Reading practices and digital
experiences: An investigation into
secondary students’ reading
practices and XML-markup
experiences of fiction
Dustin Grue, Teresa M. Dobson and Monica Brown
University of British Columbia, Canada
.......................................................................................................................................
Abstract
Correspondence:
Dustin Grue, Department of
English, University of British
Columbia, 397—1873 East
Mall, Vancouver, British
Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z1.
Email:
[email protected]
This article reports on a study of XML-markup experiences as reading practices
of secondary students studying English literature in a public high school in
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Since training in the digital humanities
(DH) has historically been restricted to those in undergraduate and graduate
programs, an important consideration in DH education is how we might implement DH methods in secondary school curricula with a view to introducing
prospective scholars to the field prior to their admission to post-secondary
education. A concomitant goal would be to investigate a new locus for DH
education, at a different level of education and in a different institutional environment, to observe how or if DH might migrate from the locale to which it has
acclimatized. Our work maps a method for developing this pedagogy and presents findings on students’ semantic tagging of two short stories: Ernest
Hemingway’s (1927) ‘Hills Like White Elephants’ and Sean O’Faolain’s (1948)
‘The Trout’. Analysis of this tagging reveals markup as reading practice and
describes how students negotiate between the experiences of reading, how
these experiences may be realized by text, and the ways in which XML
markup—as process—mediates between.
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1 Introduction
Much discussion of digital humanities (DH) curricula has focused on graduate and, to a lesser extent,
undergraduate education (e.g. Rockwell, 2003;
Chinn and Kirilloff, 2012). A future generation
of digital humanists, however, is currently in the
secondary school system, and an important consideration in digital humanities education is how we
might implement DH methods in secondary school
curricula with a view to introducing prospective
scholars to the field prior to their admission to
post-secondary education. A concomitant goal
would be to investigate another locus for DH education, at a different level of education and in a
different institutional environment, to observe
how or if DH might migrate from the locale to
which it has acclimatized. For instance, although
there are several initiatives to educate university
undergraduate students in the use of XML encoding
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doi:10.1093/llc/fqs069
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D. Grue et al.
1.1 The study
In the late spring of 2010, members of the team1
studied the reading habits, critical reading practices,
and XML-encoding experiences of students at a secondary school in Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada. Participants were fifty-five senior secondary
school students between 16 and 19 years old, from
two classes in Years 11 and 12 (Year 11: n ¼ 28,
fifteen female and thirteen male; Year 12: n ¼ 27,
nine female and eighteen male). The participants
with whom we worked were academically strong
and were for the most part bound for university
or college within a few months to a year (several
Year 12 students, for example, already had been
admitted to post-secondary institutions for
September 2010).
During a series of workshops over the course of 4
weeks, researchers led students in five activities:
(1) describing their reading habits and proposing
definitions for ‘narrative’ and ‘story’, (2) evaluating
narrative form by physically re-assembling fragments of a short story into a cohesive narrative,
(3) sketching their own models for visualizing
plot, (4) tagging fiction in groups of three to five,
either using a simplified XML schema (Year 11) or
developing an original schema (Year 12), and (5) an
interview in which individual participants discussed
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their experiences in the context of these activities.
The workshop sessions were 90-min long; individual interviews at the end of the project ranged from
20- to 40-min long. The activities centred around
two short stories: Ernest Hemingway’s (1927) ‘Hills
Like White Elephants’ and Sean O’Faolain’s (1948)
‘The Trout’. These stories were selected because they
were part of the English curriculum at the school
in question and because both are short enough
(approximately 1,500 words each) to be introduced
and discussed in a 90-min timeframe. As well, both
resist narrative representation by means traditional
to secondary education, such as Freytag’s pyramid
(Gustav Freytag, ‘Die Technik des Dramas’, 1863),
in which the action of a story is plotted on a single
line in Cartesian space and culminates in a discernible climax. Finally, they both pose a challenge for
markup with XML.
Discussion of all of the activities students undertook is beyond the scope of a single article.
Therefore, in the next section we will focus primarily on analysis of Activity 4, semantic tagging of a
short fiction selection in XML, although we will also
draw to a lesser extent on data collected in the context of Activity 1: students’ description of their reading habits and definitions for ‘narrative’ and ‘story’.
