Folksonomies, Mechonomies, and Natural Selection:
William Blake’s New Aesthetic on Fickr and YouTube
Social media and the digital humanities have questioned the traditional role of scholars and editors in the production and collection of research. Taxonomy, in which expert knowledge informs the structure of the collected edition, has been challenged by folksonomy, in which a vast number of experts and non-experts alike have the opportunity to influence online publications through tagging. Folksonomies have contributed to a bizarre scholarly media ecology, typified by a vast flood of publications and ephemera that interact with the more traditionally curated work of online journals. Even more strange, intellectual movements like the New Aesthetic have started to consider how folksonomies are - themselves - mediated by computers and machines who are starting to exhibit more agency in archival matters. As James Bridle points out, ⅔ of the most active editors on Wikipedia are bots or algorithms, and complete the majority of editorial duties. I argue that editorial theories associated with 19th century authors, from Jerome McGann’s notion of “social text editing” used in the The Rossetti Archive to Wayne C. Ripley’s vision of collaborative “delineation editing” in the The William Blake Archive do not account for the rapid development of what I call “machine editing”: the increasingly influential role of machines in curating and producing online content.
But machine editing needs to be disconnected from its association with the simplistic assumptions about mechanical reproduction frequently underlying scholarly editorial practice in the humanities. My presentation outlines how online communities on Flickr and YouTube use William Blake to articulate their complex relationship with technology, and critique the separation between nature and culture often invoked in traditional theories of editing. One example of this phenomenon is Karen Tregaskin’s Flickr image “Eternity in a Grain of Sand,” which associates Blake’s Auguries of Innocence with the building of the Hadron Collider, the search for the Hoggs-Boson, and the microscopic structure of sand. Tregaskin says that her image was based “on a quote somewhere that once they get the protons spinning around, this huge amount of energy flying around 27km of tunnels…there will still only be enough matter to fill one tiny, fine grain of sand.” Blake’s pantheistic argument in Auguries would seem to contradict the fundamental assumptions about nature voiced by the creation of the Hadron Collider, and yet Tregaskin’s illustration shows how the material ecologies of sand are reflected in the hidden universes and fundamental particles of the collider itself. Close and distant readings of Blakean remediations on YouTube and Flickr can help us reconceptualize authors as not discourses or people, but complex ecological networks that survive due to a wide variety of creative and critical efforts - most of which are lost, forgotten, or trashed.