CWWG: Colloquium Series:

Computers and Writing Working Group
Fall 2000 Virtual Colloquium Series
Session log

Michael Joyce
Rosemary Joyce
Carolyn Guyer

[log started Sun Dec 3 16:56:50 2000 EST]
Participants: S/M, jrice, egarcia, Bradley, epittman, love, tharpold, joey, Rosemary, mijoyce, CaGuyer, sullivan, ronan, stripp, dsheridan, and cnunez
Bradley turns the colloquium recorder on.
S/M says, "we're happy to have you" to Rosemary"
Bradley starts the recorder so he won't forget later.
Rosemary [to S/M]: no, the questions arrived and are wonderful
mijoyce says, "what questions (we here at Vassar have weird email)?"
tharpold rocks on his odd knees some more, regretting that he didn't get his questions in on time. Maybe he will have a chance to throw a couple in later.
love [to mijoyce]: michael emailed the questions received prior to the session to y'all so you could look them over beforehand
ronan arrives.
ronan waves hello
S/M says, "Michael, you can check the projector to get a preview of the questions. We emailed them to you 3 earlier, but yours may not yet have arrived."
Rosemary [to mijoyce]: I received the email just before coming here...
mijoyce says, "hmmm... tomtom's might have helped"
tharpold Smoke signals.
ronan punches joey hello
CaGuyer says, "sorry I didn't get any questions either. . ."
joey bonks ronan. She says, Oif!
tharpold says, "That is, we shoulda sent smoke signals."
ronan questions CaGuyer
ronan [to CaGuyer]: why are you so boss?
ronan laughs
S/M blushes in abject apology. They should have arrived sooner, but some were late a-bornin'.
Rosemary say, "actually, the questions are all the things you might expect-- otherness and disorientation and collaborating at boundaries... and also, the difference from the Storyspace mother version..."
CaGuyer says, "well, anyone who still has the same question can ask now, yes?"
ronan [to S/M]: are you t(w)oo tonight?
tharpold says, "And we can post the questions to all as we go along, yes?"
sullivan says, "aren'"
ronan always asks the same question
sullivan says, "aren't we doing the slide thing again?"
S/M supposes that as soon as everyone feels ready, we'll start the proceedings. Is everyone comfortable with that?
ronan nods
jrice say, "go right ahead"

S/M shows the slide "welcome" on the projector.

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Slide 1

Join us in welcoming our guests: Rosemary Joyce, Carolyn Guyer, and Michael Joyce. Today, the authors would like to discuss their new hypertext _Sister Stories_. The URL for tonights session is <http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/sisterstories>.

NOTE: To review this or any other slide at any time, type <peek 1 on p>, <peek 2 on p>, etc. Also, this session is being logged. The log will be posted on the CWWG colloquium web site for later reference.

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love applauds wildly...
jrice welcomes the guests
ronan applaus the intense rush he got when reading _Sisters Stories_
love stops abruptly and glances around, embarrassed.
stripp arrives.
ronan says, "oops"
mijoyce says, "yes, how civilizized:bows politely midst the wild applause"
ronan waves to stripp
Bradley grins.
tharpold rocks happily, ankles creaking in a peculiar metallic way.
sullivan wishes she were more creative
Bradley [to tharpold]: Yi
mijoyce says, "your java interface is weird, it remembers untyped stuff"
stripp waves
S/M says, "For those who wish to look ahead at questions we will ask our guests to address, type peek 2 on projector."
ronan [to mijoyce]: how so?
Bradley [to mijoyce]: That's a feature :)
S/M wonders if we have to pay extra for that feature.
mijoyce says, "a feature I wish my wetware had"
ronan says, "how can an interface remember untyped stuff ? should it not ?"
S/M invites our guests to make any introductory remarks about their work before we start grilling them with our lofty ideas.
tharpold thinks that maybe mijoyce's wetware does have that feature; he only manages to access it in his dreams, though.
joey says, "it remembers stuff yet to be typed."
joey says, "what's prolepsis?"
tharpold says, "What I've been doing with my knees."
[ 5:06 pm ]
joey says, "oh. i thought that as smaphore[1~..."
love is fascinated with tharpold's fascination w/ self-reflexivity this evening. . .
S/M says, "Well, without further ado, allow us to direct your attention to the first item on our program..."

S/M shows the slide "mal1" on the projector.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Slide 2

On the screen entitled 'Rosemary's Introduction' <http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/sisterstories/help/rosemary.html>, the 'reader' encounters the following statement: 'Disorientation is the best kind of response one can have to the prospect of trying to make sense of a culture, now 500 years in the past, that grew from roots utterly distinct from Europe, Asia, and Africa.' The subsequent paragraph then begins: 'But I don't want you to be discouraged.' Can you speak to the sense, value, and/or significance of maintaining the tension in this relationship between DIS ORIENTATION & DIS-COURAGEMENT in your hypertext? Would you, as writers and readers of texts of all kinds, EN-COURAGE others to extrapolate broader reading/writing/teaching strategies from this tension? Can you speculate on what form that EN-COURAGEMENT might assume?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