2 Method
While we intended to investigate how students envisage narrative, and how students might use
XML-aided visualizations of text to rethink the viability or appropriateness of narrative structures we
find institutionally entrenched, we propose that the
process of learning digital tools is vital in teaching
literature. We found the answer to the question, ‘Of
what benefit are digital tools in the instruction of
literature?’, therefore depends on how ‘benefit’ is
measured. The benefit is only partly the product
of looking at literature through digital tools, and
largely the process. The idea is that if tagging a
story and talking about a story tells another story,
a story of critical activity, we want to investigate that
activity.
This expansion of our focus was motivated by the
discovery of substantial variation in the students’
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(e.g. The Brown University Women Writers Project
and its affiliated programs), introducing students
to XML markup in secondary school settings is
not common and to our knowledge has not been
studied. In this light, we wanted to study the implementation of a model of DH pedagogy that involves
XML encoding for Years 11 and 12 (roughly 16 to 19
years old) literature students. But further, because
this study is part of a larger project in developing a
rich-prospect browser, ‘PlotVis’, to represent narrative (Dobson et al., 2011), and to critique how narrative is traditionally taught in secondary schools
(e.g. Dobson, 2002, 2006), we also wanted to identify
how students conceive of narrative structure and explore the benefits of rethinking this structure with
computer-based visualizations. This dual focus was
the groundwork by which we investigated a dialectic
between how students ‘envisage’ and how they ‘visualize’ narrative.
Reading practices and digital experiences
[12–130]2: All Shakespeare Stories are frustrating to read because the language is not
something we use everyday. Harry Potter by
JK Rowling was at times confusing for me
because the descriptions were so detailed, it
was hard to imagine everything.
So frustration can be caused by meaning that is
both underdetermined and overdetermined:
Shakespeare can be frustrating because his language
is unclear, and Rowling’s ‘too’ detailed language is
also a cause for frustration. Rather than critique the
participants, or view this behaviour as a failure, we
chose to use this mismatch as a framework for our
analysis. The analysis of data, therefore, proceeds
along the lines of rule-making and rule-breaking.
2.1 Rules and ruptures
As a critical framework, the theorization of rulemaking and rule-breaking informs diverse areas of
scholarship: Wittgenstein’s language games (1954)
and Marxist theorizations of utopia (Bloch and
Adorno, 1990), for example3. It also underpins contemporary social science theories of classification,
where recent work has shown that classification
schemas are rather poorly applied—but rather
than seek a remedy, a critical use is found for
this failure. Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Star, in
their work on categories (1999), summarize this
point:
‘Just because people do not do what they say
they will, does not mean that they are doing
nothing. Nor does it mean that they do not
believe in the stated formal purpose and tailor
their behavior to it’ (p. 54).
The ‘stated formal purpose’ for our participants
was to explain how they interact with fiction, and
then to interact with it. In the fourth activity, for
instance, participants selected an appropriate XML
schema—either the schema provided or one developed/modified on their own—and used this
schema to tag a piece of fiction. It was in this part
that we found intra- and inter-group variation in
how the fiction was tagged—the participants broke
their own rules. However, the breakages were
not simply dysfunction: the motivations for this
breakage, we argue, have to do with the disjunction
between readerly expectation and textual realization—the experience of literature and the words
on the page—or, as we have termed this, the difference between envisaging and visualizing. Given, for
example, the much-discussed ambiguity of
Hemingway’s pronouns—specifically, his its—in
‘Hills Like White Elephants’, how might students
new to both this fiction and XML perform semantic
markup in light of what Peter Bosch (1980) refers to
as it’s ‘attenuate semantics’? Such a problem pushes
the students to look beyond text, beyond it’s orthography, to record their experience of reading in terms
of a specific kind of classification, even when this
classification falters.
This is to say that the motivations of our participants appeared to arise from attempting to give
expression not to text but to their interaction with
it, with a top–down system, when the text resists
such classification. In this way, we might consider
the problems of ‘attenuate semantics’ to extend
beyond Hemingway’s its and, consequently, produce an interpretation, by way of markup, that
enriches the text. This seems to give expression to
the other side of Susan Hockey’s (2006) claim that
‘print is better considered as a by-product of an electronic text, not the ultimate end-product’ (p. 94).
