Narratives of material loss are often attributed to the process of digitising cultural heritage collections. Not being able to physically hold a literary artefact denies the reader an embodied understanding of the text made possible through tangible and contextual cues. What the artefact feels like—the dimensions, weight, volume, and paper quality—and where it is located—the institution, collection, shelf, or archival box—all play a role in the production of textual meaning. Thus, the argument stands that by removing these cues certain ways of knowing a text are diminished.
The process of digitisation, however, is not solely one of loss. Scholars working with digital texts are finding new ways to search, model, analyse, and rearrange written language, and in doing so are benefiting from the interpretive possibilities of textual mutability. While some scholars are taking advantage of digital materiality through computational text analysis, far less attention has been paid to the non-verbal materialities of a text, which also play a role in the production of meaning. To explore the potential of these non-verbal materialities, we take a digitised version of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick; or, The Whale and alter graphic features of the page such as line length, type size, leading, white space, and tracking. Through a critical design practice we show how altering these non-verbal elements can reveal textual qualities that are difficult to access by close reading, and, in doing so, create new, hybrid works that are part literary page, part information visualisation.
‘And, like the whale, once it is carved and rendered into its separate components, it is no longer the same creature it was when it was whole.’ (
Over the past two decades, the digitisation of cultural collections has generated vast numbers of textual surrogates. While initially understood to be place-holders for the original, recent discourse has begun to position digital textual surrogates as unique artefacts with distinct qualities and capacities. These artefacts are being reimagined as new, non-identical objects, with their own ‘ontological identity’, a process which challenges the conventional understanding of representations as mere copies and, furthermore, recognises that ‘for some purposes [the potential of these new forms] may exceed that of the originals’ (
Nonverbal elements ‘often pass without registration or remark’ (
In this next section, we explore the productive potential of an expanded understanding of materiality by
By employing this methodology, we begin to ask ‘how can making with a focus on the semantic potential of graphic materiality reveal new insights?’ or, more specifically, ‘what qualities of a text are we unable to apprehend through conventional practices of interpretation, such as close reading?’ To explore these questions, we take a digitised version of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel
Before introducing the notion of graphical deformance we will look at some historical precedents in literary studies. In this field the process of altering, disrupting, or re-organising a text in order to bring to the surface previously inaccessible or obscured qualities of a work is called ‘deformance’. Deformance describes an intervention into a text in order to bring attention to textual qualities eluded by conventional criticism. As Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels (
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
And, nothing himself, beholds
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
‘The Snow Man’ (1921) by Wallace Stevens.
Those of you familiar with the Paris-based experimental collective
Applying the n + 7 formula to ‘The Snow Man’ by Wallace Stevens.
What is critical to understand about these practices of textual deformation is that the purpose is not to ascribe new meaning to a text—it is not, in the first instance, to assist with the act of interpretation. Nor, writes Stephen Ramsay (
Digital technologies have made deformance a more common practice. The transformation of print artefacts into machine readable forms, coupled with computational text analysis tools that can read them, allows text to be treated as infinitely malleable and mutable. This has enabled scholars to explore sources in ways that were previously difficult, if not impossible. Sample (
We are more interested, however, in practices of deformance that attend to the graphical, not linguistic, features of a text—the oft-forgotten ‘architectures of a page’ which are intrinsic to the interpretation of texts (
The transformation of these graphical features, with the specific intent of revealing qualities of textual artefacts, is familiar territory to a handful of design practitioners. Through visual means, designers Stefanie Posavec (
To explore the potential of graphical deformance as a critical strategy and to better understand how the formal elements of a page might shape the structure of a text, we remake all, or parts of, Herman Melville’s 1851 US edition of
The aim of these experiments is to show how a focus on graphic materiality can operate as a critical approach to exploring a text. As we have discussed, literary scholars have largely ignored graphic materiality when apprehending a text. However, designers, with their epistemological understanding of the role of the visual in signification, are well placed to do this.