mijoyce says, "I'm still trying to read Jane's emailed question (smiles)"
sullivan realizes that it's much harder to be clever in this moo thing without drinking coffee beforehand
Rosemary say, "The juxtaposition of disorientation and discouragement was, of course, deliberate. In archaeology, certainly, we have been encouraged to place ourselves in the position of Great Synthesizer, creating a seamless fabric from the "shreds and patches" of the past. This results in very broad, very reductive, and very unreal stories that work to the extent that they do because they insistently orient readers: certain things (which I can brandish) lead unswervingly to certain other things (which I write/voice) in a more or less straight line. Any attempt to make this straight line more complex is met with warnings that we open the door to complete relativism (at our peril)."
Rosemary say, "So instead of the goal of whole, fully realized retailing of things, I advocate (in writing, reading, and teaching) attention to the disjunctions and a strategy of being interested in what doesn't go together. Multiple readings of the same material; multiple authorship; fragmentary products that are deliberately open-ended; reflexivity in writing (putting the I back in the text, or at least a we); nothing particularly new, but the idea is that practitioners should be reassured that the occasional lack of certainty about where the text is leading us is not in itself a bad thing."
CaGuyer says, "I won't belabor what seems obvious to me about encouraging a tension between disorientation and comprehension, but it does seem to me. . . "
CaGuyer says, ". . . that such tension is exactly what must occur to learn or create almost anything"
ronan [to Rosemary]: on sisterstories/poetics.fire.html : "I think the fire is like the hypertext link: it leaves in place what it passes over, touches each thing with the shape of its own shape, much as a fire when it is hot enough moves relentlessly to ash, yet in this rush holds the shape of the logs intact....._Rosemary, how does the uncertainty/disorientation change (or unfold) as the story reads individually? is synthesis not at the heart of *reading* hypertext, to the extent that every reading is within the school of "Great Texts by Great Peoples ?
dsheridan arrives.
sullivan [to Rosemary]: "your points about the kind of writing you want to work against in your discipline gel very much with how i teach/make hypertext, too
ronan [to Rosemary]: does every reading occur as fire, I guess is my ?
S/M [to CaGuyer]: Are there ways that these tensions can be brought to bear in the classroom without running afoul of those who are disinclined to welcome such creative tension.
Rosemary [to ronan]: or are there multiple flames?
sullivan [to Rosemary]: "hypertext can be contrasted to the kinds of writing in which--quoting rosemary--certain things (which I can brandish) lead unswervingly to certain other things (which I write/voice) in a more or less straight line
ronan [to Rosemary]: yes, multiple ways to reach http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/sisterstories/feathered.fir/the.aztecs.html
sullivan [to Rosemary]: "it seems to me that this non-linear quality, this questioning of the inevitability of one point leading to another etc as if inexorably, requires us to really think about the nature of the link in hypertext
ronan says, "or to be held intact at that very moment your browser reads that page"
tharpold smiles and nods, in happy approval of this emphasis on disjunction. It seems to him to address both the productive-formal and the performative-mnemonic aspects of these re-written histories -- that in them difference (cultural, temporal, erotic, affective) may be posed as an inconsistency or errancy.
Rosemary [to ronan]: in other words, and taking the metaphor over-literally in light of some work by my colleagues on burning and memory (in architecture in Neolithic Europe): there are traces and multiple ways those traces may have accumulated (in the past) and multiple ways that people (in the past) may have known about/of those traces-- and this is the experience I want to portray...
sullivan says, "sister stories has a variety of types of links; sometimes the links are logical, other times i would click back to see the link, to try to figure out the connection being implied"
ronan nods to R
Rosemary [to sullivan]: Yes! I have suggested (to other archaeologists) that Sister Stories exhibits multiple strategies that either are, or are analogues of, the ways we come to know in our discipline-- and this multiplicity is another thing I would like to capture more generally
sullivan says, "regarding fire--native americans believe that fire is sacred, and that the smoke released signals transformations"
CaGuyer [to sullivan]: there is always a kind of 'logic' in the links, sometimes more conventional or predictable, and other times much more oblique and associational
love [to tharpold]: terry, are you talking about a recuperation of inconsistency and errancy? not sure i follow . . .
[ 5:17 pm ]
sullivan [to Rosemary]: "also there are multiple links--of different kinds--to the same page of info, and this multiplicity makes the reader re-examine her initial experience of those pages i believe
love nods at sullivan.
love says, "yes, i noticed that my return visits to various pages built up layers of associations, very rich..."
Rosemary [to tharpold]: perhaps not errancy so much as difference itself... in my more conventional work, I juxtapose, for example, figurines and monuments and explore where they cease to echo each other as the node into a network of meaning
tharpold says, "Sullivan's question about the 'types of links' poses an interesting limitation of the WWW performance, though -- in what ways do the conventions of the browser limit your opportunities for multiplicity?"
sullivan [to CaGuyer]: "right, and in terms of associative links, lately i've been thinking about eisenstein's distinction, in reference to types of montage, in which he argues for montage as collision over montage as linking -- he wants the links to be confrontational, it seems that some of the links in s.stories, are, too
ronan liked the specificity towards pronouncing Nahuatl
Bradley nods at tharpold.
sullivan [to tharpold]: "what conventions of the browser exactly?
ronan wonders if the multiplicity of links within a textual passage makes the confrontational (almost) impossible ?
stripp wonders about the "back button"
CaGuyer [to sullivan]: confrontational or provocative?
Rosemary [to tharpold]: Carolyn should speak to the constraints of the WWW version versus the original Storyspace version, but yes, the original was in some ways more active
sullivan [to ronan]: "very interesting point...
Bradley [to sullivan]: Links pretty much only work one way ... click then go
ronan disagrees with dilger
tharpold [to Rosemary]: That active "network" is perhaps what I had in mind with 'errancy' -- an ongoing dislocation of sedimented identity.
ronan [to Bradley]: click here/here/here/there/ here go where?
sullivan [to CaGuyer]: "i take eisenstein's call for montage as collision to be in contrast to juxtaposition that just puts different voices in conversation
CaGuyer [to sullivan]: actually I prefer the idea that the links are evocative and not confrontational or provocative at all
ronan nods towards evocation
jrice [to tharpold]: yet here the link is associated with genalogy (http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/sisterstories/he.links.people.html) - "he links people"
love noticed that michael's pages seemed to be more self-reflective about their relative position in the storyspace layout . . . an orientation that i missed reading on the WWW.
S/M says, "One of our questions seems to be geared toward one of the threads emerging, and so, with your indulgence, we'll open it now..."
Rosemary [to sullivan]: agree with Carolyn, but there were places we constructed where there was no way out other than backwards, if that is confrontation...