Since electronic text does not simply reduce to
print, it is also not merely print’s expansion but
the encoding of a practice—it is a reflection of a
reading practice. Furthermore, if we consider these
reading experiences to be valid experiences, the implication is that XML markup itself is rhetorical,
first of all in its acts of definition, and also in that
it is not merely the bare reflection of text but the
recognition and highlighting of relationships in text.
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performance in the activities under discussion here.
To put this simply, students created rules—rules for
interacting with literature, as readers and as XML
taggers—but then broke them. The contradictions
were multiple: in the narrative survey activity students explicitly declared incongruous conceptions of
narrative, and in the XML tagging activity they generated tagging schemas but did not follow them. For
example, the following is a student response from
the survey, explaining how a text can provoke
frustration:
D. Grue et al.
2.2 Tasks and early findings
As noted earlier, we will focus primarily on the XML
tagging exercise. To establish one side of the
envisage-visualize dialectic, however, we will first
report briefly on findings from the narrative
survey, which was completed by fifty-five students.
The goal of this written survey, which consisted of
nine short-answer questions, was to collect data on
students’ self-reported reading habits. Students were
asked what they like to read in and out of school, as
well as which of their lifetime readings they most
recalled as unforgettable, and which they most recalled as frustrating or confusing. Additionally, they
were asked to provide their own definition of ‘story’
or ‘narrative’. Responses were transcribed, tagged
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with a customized XML schema, and output for
analysis. Responses amounted to a combined total
of 10,041 words. The average total word length of
response was 162 words, with a range from 63 to
316.
One of the suppositions of this study is that institutional language and values, the values echoed in
public education, strongly determine how students
identify their relationship to literature. In some
sense, parts of our study allowed the students to
temporarily take the role of their teachers or of
formal critics, praising and admonishing their reading in a tone ringing with institutional language:
e.g. ‘The Dark Fields—The ending was not very
strong and it was cliché’ [11-270]; ‘the writing
wasn’t as strong as I would’ve liked’ [11-10].
Indeed, this accords with previous observations
(Dobson, 2002, 2006) that students tend to represent narrative structure in conventional ways consistent with what has been represented to them in
their formal schooling. Responding to a question
about poignant parts in ‘Hills Like White
Elephants’, a participant explains that, ‘once this
passage was said, the mood totally changed. This
was when I thought there would be some conflict
and turning point’ [11–30]. In addition to the terms
‘conflict’ and ‘turning point’, compare this student’s
statement with ‘achievement indicators’ in the prescribed curriculum for English Language Arts in
British Columbia (2007)4: ‘[students will] identify
how the key elements of a story [. . .] influence
each other (e.g. elements of setting influence character action, character action contributes to understanding of characterization, and plot events can
contribute to mood)’ (p. 122). It was clear, then,
that the institutional form of reflection somewhat
determined its content.
The XML tagging exercise had two parts: students were introduced to the idea of visualization
with a variety of applications, such as ‘Many Eyes’,
‘Wordle’, ‘TextArc’, and ‘Voyant Tools’ (at the time
of the study, ‘Voyeur’). They were then introduced
to semantic markup, divided into groups of three to
five, and invited to tag their choice of one of the two
short stories we had introduced in the workshop
series (‘Hills’ and ‘The Trout’). Year 11 students
were asked to use a provided XML schema,
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The point of investigating rules and their ruptures lies in the notion that rules suppose an idealized system, supported by the rules, but also
suppose an eventual abrogation: a rule is only a
rule if there exists the possibility it might be
broken, and this breakage can be instructive. Like
Paul Grice’s well known four linguistic maxims
(‘Logic and Conversation’, 1975), meaningful communication occurs when rules are flaunted: when a
steady-state expectation of cooperation is subverted,
attention is drawn to the motivations of that subversion which in turn enriches the communicative
exchange. The idea of privileging failure in terms of
semantic markup may not speak well of its use as
‘product’, but focusing on failure opens up the productiveness of its use in ‘process’. This notion of the
productivity of eventual failure finds its way to
inform other fields: picking up on the Gricean
linguistic tradition and relating this to utopian critiques, cultural critic José Muñoz writes in Cruising
Utopia (2009), ‘The eventual disappointment of
hope is not a reason to forsake it as a critical
thought process, in the same way that even
though we can know in advance that the felicity of
language ultimately falters, it is nonetheless essential’ (p. 10). ‘Failure’ has utility in that we can learn
from it—as a bare corrective—but an analysis of
rules affords a mapping of the discursive space in
which these rules are actualized. This methodology
is not motivated by a critique of semantic markup,
but a way of finding use when it seemingly falters.
