My Presentation for ICR 2012: William Blake’s White Noise

Remixed part of a larger collaborative book I’ve written with Jason Whittaker titled William Blake and the Digital Humanities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media due out from Routledge on Christmas Eve.

Question of what it means to be a caretaker of Blake. Are scholars “caretakers?” Quote from Morris Eaves in 1995 article for The Huntington Library Quarterly.

Quote has certain taxonomic assumptions that are linked to broadcast media. Academic as media producer. “Audience” as consumer. Part of the same logic that structures The William Blake Archive. Question: Is it true that most of Blake’s “readers” go to the Archive? Argument: Outside of academia, Blake is being deployed in ways that treat initiated readers and experts as largely irrelevant. What would it mean to embrace this “white noise” as essential to understanding our Blake’s cultural inheritance?

Quote from Media Studies scholar Jussi Parrika. Traditionally, literary studies approached scholarship as something that separated the literary from the popular, the archive from the ephemera, the sound from the noise.

Also think of this in terms of taxonomic role of the scholar versus folksonomic. The upper image is a taxonomy tree used by Google to explain how computer products should be categorized in a simple product hierarchy for companies. The lower image is a wordcloud, a folksonomy in which individual users “tag” entries and these entries are ranked in terms of tagging frequency. Note that taxonomies are generally supplied by an authority, while folksonomies are generally mapped by algorithms. See Google’s PageRank program vs. earlier search engines like Yahoo! and Altavista.

Blake appears in strange places, and these places are often missed by scholars. This is a comment from a 2007 wired article on the popularity of various “punk” genres. Derek C.F. Pegritz includes this comment at the bottom, which is probably sarcastic - since the story was never written. But what role do forum comments have in a larger understanding of Blake’s online ecosystem? You probably know the image on the left, William Daniels’s William Blake II, I place it here b/c it demonstrates the same “punk” attitude that Pegritz lambasts in his comment.

Different ways of “reading” Blake’s popularity. Richardson began this analysis in his 1997 article, in which he noted the “long term” importance of Blake in anthologies of British Romanticism, but also sees that his popularity drops off in the 1990s, and thus he “ultimately fails to achieve prototypical status.” Mark Lussier criticizes Richardson’s analysis for failing to include Blake’s popularity in comic books, genre fiction, and advertising. But the quantitative method Richardson uses is interesting since it quickly becomes difficult, if not impossible, to closely read all of the “noise” Blake generates. Hence text-miners like Ted Underwood have suggested not looking for simple key search terms (like “Blake”) and instead focusing on semantic clustering (a cluster of words that tend to appear together), because the former method presumes that scholars know what they are looking for, and can lead to confirmation bias. Further, Franco Moretti argues that close reading is too theological, “a very solemn treatment of a very few texts taken very seriously-whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them” (151).

What might this look like? Here is a 6 month study, undertaken in 2010, of quotations by the “big 6” Romantic poets. As an aside, there are obvious limitations to the way this study was performed. For example, all of the surveyed poets are men, and it was difficult (if not impossible) to compare the Romantic poets to Shakespeare (who generated about 6 times the number of quotations) or the Bible (about 20 times). More generally, though, we wish to show how this type of study illustrates how a social media apparatus like Twitter generates Blakean noise that can be visualized. Some other limitations: We’ll see how what counts as a “Blake quotation” can often include misappropriations and misquotations. Second, about 19% of Byron’s quotations are retweets of the phrase “Always laugh if you can, it is cheap medicine,” and (perhaps not surprisingly) he is the most popular of the six to be quoted in a different language.

The sources themselves are interesting. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell was, by far, the most popular source for users to quote in Tweets.

This might give you a better sense of which quotes were taken and how many from each source. Note how the “Proverbs from Hell” make up the largest percentage of Blakean quotes. Mike Goode would, of course, not find this to be surprising. What surprised me was the amount of quotes from Jerusalem, which comes in second; the amount of times the Jim Morrison quote about the doors was attributed to Blake; and the relative unpopularity of the Songs, especially “Tyger” which is often seen as Blake’s most popular poem.

In particular, the Jim Morrison quote illustrates just how much error and misappropriation effect Blake’s presence online. Here’s another short example from YouTube. YouTube is filled with class assignments (recreate a Blake poem using Twitter), weird and haunting animations of Tom Phillips’s Blake portrait mouthing lines from his famous poems, and different (often nonacademic) lectures on Blake’s work. This is a video made secretly by a student of Aethelred Eldridge. Those of you who don’t know him, he is a famous avant-garde artist, the founder of The Church of William Blake, and known for his eccentricities. This video showcases just how much student reactions mirror those of Blake, some are enchanted, others see him as a curiosity.

Here are a few of the comments. His students are obviously not very generous to him. But what’s interesting to me is that, despite their total disinterest in Blake (none of them mention him at all), the video disseminates Blake’s words and ideas. Even if a good percentage of the Twitter quotes are misquotes or quotes that should be attributed to someone else, this “white noise” constitutes a signifiant part of what transmits Blake’s cultural legacy across time and space.

In fact, I’d like to end with a quote from Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter. When Bennett talks about a “heterogeneous assemblage,” she suggests that agency is never the property of a single body but is distributed across fields that are often ignored. It might be easy to see our cultural knowledge as something that is kept, articulated, and broadcasted by experts. In an age when data on non-academic, or even non-human, actors citing William Blake is plentiful, we need new approaches to better understand how (directly or indirectly) Blake impacts our world. Thanks.