S/M shows the slide "cbd" on the projector.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Slide 5

My question is about the navigational devices included in the work -- the headers and footers which appear on every page, but also the page with the circlemap on it:

http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/sisterstories/feathered.fir/ss.circlemap.html

This page seems like a sort of sitemap (though the help page says there isn't one). At the least, it functioned like a sitemap for me -- it helped me get a feel for the scope of the work, and it enabled me to discover an entire section of _Sister Stories_ which I didn't see on my first or second reading.

Could you explain the rationale behind the use of the navigational devices and the deployment of this map? The colormap page says _Sister Stories_ was created in Storyspace -- is there a difference between the work as it exists on the web and as it was originally created?

I'd also be interested in hearing more about the choice to design pages with lists of links like these:

http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/sisterstories/feathered.fir/newfire.html
http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/sisterstories/cuicacalli/taom.html

Thanks.

cbd.

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Bradley [to ronan]: Technically speaking, html links are very primitive. I thought that's what Terry was talking about.
tharpold [to sullivan]: I mean the conventions of browser "navigation," which shape cognitive and affective responses to "movement" in the text in some ways -- one anticipates "go-ing" someplace.
ronan nods at primitivism, as a concept
jrice say, "another thing about this question: it's the page with an imagemap for navigation as opposed to just a link..."
Rosemary say, "Carolyn can elaborate the move to the WWW, but yes, the map is a map of the original in Storyspace in which the map space is (for me at least) so meaningful that I mourn the inability to reproduce it in WWW"
Rosemary say, "the space we created was space as place, where one was always in relation to otherwheres, which is not a sense one gets in moving click-click-click"
ronan [to Rosemary]: tell us more about why this mourning, if you could ?
sullivan [to CaGuyer]: "what i think of in terms of collision is to set up contradictions, to make different voices elements confront each other, and eisentstein worked to make the viewers themselves confront their own complicity with dominant ideology
sullivan [to CaGuyer]: "what i think of in terms of collision is to set up contradictions, to make different voices elements confront each other, and eisentstein worked to make the viewers themselves confront their own complicity with dominant ideology
tharpold says, " 'the map space is (for me at least) so meaningful that I mourn the inability to reproduce it in WWW"' -- a lovely piece of reflexivity, that. The transfer to the WWW instantiates a break in the telling-inscribing of the stories, which divides them from a (now mythical) point of origin."
Bradley [to Rosemary]: For me, when the page I mention came up, and I saw the circle structure, the effect was like POW -- there were things that suddenly became clear
love . o O ( holding and leaving what is held . . . )
Bradley is referring to first link in the question.
Rosemary [to ronan]: I work with images and try to understand people who wrote with images. Space time is what I am trying to make students/readers see when we have largely submerged it and naturalized it as simply a given. In constructing the spatialization, I was able to take the linear texts out of the linear order imposed on them by Sahagun and re-see them as experienced in space
sullivan [to tharpold]: "i see what you meant--but still, when you're going somewhere, and you come across a link you've already visited, but from a different angle, you get multiplicity in that way
sullivan [to CaGuyer]: "in the hypertexts i and my students make, we are esp interested in confronting the contradications of our own behaviour, beliefs, experiences, in relation to our intellectual knowledge, other contradictions are those between media messages and real dynamics, and the contradictions of capitalism itself
CaGuyer says, "I believe Rosemary has already said this, but in the original Storyspace, each lexia was located in an actual spatial juxtaposition tha was meaningful to the entire work"
Bradley [to CaGuyer]: Spatial? How?
Rosemary [to love]: yes, leaving what was held, always...
ronan says, "Black Song/All Songs is a nice way to map those texts, and maybe a way to think of evocation as Eisensteinian confrontation with an ideologoical relationship"
[ 5:27 pm ]
CaGuyer says, "Storyspace, for those who haven't experienced it, is a program that allows texts to be placed near each other in a 'three-dieminsionall;' arrangement..."
sullivan says, "i've never worked in storyspace (collective gasp here, i know), but anyway--when i'm teaching hypertexts, i tell my students to print out their pages and put them on the floor and make a map that way, to see what they have and to help them with navigation"
egarcia [to Rosemary]: are these (sociocultural) differences in textuality part of the reasons why you chose these texts in particular?
CaGuyer says, "sorry, I can't see what I'm typing in this interface after the first few words . . ."
ronan [to CaGuyer]: is that what you mean when you say "program that allows texts to be placed near each other
Rosemary [to Bradley]: I would stress that in the making of the original storyspace version, I was made aware of time space relations that I never consciously knew before-- that is, conventional research had not brought me to understand these texts until I spaced them
ronan [to CaGuyer]: and "the whole work."
sullivan [to CaGuyer]: "does it work if you just move the cursor backwards, e.g., by using the home button?
Bradley says, "Did the storyspace version have the 'home aztecs related help' banners on every page, ask well as the graphical header?"
ronan nods at B
ronan says, "or the cool colors ?"
CaGuyer says, "in the original Storyspace version, there were a set arrangement of links, but not in the web-conventional navigation strip tha6t appears in the web vversion"
Rosemary [to egarcia]: yes, the issue of textuality/visuality/performace is central for me. Sahagun's interviews elicited words using pictures, originally; then re-elicited more words, originally for a dictionary (so no narrative was wanted); and only then did he cut and paste into a structure already given, not part of a Mexica experience. In revisiting his works, things emerged, such as feathers, that were not patent in the text before, as meaningfully constituted and lost echoces of visuality
sullivan says, "in reference to the banners bradley mentions--the part of me that wanted to make sure i saw everything was glad they were there, another part of me wished they weren't on the screen, so that i could focus on only the words of that link--so that there was no interruption of the textual space"