Reading practices and digital experiences
It was evident as researchers circulated through
the room with the activity ongoing that several
groups tagged texts in a linear manner, proceeding
through their tags sequentially: they tagged all of
one element, then read through the text tagging another, etc. As well, of the four groups who did not
manage to complete the activity before the end of
the workshop, three of the groups’ XML tags do not
‘end’ altogether, but in parts. This is interesting because it imposes another kind of temporal ordering
on a type of text already temporally ordered (narrative fiction): as the students read through text,
they read ‘for’ <action>, ‘for’ <narration>, etc.
Therefore, this reading practice, prior to its abstraction by a piece of software (such as ‘Plotvis’), is
already informed by another abstraction: a type of
efficient reading.
If sequential tagging does allow for greater accuracy for ease of effort, if it is an ‘efficiency enhancer’,
then it will be important to investigate in what ways
it is efficient. Multiple readings of a text seems intuitively to be inefficient, in terms of time, but possibly with the tradeoff of better tagging accuracy. Do
students consciously (or unconsciously) apply nesting rules, for example? That is, if a section were
tagged <narration> would students skip this section
when looking for text to tag <dialogue>? How intuitive are these rules (and what does this say about
conceptions of narrative fiction)? These are questions we will address in future work.
3 XML Tagging: Visualizing
Narrative
Fig. 1 General tagging schema for fiction with implicit
nesting
Following the theme of rule-making and
rule-breaking, and given a set of rules proposed by
the students, viz. the XML schema they selected, we
examine the space between practices proposed and
practices followed. As noted earlier, data collected
from the investigation show intra- and inter-group
variation. However, this variation is not simply
random or flawed. Although this tagging was inconsistent, it was only inconsistent in terms of its own
ad hoc rules—evaluated in another way, as a literary
critical activity, these errors fall into regularized
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though instructed they could add on to it if they
considered it insufficient, while Year 12 students
were asked to develop their own schema with special
consideration to the particular features of their
assigned story. Since there were not sufficient
computers for all, in this exercise tagging was
done using either the open-source XML editor
Serna (Syntext, 2010) or in an improvised paper
form using highlighters (with a colour representing
the contents of a tag). Four groups of Year 11 students chose to tag ‘Hills’, while three tagged ‘The
Trout’; six groups of Year 12 students tagged ‘Hills’,
and one tagged ‘The Trout’. There were fourteen
groups in all.
For the XML markup exercise, five elements were
introduced: three to identify narrative events
(<narration>, <dialogue>, and <action>) and two
to identify narrative objects (<character> and
<object>). And although this proposed schema
was flat, nearly every group subordinated
<action>, <character>, and <object> under <narration> or <dialogue> (Fig. 1), implicitly elevating
these elements. This was intriguing since it suggested students’ highest level concern was, essentially, ‘who is telling the story?’. We will explore
the narratological implications in the next section.
The subordinated elements suggest a structure
loosely corresponding with a general grammar comprised of subjects and predicates (e.g. a <character>
performs an <action> on/with an <object>).
D. Grue et al.
3.1 Reading, digitally
In his stylistic analysis of Hemingway’s ‘Hills Like
White Elephants’, Alex Link (2004) argues that repeating patterns of terms, lexical sets, and phrases
form the structure of the work’s focus: an argument
between a man and a woman over an un-named
thing, presumably an abortion. Central to this strategy of repetition is the use of the pronoun it. Link
categorizes the fifty-six instances of it in ‘Hills’ as:
ambient, where the it refers to a situation or general
ambience; anaphoric, where the it refers to a definite nounphrase which precedes its use; and situationally exophoric, where it refers to something
as yet unmentioned in the current context. What
is particularly prominent in terms of it in ‘Hills’,
Link argues, is the male character’s skilful deployment of exophoric-it: given this category’s ambiguous reference, this character manipulates it’s
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meaning to aid in his goals of persuasion. What is
interesting for our purposes, given that a range of
the saliency of it’s referentiality has been established
in the text, is to see if students respond to this saliency in their tagging behaviour. To see if students
are ‘reading’ the story, or merely ‘marking’ it, we
test to see if a pattern arises for how this term is
tagged.
