where the kidnappers and their captive are reunited and Kriepe and Leigh Fermor are interviewed about this adventure. Fortunately there is a version on youtube that’s been dubbed into English so I’ve been able to link to that. I’m also in two minds about linking to “Ill met by Moonlight”, the film version based on W Stanley Moss’ book about the kidnap. At the moment I’m deciding against inclusion because it doesn’t seem to add much to “Trigons”.

I’ve found that, once you start thinking in terms of “material” rather than what’s in print you become immersed in a completely new set of possibilities, from the use of images and how they can relate to the notes and to the poem, the use of audio files for the music that’s written about in the text through to whether to flag up sources that are skewed by bias but nevertheless give a decent account of the event that the work alludes to. Another dimension that I haven’t got my brain around yet is how best to reference place names that might be obscure- I’ve linked Mt. Ida on Crete to the Google map but I can also provide images s well as geographical and geological data. I’m also very fortunate to be working with the maker of this poem and therefore I have this amalgamation of what he wants as the poet and what I want as the reader.

Whilst writing this, Zachary Bos forwarded me a quote from one G Hill on difficulty which seems pertinent to the glozing business:

I think art has a right—not an obligation—to be difficult if it wishes. And, since people generally go on from this to talk about elitism versus democracy, I would add that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification. This thought does not originate with me, it’s been far better expressed by others. I think immediately of the German classicist and Kierkegaardian scholar Theodor Haecker, who went into what was called “inner exile” in the Nazi period, and kept a very fine notebook throughout that period, which miraculously survived, though his house was destroyed by Allied bombing. Haecker argues, with specific reference to the Nazis, that one of the things the tyrant most cunningly engineers is the gross oversimplification of language, because propaganda requires that the minds of the collective respond primitively to slogans of incitement. And any complexity of language, any ambiguity, any ambivalence implies intelligence. Maybe an intelligence under threat, maybe an intelligence that is afraid of consequences, but nonetheless an intelligence working in qualifications and revelations . . . resisting, therefore, tyrannical simplification.

This is all very well but I do think there’s a difference between simplification and providing context. I’m also a little suspicious of Hill’s justifications because they change so often (“life’s difficult” “wouldn’t want to insult the intelligence of my readers”) and none of them manage to justify some of his more extreme obscurities (Bradwardine). If I thought that either John or I were trying to provide a “Trigons Lite” then I wouldn’t have started but John’s work is usually packed with real people and real places which provides plenty of scope for providing a ‘neutral’ context.

In his response to an earlier post, John quoted William Empson:

There is no longer a reasonably small field which may be taken as general knowledge. It is impertinent to suggest that the reader ought to possess already any odd bit of information one may have picked up in a field where one is oneself ignorant; such a point may be explained in a note without trouble to anybody; and it does not require much fortitude to endure seeing what you already know in a note.

One of the advantages of the interweb is that you can present information at a number of levels that enable readers to “drill down” as far as they want. Of course we choose when the bottom is reached, the current debate is about to revolve “Mr S Thalassinos” which John feels requires a short note but I’ve now found a quote which ties this fictive character to Giorgos Katsimbalis who is already mentioned in the notes which is useful to me as a reader but may be too much for the poem in terms of providing a disproportionate amount of detail.

I’ve also been trying out a number of “experiments in reading” and it now strikes me that perhaps I should make more use of links in these too. This seems especially important in the case of David Jones’ “The Anathemata” for which Jones provided his own notes as well as a number of images to accompany the text. As I’ve said before, Jones omits to gloss some of the trickier bits and some of the notes require notes of their own. I was continuing with this particular experiment earlier this week and, in order to preserve the sense of immediacy, simply referred to looking on the “interweb” to find more about some of the proper nouns. Half of me thinks that this is okay, that it’s not intended to be a gloss and that people (who want to) should be able to find the same information quite quickly whilst the other half thinks that a link expanding further on the “it’s Ossa on Pellion now” line might be useful.

As John Dillon remarked in a recent response, illustrations and comments alongside poems in manuscript form were reasonably common during the medieval period- as I’m writing I’m resisting the temptation to link to Bodleian MS Douce 104 which carries illustration to the ‘c’ text of “The VisionPiers the Plowman” – and many poets have used photography to accompany their work- Paul Muldoon’s “Plan B” springs to mind. This isn’t to say that poetry on the web should be reduced to a comic book but that it might help, for example to include in the notes an image of the kidnapped general as he is escorted across the island. It might also help to make use of google maps for Smyrna and Leros as well as Ida. I’m sure that there’s a balance to be reached in these things but I don’t think just relying on text is going to be sufficient in the very near future. For example, Trigons has many musical and musicological references which can be augmented with the relevant audio files, the issue for the glozer is whether or not these should be embedded in the page or accessed via a link in the text. I’m of the view that the latter should suffice provided that the “title” tag makes it very clear on rollover what the link leads to.

The other issue that keeps cropping up is the reliability of external sites. We’ve decided not to rely on Wikipedia articles unless we can verify the content but there are some wonderful resources now on some of the more esoteric subjects, there’s a Leigh Fermor blog that is obviously a labour of love but contains invaluable info and resources that we’ve made use of, there’s also an English language site devoted to Karaghiosis, a form of puppet theatre that we’ve obtained a pertinent quote from even though I haven’t been able to verify it.