ronan [to CaGuyer]: but some of the ways you have played with it in the WWW version makes some of that 3-D ality of SS , right ???
stripp says, "In additional to the spatial aspects we've been discussing, I'm struck by the sense of temporal disjunction in Sister Stories"
tharpold nods at Rosemary's "In revisiting his works, things emerged, such as feathers, that were not patent in the text before, as meaningfully constituted and lost echoces of visuality" -- the repetition of images of feathers, tropes of feathers, is, he thinks, one of the truly arresting elements of the work.
Rosemary [to ronan]: the thing we gained, from my perspective, in WWW is visual beauty; real feathers
love nods at tharpold.
CaGuyer [to ronan]: there a sense of 3-D in any hypertextual experience I think because humans are so associational and 'simultaneous' in their apprehension of ideas and things
love loved the feathers, clung to them in her navigation.
ronan says, "http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/sisterstories/calpulli/youth/womans.work.html .... the "repetition" there is a repetion of source, or of relationship to any other position w/in the work as a whole?"
egarcia [to Rosemary]: it seems the comparisons that emerge in this sort of work (by placing the mexica textuality alongside sahagun's along yours really foregrounds the specific prejudices which inform reading/writing
sullivan says, "the repetitions and patterns, such as feathers in this text, are one of the benefits of using associative logic in these types of texts, connections became apparent that weren't obvious before, and there is some kind of power in these links"
Rosemary [to stripp]: in what sense struck by the temporal disjunction-- since I can see multiple ways to read that...
ronan [to CaGuyer]: yes, and SisterStories evokes the simultaneity really well, ...
CaGuyer says, "I will say that I think the web provides certain advantages that weren't entirely possible before, most specifically, the fact that web publication is likely to create a broader audience"
CaGuyer says, "... or not. heh."
ronan [to CaGuyer]: and yet, only so many words can be/ are hyperlinked, and where the borders of the "work as a whole" is what I was wondering about
Bradley grins.
Rosemary [to egarcia]: yes!
egarcia [to Rosemary]: for me it really brings out the connections between the encyclopedic tendencies of the codex and the forms which hypertext might be trying to revise
dsheridan has disconnected.
jrice [to CaGuyer]: would you consider other things possible on the Web, not possible in Sotryspace - like javascript?
Bradley nods at jrice.
joey says, "href="javascript:..."
ronan says, "or maybe adding comments in your source code, indexical, so that if I view http://www.nyupress.nyu.edu/sisterstories/calpulli/youth/womans.work.html, say, I would get the APA/MLA indexical info I might need for that particluar poem/fragment/recording/image ?"
CaGuyer [to jrice]: I think the new versions of Storyspace may handle some webby things like javascript, but not sure.
ronan nods at joey
Rosemary say, "repetition is one of the things that I like analytically as well, given a prediliction for practice theory and a consequent belief that repeating actions is how culture happens and becomes perceptible for me as an archaeologist"
stripp [to Rosemary]: In two ways, really. First, the more general effect of putting the Aztec stories into play with "contemporary" narratives. But also the inevitable untimeliness of question-and-response posed by the user's selection of links
Bradley says, "To move to the second part of my question... are the pages with lists of lins an example of that repetition?"
Bradley says, "s/lins/links/"
[ 5:37 pm ]
jrice [to CaGuyer]: I'm struck by those moments the work briefly goes out of textual linking (the imagemap) but wonder if you considered other ways of working with narration as well?
ronan [to Bradley]: stop talking about clever cryptograms of linux, geek boy
ronan laughs
CaGuyer says, "I think there are tons of of things that could be done with the web version that we didn't do, mostly for lack of time"
sullivan [to stripp]: "can you explain that latter point more, steph?
Bradley [to ronan]: Sorry, moo habit
joey . o O ( dad blamed economy of time !?! )
ronan wonders how RosemaryCarolynMichael, as "the" author of this story, Sister Stories, actually colloaborated ?
tharpold nods in reponse to ronan's question.
dsheridan's friends arrive to cart em off to bed.
ronan says, "what were space/time/career/etc constraints of a 3 way collaboration ?"
Rosemary [to ronan]: Mechanically, we began with email, went on to an ftp version, went back to exchanging media.. if memory serves.
ronan says, "and how did you negotiate problems"
ronan nods
ronan [to Rosemary]: were you all agreed on what/where the work was, exactly, or did that emerge as you progressed
CaGuyer says, "methods of collaboration included email, telephone, personal visits, usmail, etc. We started it back in 1993 I think, wasn't it?"
tharpold says, "More specifically, re. "collaboration" -- did it extend to the elements of nodes -- that is, are there crucial nodes in the text where more than one of you is actively responsible for the textual and graphical elements of that node? In other words, what was the granularity of the collaborative exchange?"
Rosemary [to ronan]: Michael brought me in with an invitation and I overproduced: I sent Michael and Carolyn a space out of the Mexica texts that was much more than we had expected and that then posed them the problem of entering it, since I had linked hundreds of words...
ronan nods at R
Rosemary [to CaGuyer]: 1993, yes
joey says, "i LOVE granularity"
ronan [to Rosemary]: and the 3 of ya'll worked from that first selection of Mexica texts
sullivan says, "this may seem either obvious or reductive, but one thing i noticed while viewing this hypertext was that i had a lot of anxiety that i would miss some links... i was kind of preoccupied with that actually"
ronan smiles at joey's sugarrrry link

S/M shows slide 4 on the projector.

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Slide 4

Having been trained in, and accustomed to, the rigors and the protocols of the educational institutions, how would you characterize any differences you observed between the habits and the skills you developed through previous work and your experiences with the collaborative writing that produced 'Sister Stories'? What might you say, for instance, was especially rewarding, especially troubling, or especially surprising about navigating and negotiating the disciplinary boundary between archaeology and literature? Between the 'textual' and 'visual'? Or even -- if such a boundary can, by analogy, be imputed to institutional knowledge production and disciplinarity -- between 'the feminine' and 'the masculine?'