Of the four groups who tagged ‘Hills’ with an
XML schema including an <object> element, all
used this element to tag it. However, this tag was
not applied to it universally between groups, nor
uniformly to all categories of it. Table 1 shows the
aggregated rate of it-tagging for all four groups,
broken down by the categories used by Link. To
Link’s three categories, we have added one more:
formulaic it e.g. ‘oh, cut it out’ and ‘you started
it’. If language formulas are non-compositional
and processed as chunks, we might find that the
items in such formulae are tagged differently than
those terms constitutive of phrases.
As expected, anaphoric-it was tagged most often
as <object>, exophoric-it less often, and least often
ambient-it. This was expected because the tagging
pattern of it as <object> seems to follow the gradient of the determinacy of the reference: though anaphora refers to a preceding noun, exophoric-it
refers ambiguously, and ambient-it to no nounphrase at all. In fact, of the four groups only one
group tagged ambient-it as <object> even once, and
though this group was by far the most rigorous in
their tagging (using the most number of elements of
all the groups) even they ‘missed’ one ambient-it.
This suggests that, for the most part, the groups
were reading rather than passively marking—responding to the semantics of the text rather than
to its orthography. Only one group exhibited a
strong fixation on orthographic form—the group
that tagged ambient-it as <object>—tending to tag
Table 1 Aggregate rate of ‘it’-tagging
Category of ‘it’
Present
Tagged
(%)
Anaphora
Ambient
Exophoric
Formulaic
22
18
36
4
20
6
23
2
91
33
64
50
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patterns. This is to say, it appears that these activities were not un-motivated.
In this light, rule-breaking reveals first, and most
basically, that when students tag texts they are in
fact reading them: as we will show, when students
tag Hemingway’s its in ‘Hills Like White Elephants’
they tend to tag as <object> those its that can be
shown to refer to a nounphrase, and less often those
its that have more ambiguous reference. In this way,
XML tagging is a digital reading practice, in which
students mediate between their experience and their
classification of the text. Second, this type of digital
reading is curious reading. Students’ proposed schemas, as well as their additions to the basic schema,
reveal a degree of expectation—an expectation that
is either confirmed, as features are found textually
realized, or faulted. Furthermore, when students
were asked to reflect on text, they did so through
institutional lenses. When students visualized text
through XML markup, they selected some features
that are shared with professional practices. Finally,
digital reading has a meta-expressive function in
that it lets us evaluate salient features in text and
provides a method for comparing texts. An analysis
of speech reporting verbs in ‘Hills’ and ‘The Trout’
shows a preference for tagging reporting verbs as
<action> in ‘Hills’, suggesting a difference in narrative strategy between the two texts.
Reading practices and digital experiences
3.2 Curiosity and its discontent
Expectations were also disappointed in how schemas were selected and how they were actually
used. Whereas the above it-tagging emphasized the
difference between a term and its pragmatic implication, in this section we will discuss the disjunction
between the experience of a text and its textual realization. Student-proposed schema elements enjoyed
varying levels of productivity—some were used
quite often, while others were used minimally or
not at all. For example, one schema proposed for
‘Trout’ contained the elements <dialogue>, <characters>, <notable events>, and <change in location>, though only the first two were used.
Another schema, for ‘Hills’, contained <questions>,
<imperatives>, and <possibility>, and though
<questions> and <imperatives> were used prolifically <possibility> was not marked once. It is worth
noting that Link (2004) also pays particular attention to questions and also opposes these to commands, writing that ‘The couple’s power
relationship also emerges in the prominence of
questions’ (p. 68).
Common to many elements proposed by the students is their relatively high level of abstraction, met
with their tenuous usefulness. A Year 11 group who
augmented their schema proposed to use—and did
use prolifically—a <contradictory remarks> element. In theory this might be a useful tag, but given
both the relative ambiguity of much of ‘Hills’’ dialogue and the necessary referentiality of a contradiction—what does the tagged statement contradict?—
its productivity is questionable since its use carries
with it so many assumptions. For example, without
understanding the students’ assumptions, it is unclear what is contradicted by the following: ‘I’ve
known lots of people <contradictory remarks>that
have done it</contradictory remarks>’. Furthermore, a Grade 12 group working with ‘Hills’ divided
the <action> element into <man’s action> and
<girl’s action>, but ended up only using the
<man’s action> element for speech reporting (e.g.