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Rosemary [to tharpold]: so Michael and Carolyn had a product that was pretty fleshed out by itself, and then they navigated it, unlinked and relinked parts, found places for themselves...
stripp [to sullivan]: Sure. I mean the way that certain narratives or arguments appear to proceed based on linking choices.
sullivan says, "it seems that on the one hand you don't want to lead viewers through every link but on the other hand perhaps there might be a way to mitigate the anxiety that one will miss links (and the actuality of missing some even on repeated viewings)"
ronan 's anxieties revolved @ the archealogy/literature boundary, and where that was mapped
Rosemary [to ronan]: and then there were email exchanges asking me to explain why I did some things-- and some of these are in the current version-- and ultimately I was induced or persuaded to put my own voice in it in the first person which I had not done originally...
CaGuyer says, "the work definitely formed in relation to its forming, even though it began with an 'academic' excerpt, it was/is art"
ronan nods at Rosemary, and wonders about why/when the move to firsat person narration
Bradley says, "Was there an archealogy/literature boundary?"
sullivan [to Rosemary]: "personally as a reader-viewer i dig some first person, lends some immediacy and intimacy, nice to juxtapose with the detached scholarly voice
CaGuyer [to ronan]: . . . yet Rosemary's initial selection was an entirely creative and 'voiceful
Bradley says, "I mean, I'm sure there had to be at least at the beginning. I'm wondering if that changed over time."
Rosemary [to ronan]: the archaeology/literature boundary was one that concerned me (in re career) at the start-- I decided this would be a secret life I would not report to my academic employers, for example...
ronan says, "the tonality of the creative voice, as I read through, comes from the selection AND the poesis of the link"
ronan [to Rosemary]: we won't tell your boss
Rosemary [to ronan]: and then I came to my current place and found a colleague who was even more experimental than I was, so now I am happily able to acknowledge that I do this as well as (as a reviewer recently said in letting me getting away with creativity) "conventional normal science"
ronan smiles
[ 5:47 pm ]
Bradley grins
Rosemary say, "there was an archaeology/literature boundary in my mind originally, marked by direct quotes and specific attribution to the Mexica texts"
sullivan says, "when i'm making a hypertext i often find that when i'm putting up the links, i think of a bunch of other stuff to do that i hadn't anticipated, hypertext production for me is very recursive in that sense"
joey says, "we forsook our legitimate studies to learn Perl and other geek junk"
Bradley [to joey]: Or forsook our legitimate Perl to learn literature junk
ronan [to Rosemary]: could the WWW version have made that border more concrete, ie "academic" ?
Rosemary [to ronan]: as Carolyn says, my original selection was anything but objective, and in fact one of the things I am trying to do in other (more conventional) work is to make the argument that all archaeological knowledge creation is narrative, and thus voices something to someone
joey says, "but am always with head in the theory texts !!!"
ronan [to Rosemary]: yes. excellent.
S/M [to Rosemary]: Do you recognize similarities in your Conventional Normal Science work with the screens of straight quotation from Bolter, et al? Does this resonate differently for you?
jrice [to Rosemary]: do you connect this with the anthropological tradition of Levi Strauss who positioned Triste Tropique as a personal narrative?
ronan [to Rosemary]: it seemed that longt page on the Florentine Codex makes that point well
ronan [to Rosemary]: I wanted a link to that, or an overlay, or maybe a more rigorous connection to soem of the primnary texts
Rosemary [to ronan]: the WWW *could have* made the boundary more concrete, and in some ways it does (visual marking of the Mexica texts) but it also displays the reason that boundary is an illusion-- there is always a selection, an audience, a rhetoric
Rosemary say, "yes, this is (for me) all linked to the reflexive turn in anthropology (and Triste Tropiques is as good a place to begin as any, but in fact I would move it back to foremothers of feminist ethnography in the 1920s and before) in which we try to make forms that show that they are being made in order to make the interpretations clearly contingent..."
ronan says, "did the StorySpace version change, become something else, once you migrated it to the Web ?"
tharpold wonders if Rosemary can speak briefly to the effect of a re-reading of her text by brother and sister on this movement from normal-academic to subjective-poetic. Is this change in narrative form or style a result of the revisions of Carolyn and Michael (and their meditations on the status of the sister-story), or is the switch the context-catalyst of their collaboration?
CaGuyer [to ronan]: Yes, it did change when it went to web version, but most of the original text and imagery is still there, so it was more a change of form than content
Rosemary [to S/M]: the use of citations straight from academic works perhaps does resonate differently for me, although I would need to know how it resonates for Michael and Carolyn to be sure... but certainly, it is a form of academic rhetoric that is typical of (much of) my Conventional Normal Science (CNS) work.
sullivan [to Rosemary]: "i'm wondering if you know of the work of aurora levins morales, who writes what she calls "curandera history" in much the same way you describe, and who breaks down the boundary of what tharpold calls the normal-academic and subjective-poetic?
Rosemary [to sullivan]: not a familiar name but one I will seek out after this event, thank you for the seed...
sullivan [to Rosemary]: "levins morales's book _remedios_ is about the history of puerto rican women, interweaving all kinds of information and voices, correcting what l m calls "imperial history" and also interweaving entries from an "herbal" --the herbs are metaphorically linked to the history
joey says, "the boundary apparently remains hidden"
[ 5:58 pm ]
ronan nods at joey
S/M says, "We'll soon be showing our next slide. The question is fascinating and complex; be forewarned, and feel free to take a moment to mull it over. It will take over your screen momentarily."