‘the man said’) and the <girl’s action> element
mostly for speech reporting, but also two other instances: ‘The girl stood up and walked to the end of
the station’, and ‘she saw the river through the
trees’. Speech reports are not often explicitly indicated in ‘Hills’, so this element was not used often,
and since this group’s schema also included <man’s
speech> and <girl’s speech> elements one wonders
why these other elements were necessary, or if these
students were expecting to find something else?
All of this is to say that in creating their schemas
and finding them variably applicable, students
appeared to propose one thing but actually do another. But, to re-invoke Bowker and Star’s (1990)
sentiments on categories, ‘Just because people do
not do what they say they will, does not mean
that they are doing nothing’ (p. 54): our subjects
read text and envisaged a schematic form to represent this reading experience, but found disjunctions
between these experiences and their textual realizations. In fact, it cannot be said that these experiences
are unsupported by the text—the above example of
questions/imperatives is one such example—but so
too would be something like ‘contradictory
remarks’. The slippery rhetoric of the man’s
speech in ‘Hills’ might be one feature engendering
a sense of contradiction, which is a focal point for
this group’s tag, and, indeed, such contradiction has
also been noted in published criticism: Rankin
(2005) writes, ‘As the man persists in opposing the
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their text in a find/replace type manner. For example, though this group tagged all but one instance
of have (e.g. ‘so have I’) as <action> they left
untagged all instances of have as a contraction
(e.g. ‘I’ve known lots of people that
<action>have</action> done it’).
To apply the guiding metaphor of this article, we
have inferred a rule from the students’ practice—it
is tagged as <object>—and described when it is followed and when it is broken. And though this inference is a methodological expediency, it is worth
reiterating that these groups only used the <object>
element to tag it and never another. This is not to
say the students were inflexible—not (always) tagging it as <object> indeed suggests a kind of flexibility—but indicates a certain expectation of how
meaning is expressed in text (it is an <object> or
it is nothing) that is not fulfilled. If it does often
refer to a never-mentioned abortion procedure
(which the students recognize, as indicated in classroom discussions) then why not tag it as <action>?
D. Grue et al.
3.3 Process as text analysis
The preceding sections focused primarily on the
past and present—what could be learned preprocess and in-process, rather than after the process,
from students’ interactions with text. This last section will turn back (forward) to examine high
school students’ tagged text as an end product in
order to evaluate the fiction with which they
worked.
In our basic schema given to Year 11 students,
five elements were suggested: <dialogue>, <narration>, <action>, <character>, and <object>.
The most consistently applied elements were <narration> and <dialogue>, likely because of their
orthographic and grammatical properties (i.e.
quotation marks and speech reporting expressions).
<character> was also tagged consistently, the primary variation being whether or not pronouns
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were also tagged by this element (often they were).
<object> enjoyed variation, and some of these have
been discussed. This last section will report on variation in how <action> was applied, specifically with
regards to speech and thought reporting verbs, and
suggest that the variable way in which this element
was applied between ‘Hills’ and ‘The Trout’ is motivated by the students’ responses to the texts’ unlike
narrative strategies.
Tagging for speech posed a problem for the students, and legitimately so: when reporting a character’s direct speech, ‘said’ obviously suggests, most
clearly, <dialogue>. However, ‘said’ is also an
action, a speech action—what we know as a
speech act, and therefore also elicits an <action>
tag. Seen in this light, such a problem presents a
markup opportunity. Narrators represent their
speech (and thoughts) all the time in many ways,
and parsing these ways can be a productive way into
a text. So choosing how to tag these elements, and
even simply reporting verbs like ‘said’, is implicitly
narratological.
In Fig. 2,5 tagged text from Hemingway, ‘said’ is
tagged as an action. In Fig. 3, from O’Faolain, other
verbs are tagged as actions but ‘said’ is not. What
could be considered inconsistent tagging between
groups might also reflect reactions to differences
in speech and thought representations between the
two stories. Very basically, in Hemingway speech is
an action: the abortion procedure is effected
through language. In ‘The Trout’ the thought representation is more monologic and passive.