S/M shows slide 3 on the projector.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Slide 3

Rosemary, Michael, Carolyn:

'Sister Stories' drew me in and did not release me until I had (I think) clicked every link there is to click. The interplay of Michael's and Carolyn's more personal archaeologies with Rosemary's work on Mexica daily life (fascinating!) created, for me at least, a powerful juxtaposition of assumptions about the oppressiveness of Aztec society (countered by Rosemary), assumptions about the inherent oppressiveness of male/female relations (countered by Michael and by the sister/brother relation in general [cf. Hegel . . . ?]), and assumptions about the oppressiveness of intercultural or trans-historical comparisons, addressed so forthrightly by Carolyn (black feather, right?) here:

It's almost a sacred leap, this kind of jumping through time, through histories not our own. Not just a cursory glance at another world, but trying to live it enough to see by the light of the fire that was, the ashes left in barely discernible mounds by others' breathing. The seriousness of it. The necessary respect, and the courage to move anyway. To hold and to leave what we hold. . . .'

'It occurs to me that it may be easier to make this kind of leap through time than it would be to try a crucible of hypertext through space. What Latino or African-American world in the1990s would trust the intention here? And why should they? There are some flames that leave no ash. We are outsiders of the most terrifying sort, made so by our keeping others out.'

Elsewhere, Carolyn (in your wonderful essay, 'Fretwork: Reforming Me'), you negotiate a similar problem by indicating the continuity between the inter- and the intra-cultural, arguing that the divisions we face across the familiar lines of class, race, and gender (the intercultural) fan out imperceptibly, fractally (if we but pay close attention, *not* 'keeping others out': response-ability, you call it) into the differences that make each individual a culture unto herself (the intracultural). I want to link this to your linking, above, to what Michael wrote about the difficulty of dying ('to hold and leave what we would hold') and this, in turn, to what Michael has written of elsewhere (in 'Songs of Thyselves,' I believe?) as a 'proximate geography,' the quotidian measure of life and, as, mortality.

It strikes me that 'Sister Stories' brings these two, the intracultural and proximate (seen most clearly in Michael's recurrent concern, in his links [red feather, right?], with locating himself: 'I have to find where I am'), together as *practices* that are all the more visible and effective for their engagement with an otherness as profound as that of the Aztecs. 'To hold and to leave what we hold' is the practice of archaeology in its study of those long dead; it is also, as Michael writes, the practice of dying itself for each of us. Mortality itself is the proximate geography that links us with others and forms the inter/intracultural substrate for response-ability.

These are some of my thoughts, but I admit to misgivings about such a Heideggerian reading, such an inevitably humanist descent to a universal being-towards-death, especially given the Aztec's very different valuation of death as demonstrated through human sacrifice (Rosemary, I take very much to heart your suggestion that, for them, this was not merely 'necessary' but part of the Good). And yet, what more palpable figure of otherness exists, than death?

I suppose my question for you all (any or all) is simply this: How do you see 'Sister Stories' negotiating (or negotiated by) the problem of otherness?