In the first example, from ‘Hills’, students highlight every verb as <action>, while in the second
example from ‘The Trout’, ‘she accused’ is tagged
as an action but ‘said’ is not. In fact, outside of the
dialogue, the only verb not tagged is ‘said’. If speech
is an extension—and consequently an imposition—
of one consciousness onto another, here the action
‘said’ does not interrupt the orderly flow of the narrative, and does not warrant identification as an
action. The extension of consciousness denoted by
‘said’ in ‘The Trout’ is not an extension, but a seamless integration into the preceding discourse.
This difference between ‘Hills’ and ‘The Trout’ is
noticeable, but not exactly clear-cut in single instances. Only over the range of our corpus do we
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continuance of Jig’s maternity, he grossly oversimplifies the issue, even to the point of
self-contradiction, calling the abortion first ‘‘an awfully simple operation’’, and then ‘‘not really an operation at all’’’. (p. 235). In fact, though the group
tagged several potential false positives, the first they
do select as <contradictory remarks> are the preceding phrases quoted by Rankin.
In this tagging exercise, students experienced a
text, translated these experiences into XML tags,
and then tested these experiences with how they
might (or might not) be realized textually. In
other words, through the identification and application of conceptual tags they engaged critically
with text. This is not to say that students are
doing the same thing as literary critics, or that
their work rises to the same institutional standard.
But they are engaged in a similar practice: reading
and defining, essentially developing questions and
then asking these of the text—the fact that some
students are asking similar questions as their professional counterparts is promising. We would
argue that introducing DH methods at the senior
secondary level is important in introducing the next
generation of scholars to a variety of methods for
literary study.
Reading practices and digital experiences
Fig. 2 XML Excerpt ‘Hills’ [11–200, 11–260, 11–20]
Fig. 4 XML Excerpt ‘The Trout’ [11–190, 11–210,
11–220]
see these differences clearly; of the three groups who
tagged ‘The Trout’, two did not tag ‘said’ as an
action but one group did, in a manner akin to
groups tagging ‘Hills’: see Fig. 4.
Expanding the focus from the reporting verb ‘said’
to include other verbs representing speech and
thought, we find something of a gradient in the
way they have been tagged. Table 2 contains two
sets of verbs—representing speech and thought, respectively—in each short story, and the proportion
of those verbs tagged as <action>. As well, we note
which of these tags also incorporates the subject,
combining the ‘doer’ with the action.
These data suggest several things: first, that proportionately many more reporting verbs are indeed
tagged <action> in ‘Hills’, but also that the reporting verbs in ‘Trout’ are much more varied when
compared with ‘Hills’. Furthermore, reporting
verbs are never tagged with their subjects in
‘Hills’—they are experienced as independent elements in ‘Hills’, though their form is the same in both
texts. In ‘Trout’, however, reporting verbs are not
acute but integrated. The most independent,
<action> verbs in ‘The Trout’ tend to be rather
abrasive (‘boasted’, ‘mocked’, ‘squabbled’, and
‘tell’), and this observation might provide another
way to explore reader interactions with text: a tripartite inquiry, coordinating the reader’s experience
with text, a digital analysis, but also a reflection on
the process of analysis as analysis.
In this final, brief look at reporting expressions,
we have moved beyond an analysis of rule-making
and rule-breaking and into a comparative analysis—
a look at the different forms of tagging between
groups and between texts instead of simply within
them. But in this last step, we also find a gradience
of tagging strategies. Although in principle XML
tags are binary and hierarchical, in practice they
are not. At least, they pose problems to be resolved,
especially by amateur users. Narrative fiction tends
to resist these tags, but this does not mean they are
not applicable: in fact, if we look around these
‘messy areas’ of markup and sharp gradients, we
find areas of critical inquiry with historical precedence. Research on reporting expressions in literature has proliferated since Mikhail Bakhtin (1981)
and Valentin Vološinov’s (1973) work in the beginning of the twentieth century. And if such inquiries
Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2013
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Fig. 3 XML Excerpt ‘The Trout’ [11–80, 11–150]
D. Grue et al.
Table 2 Tagged speech and thought reporting verbs in ‘Hills’ and ‘The Trout’
Speech
‘Hills’
Said
Asked
‘Trout’
Said
Asking
Thought
Think
Thought
Thinking
Cried
Believe
discover old areas of inquiry, perhaps these can also
find new.