Best,

Jane Love

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

tharpold says, "Whoa, Jane."
Rosemary [to tharpold]: your question echoes the way I originally gave myself permission to participate in this project (as a "creative work", not an analytic one) but I think two things made that a useful fiction from the beginning. First, as Carolyn noted, my version of Sahagun was by no means academic. I am/was deeply engaged in creating an alternative vision of the prehispanic social realities for which these sources are used. Second, perhaps more interesting for the purposes here, I was not authoritative with respect to the Mexica, but in the Maya-- and in our field, these tiny differences matter
stripp waves so long as she is ushered out the "actual" door by her partner.
stripp has disconnected.
love thinks that all the questions so far have been fascinating and complex.
ronan [to Rosemary]: and yet this story is of mexica and T, the temple, the people
love apologizes for her outsized question . . .
ronan [to Rosemary]: can the intracultural and proximate be negotiated, or how are they... ?
ronan [to love]: is that one of your ?s
Rosemary [to love]: Your question is so rich and I am well aware I am talking too much, and also aware that I have the advantage of having read it in advance which Michael and Carolyn didn't, so a brief response: my hope is to think of multiple forms of the otherness of dying. For the Mexica, the dead became ancestors who participated in everyday life, including contributing physical matter through the steam of the ancestral steam bath. So the otherness of death is still other, but not necessarily the same kind of loss...
sullivan says, "the sacrifice elements was interesting to me, the way i read the links, the order i initially chose, made me wonder if i was reading descriptions of the sacrifice of children or not, i put it out of my mind, then eventually came across the link jane quotes, i had mixed feelings, wanting to understand this other way of thinking and caught within my horror anyway..."
love [to Rosemary]: yes, i sensed that through your pages.... that's what i find so fascinating, how the mexica pose a kind of hyper-otherness surrounding death and dying
Rosemary [to ronan]: yes, it is not interesting if the Mexica are not the point: the critique of the reflexive turn in anthropology is and has been that we (anthropologists) are not as interesting subjects as the others who we seem to be abandoning. But what I hope I am able to do is make the focus the intersubjective place where we experience Mexica things/texts and thus come to form our representation of Mexica experience, with an unerasable gap (that would have been there even had we been face to face)
ronan nods vigorously
love [to Rosemary]: i kept looking for indications of how the . . . sorry, i won't get this work right . . . ixiptl? the human representation s of gods who were sacrificed. . . how they theymselves perceived or experienced this. they're often referred to as captives/victims, but at moments there seems to have been an identification w/ the god personified. can you clarify this?
stripp's friends arrive to cart h* off to bed.
egarcia says, "that's a crucial connection you're making-- mexica's acceptance of death (in the everyday) with a possible (and more honest) acceptance about the othering that is necessary for all telling"
[ 6:08 pm ]
ronan [to Rosemary]: I wonder if that project could better be forwarded with more links to images/codexs/translations from Nahuatl/ using the hypertectulaity of WWW
CaGuyer says, "to bring Jane's question in front again, as much because this interface takes all away before I'm ready. . ."
ronan says, "can Other be linked to ? should it? is *Mexica* always already a narrative construct ?"
love [to CaGuyer]: carolyn, you can see it again by typing <peek 3 on projector>--S/M? it is 3, isn't it?
S/M says, "yes."
CaGuyer says, "well, I can type peek 3 on projector but getting the system to accept my re' negotiating (or negotiated by) the problem of otherness?How do you see 'Sister"
Rosemary [to sullivan]: sacrifice is really problematic for me and I most definitely want to resist the notion that it was OK because (some) Mexica thought so. The ixiptl were not always captives, probably not usually captives, but that does not mean that the prospect of sacrifice was a risk equally distributed within Mexica society-- no one sacrificied the tlatoani (speaker) or the cihuacoatl (serpent-skirt), the supreme political powers. Ixiptl means representation, literally, and is applied to images, the costume, the person who wears the costume, but the representation is actually better thought of as a part of the being than an image of the being.
egarcia nods to ronan
egarcia nods to ronan
ronan [to Rosemary]: I meant that comment in terms of CNS archaelogical work
CaGuyer says, "request, is another matter. . .."
joey has disconnected.
CaGuyer [to S/M]: no need, I've tried to capture each and stick them in a Notepad window...
ronan [to Rosemary]: CNS rather than a piece of Art. could we imagine an academiuc environment where a text like Sister Stories is built as both art/CNS
sullivan says, "question for all three of you--i find that making hypertexts like this changes me in fundamental ways, changes how i think, what i dream, how i write, how i compose (in html or not), how i approach my traditional studies, etc.--do you find that you are changed in any of these ways by the making of these types of texts, too? if so, how?"
ronan sacrificies himself for Conventional Normal Science
love [to CaGuyer]: could you talk a bit about the inter-/intraculturality of your interactions w/ the mexica texts? i'm trying to get a sense of how you experienced the problem (the opportunity, the challenge, the sheer grace) of countenancing that otherness...?
ronan [to egarcia]: we should all be conventional normal scientists, or at least play CNS on TV
ronan smiles at emily
tharpold must, alas, leave at this crucial juncture. He rises uncertainly on his wobbly knees, and waves goodbye to all. He looks forward to reading the transcript later. Thanks *very* much, Rosemary, Carolyn, Michael.
CaGuyer [to love]: I suspect I did 'negotiate otherness' differently than either Rosemary or Michael, partly because the boundaries seemed a little less real
CaGuyer says, "... the academic/art divide that is..."
sullivan says, "the first time i ever made an experimental hypertext--in which i juxtaposed info on ted bundy, cosmetics discourse and personal/family history--i started dreaming in hypertext, disembodied, "clicking" on the computer screen to get to the next part of the dream"
love [to CaGuyer]: yes, i kinda felt that, w/out having noticed it necessarily...
tharpold has disconnected.
joey's friends arrive to cart him off to bed.
CaGuyer says, "I'm not an academic, so I was freer in a sense. . . but I myself was an 'outsider' in another sense too - I'm the sister in law, not a natural born joyce"
Rosemary [to ronan]: yes, I can imagine that context because I am (now) in it. which goes back to the story of making this work: I left my previous place and came to Berkeley and found a group of feminist archaeologists including Ruth Tringham who was beginning to work with multimedia representation of the past. For the past four years we have been developing a program here in multimedia authoring in archaeology where we teach students "content" simultaneously with the tools of creating their own multimedia representations, and critiques of representation-- and they do it for their course projects. So far as I know, we are unique in our discipline for the combination of critique, practice, and content in one context. And this context makes our works art/CNS at once: Ruth's publications on her European archaeological work present the field "data" and multiple narrative mediations.
love [to CaGuyer]: it felt to me as if michael was measuring his location in relation to you and to rosemary and to the mexica, but you seemed much more fluidly caught up *in* the relations themselves... does that seem right?
ronan [to CaGuyer]: I tried to find your FEED essay, http://www.emedia.net/feed/95.09guyer/95.09guyer.html, but it was 404
sullivan says, "lately, i've noticed that making experimental hypertexts that combine deconstructions of advertisements, personal and family anecdotes/narratives, and critique of political economy, have led me to think differently--on a theoretical level--about my object of study; that is, thinking associatively has changed my thinking that i approach from a more purely conceptual framework (i.e., academic writing)"
[ 6:18 pm ]
CaGuyer [to love]: yes, I think there is something to that. Not that I was more fluid necessarily, but less constrained by training - ignorant in othewords
ronan [to Rosemary]: excellent. do you have a URL for your group's work for us???????
S/M says, "We have one more slide to show for your consideration."
Bradley [to ronan]: I think Carolyn's essay is at http://www.feedmag.com/95.09guyer/95.09guyer.html
CaGuyer [to ronan]: not sure... FEED may have unarchived some of the old stuff. If it's not available anymore, they'll probably get you to a copy of some sort

S/M shows slide 6 on the projector.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Slide 6

Can you please comment further on what is at stake in the distinction you make between the good scribe who 'links the people well; he places them in order'-- and the 'different order' of _Sister Stories_. You call the 'different order' that sister stories know one that 'link[s] not by placing but by finding places within which to be.' Is there a sense in which the ordering of the good scribe relates to the multiple meanings of the *mot d'ordre* described by Deleuze & Guattari; that this knowledge of 'the genealogies of the lords' stands as a kind of empty sloganeering against the somehow richer, more fulsome ordering of sister stories?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

ronan nods to Carolyn
ronan [to CaGuyer]: the other stuff on your mothrermillenia site is GREAT
CaGuyer [to ronan]: oooh, don't say mother millennia. . . i'm so far behind on that project it's breaking my heart
ronan promises to never say it again
tharpold's friends arrive to cart em off to bed.
sullivan [to CaGuyer]: "i find that i'm *always* behind on my hypertext projects, esp as i'm trying to do them in my "free" time, in between teaching and writing my dissertation
Bradley wonders why this question brings up sloganeering?
sullivan [to CaGuyer]: "they seem to call out to me all the time, i find myself thinking a lot that i'd rather be working on the hypertexts than doing whatever i'm doing... sometimes i think of a series of links that i want to make, i just write down the ideas for the time when i will (hopefully) get to implement them
ronan forgot to read the History of the Lords who Order His World
ronan says, "I promise to read that text real soon now"
CaGuyer [to sullivan]: the perpetual complaint, never enough time
love . o O ( and then we die... )
S/M says, "The French 'order-word' carries the everyday meaning of a 'slogan', a cliche, if you will."
sullivan [to CaGuyer]: "yeah, that's true, but also i find that hypertext *does* take more time, i enjoy the hell out of it, but it takes longer than straight academic writing, so to speak, for me anyway
cnunez arrives.
cnunez says, "hi ronan""
ronan waves to his scholar friend, claudia
cnunez says, "not much just putting the finishing touches on your paper""
cnunez says, "how do i use pages?""
ronan looks at cnunez and asks her to page him
ronan [to cnunez]: join me
ronan steps quietly out into the hallway. Aquifer. (Whatever!)
cnunez steps quietly out into the hallway. Aquifer. (Whatever!)
S/M says, "We'd like to thank our guests for participating and enriching us with their art and their conversation."
egarcia shrugs bashfully and quietly sneaks out of the moo...
egarcia has disconnected.
mijoyce says, "Thanks for having us..."
ronan arrives.
Bradley smiles, "Yes, thanks very much. I very much enjoyed _Sister Stories_ -- though I think I haven't found all of it yet."
S/M says, "It seems that the late Sunday afternoon spirit has gotten the better of us and it must be time to go count some more ballots."
love says, "thanks for coming--"
ronan says, "sorry, I didn't want to interrupt"
ronan says, "ooooh, is it over ... ?"
sullivan says, "thanks for your presence here, and for the very provocative hypertext"
Rosemary say, "I read this question as a query whether there was an ironic intent in the use of the scribe as our starting point, given the very real way that the scribal order is single, hierarchical, and imposed by the state-- where we are obviously multiple (although not so multiple today, I notice? Is Michael still here?). The sloganeering as words drained of meaning. The interesting thing here is the question of whether hypertext as rhizomic is somehow closer to life as lived, or at any rate, that is what I read into the last line of the question. Some archaeological theorists have asserted that rhizomic writing would be better archaeology (even in print) and a few have tried to produce examples. But these (from my perspective) are less effective than hypertext because of the inability to follow a larger body of possible pathways, so that actually they are misleading-- they are only one pathway, after all, but masquerading as multiple."
ronan says, "Sister Stories was great"
[ 6:28 pm ]
ronan [to Rosemary]: I am eager to explore that link
CaGuyer [to love]: Jane, I love (so to speak) your comment about 'clinging to the feathers' in Sister Stories.
love [to CaGuyer]: oh, i mean that quite literally... well, as literally as possible
ronan [to Rosemary]: more rhizomes, less slogans
epittman has disconnected.
ronan says, "the larger the body of paths the better"
CaGuyer [to love]: the feathers are definitely something to cling to I think. the nahuatl is daunting...
ronan agrees with Carolyn G
love [to CaGuyer]: at what point did the feather emerge as the organizing thread?
ronan says, "it is daunting"
S/M says, "Don't get me wrong, please continue. I just want to make our guests know how much we appreciate their generosity while I still have the opportunity."
love loves to say, huitzilopochtli....
CaGuyer [to love]: mmmm... not sure it's *the* organizing thread, but it became much larger for me when I started converting to the web version
ronan butchers the pronunciation marks of all those consonants
sullivan says, "can we speculate for a moment on precisely why a "larger body of paths" is better? "
Bradley [to love]: Is it the feather? I thought it was the colors...
Bradley grins at love.
love [to CaGuyer]: guess it was for me bcs of the shift from SS to the WWW
Bradley thought it was colors and the calendar
egarcia's friends arrive to cart em off to bed.
love [to Bradley]: it's the colored feathers
Bradley [to love]: Wanna fight?
love throws bradley a punch from the left
CaGuyer [to love]: I also love to say huitzilopochtli and also coyolxauhqui and all of it
ronan waits for the punches to land
Bradley says, "Seriously, though, that colormap change turned the text inside out for me..."
Bradley ducks a little too late
ronan [to sullivan]: more pathways, closer to a rhizomatic relatioinship we might have with the Mexica or the Zapotecs, or the ...
Rosemary say, "feathers were one of the things I forced attention to from the beginning, I think, because I used the Storyspace linking tools to find and link all feathers of particular colors..."
love got to visit the ruins at copan several years ago... "Sister Stories" took her back to that visit...
Bradley says, "It changed the status of the feather by opposing them, giving them a spatial relation."
sullivan [to ronan]: "rhizomatic relationship??
mijoyce says, "At end I am still back at the beginning, trying to understand the relation between fire and courage and orientation (unironically, they seem connected, moving toward light & warmth, etc"
epittman's friends arrive to cart em off to bed.
ronan [to sullivan]: a relationship that is never a determinate relationship
sullivan [to ronan]: "so more pathways = indeterminacy literalized?
CaGuyer says, "I want to thank everyone here before it's too late, for reading and attending to Sister Stories. Makes it worth all the years of working on it. Thank you!"
Rosemary say, "Copan is special to me; in 1977 it was the first prehispanic site I saw, it is partly responsible for my switching to this area (from 19th c. N American archaeology)"
jrice thanks the guests
ronan [to sullivan]: no, I was arguing for more pathways so FlorentineCodex,Nahuatl Glossary,OtherAccounts become part of Sister Stories more concretrely through a wider us eof <A HREF
S/M [to mijoyce]: How do you like your prospects? For understanding, that is.
sullivan says, "thanks, y'all"
mijoyce says, "Bye all, I'm afraid we have to go. Thanks *so* much for the careful reading and wonderful questions!"
love [to mijoyce]: and is that related to mortality? (but then, what isn't?)
Bradley says, "Thanks again."
love says, "ooops, sorry"
mijoyce has disconnected.
love says, "thanks, all"

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