4 Conclusion
In the XML exercises, where students were tasked to
visualize narrative, their inconstancies marked the
discord between textual features and how they
might have been envisaged. This speaks to the
underdeterminedness of meaning in text—text
cannot convey meaning on its own—but also, and
concomitantly, those other determinations informing its meaning: in other words, the expectations
readers bring to text. Why could it only count as
an <object> (though also tagged variably), and not
<action>, as we have seen? Some of the most frustrating moments for students in the exit interviews
involved resolving these issues of form and meaning. Drawing upon the dialectic between close reading during tagging, and distanced reading through
tagging, we might encourage students to take steps
towards integrating these different faces of a critical
approach—a step on the road to making more salient students’ latent critical awareness.
As mentioned at the beginning of this article, the
theoretical framework of ‘rule making and rule
breaking’ has informed a large amount of scholarship, including theories of Utopia. Ernst Bloch and
Theodor Adorno (1989) discuss the late twentieth
246
Literary and Linguistic Computing, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2013
% Tagged
# With subject
26/36
6/6
2/8
2/9
0/2
2/3
2/2
1/4
2/2
1/1
1/1
1/1
1/1
1/1
1/1
72
100
25
22
0
67
100
25
100
100
100
100
100
100
100
0
0
0
2
0
1
2
1
2
1
1
0
0
0
0
century degradation of the term Utopia and Adorno
notes that with the realization of utopian dreams,
‘one sees oneself almost always as deceived’ (p. 2)—
‘insofar as these [Utopian] dreams have been realized, they all operate as though the best thing about
them had been forgotten—one is not happy about
them’ (p. 1). Adorno and Bloch’s lament is that in
the desire to realize—or perfect—a Utopian dream
the re-imagination of the totality this dream refigures is occluded by its realization.
Adorno and Bloch use the example of the dream
of flight, an appropriate contemporary allegory considering the difference today between flight’s
technological and poetic realizations. As a perfected
technology, flight is now air travel, or a banal mode
of transportation in which the maximum amount of
discomfort is compressed into the minimum time.
But flight’s poetic realization, like John Magee’s
(1941) ‘High Flight’, is not about the wonders of
the technology, but ‘slipping the surly bonds of
earth and touching the face of God’—a complete,
radical, transcendent dream that preserves the idea
of freedom through the abrogation of natural laws.
A utopian critique is therefore one that sets a vision
in the future that proposes a radical alteration of
our most basic assumptions of today.
The digital humanities must not forget ‘the best
thing about itself’. It cannot become ‘product’ oriented but must remain a viable ‘process’: a process
of pedagogy and research. The ‘process’ is its
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Accused
Suggested
Boasted
Mocked
Squabbled
Tell
Tagged/Total
Reading practices and digital experiences
utopian element, the ‘best thing about it’. The mismatch between schema and tagged-text reveal textual
relationships, and in this revealing, we might find
ways to afford students opportunities to realize
these relationships. In attempting to merely perfect
a practice, and in occluding its accidents and variances, one is bound to fail. The digital humanities
offer a Utopian critique—a refiguring of the normal
way of doing business in the academy—but this
might only succeed if we start breaking our own rules.
This work was first presented at the Digital
Humanities 2011 conference and benefited greatly
from the enlightening discussion that followed. In
addition, the authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and
the editors for their work on this issue.
Funding
This work was supported by the Social Sciences and
Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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1. The research team was comprised of professor Teresa
Dobson and graduate research assistants Monica
Brown and Laila Ferreira.
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Notes
2. To refer to participants, the following notation will be
used: Year (i.e. 11 or 12), followed by a randomly assigned two to three digit number.
3. In review, it was also mentioned that Karl Popper
develops a framework around the productivity of failure in his Conjectures and Refutations (1962). For
example, on mistakes: ‘by bringing out our mistakes
it makes us understand the difficulties of the problem
which we are trying to solve’ (p. vii). And although our
epistemological premises and aims differ, Popper’s
notion of (apparent) failure as productive provides
an interesting parallel to our method.
4. In Canada, curricula through secondary school is set
by the Province.
5. Most examples of XML markup in this article have
been transcribed from the pen-and-paper work or
computer tagging work done by our participants.