One of our first experiments,
In
Typesetting Chapter 122 ‘Midnight Aloft – Thunder and Lightning’ as a double page spread.
Typesetting Chapter 6 ‘The Street’ as a double page spread.
Typesetting Chapter 54 ‘The Town Ho’s Story’ as a double page spread.
One of the consequences of typesetting a book so that each chapter fills a double-page spread is that we end up with a novel of unusually large dimensions (410mm × 265mm). Typically, the format of the book is decided by the publisher, leaving the designer to choose the typeface, size, and leading (as well all the other paratextual elements) according to reading conventions. The length of the novel, or the number of pages, is a consequence of these typesetting choices and the word count. However, in
While this process of altering the graphical elements of a text—taking the shorter chapters and expanding them to fit across two pages while simultaneously compressing the longer chapters—may not tell us anything specific about the plot or the content of the novel, it does draw our attention to the book’s overall structure. What is revealed through graphical deformance is the way Melville changes the pace of his text by dramatically shifting chapter lengths. This is illustrated by flipping through the pages, but also by the thumbnail overview at the end of our publication (Figure
Thumbnails of chapters 91–120.
The second act of graphic deformance also attends to Melville’s writing style, but instead of focussing on the length of his chapters, we create a visual strategy that reveals the variation in sentence length throughout the novel. By varying the tracking—the space between the letters—in relation to the number of words in each sentence we can begin to see the rhythms or patterns in Melville’s prose. Any sentence with less than the average word count (21.32 words per sentence) has incrementally reduced tracking (e.g. a 7–9 word sentence would have –90 tracking), and, conversely, any sentence longer than average has incrementally reduced tracking (e.g. a 124–26 word sentence would have 310 tracking). We decided to tighten tracking for short sentences and expand tracking for long sentences in order to emphasise and reinforce the effect of different sentence structures. Short sentences grab the reader’s attention. They are quick and dynamic, creating drama and intensity, and are often used to describe action. Longer sentences slow the pace of the narrative, can be reflective or rambling, and provide space for rich description or the building of suspense. It is, however, the combination of lengths that gives these varying sentences their potency.
This process of graphic deformance, specifically the visual tightening of short sentences, quickly reveals a characteristic of Melville’s writing: concise opening lines. Leafing through the newly tracked pages shows tightly clustered letters at the beginning of many chapters and paragraphs. Melville (
Using tracking and sentence length as a graphic strategy on Chapter 1 ‘Loomings’.
Using tracking and sentence length as a graphic strategy on Chapter 132 ‘The Symphony’, a close up view.
Revealed through this graphic strategy is Melville’s extraordinary range of sentence lengths, from one-word sentences to the seemingly endless 471-word sentence in Chapter 42 (‘The Whiteness of the Whale’). In this chapter Ishmael accounts for his fear of whiteness: ‘It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me’ (159). He begins with a discussion of virtues commonly associated with the colour white, purity and even holiness, before moving into more philosophical terrain, where white is associated with ghostliness, absence, a void, the unknown. A 21-word sentence opens the chapter (tracked at –50), followed by sentences of 64, 13, 27, and 471 words (tracked at 100, –70, –30, and 1450, respectively) (Figure
Using tracking and sentence length as a graphic strategy on Chapter 42 ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’.
An example of Melville using long sentences in Chapter 42.
An example of the variation in tracking and sentence length in Chapter 42 continued.
The pull of justified type creates these perpendicular lines of code that seem to promise readability if read from top to bottom, not left to right. This promise, however, is quickly broken by a string of nearly-words: ‘thorb’, ‘peoct’, ‘maan’, ‘satal’, ‘dosab’ (Figure
Page 165 of Chapter 42 ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’.
And while much is made of Melville’s innovative and unorthodox approach to novel writing, Chapter 135 (‘The Chase – Third Day’) illustrates how conventional his sentence structures can be. In this, the final chapter (before the epilogue) and day three of the battle with the whale, it becomes apparent that only death will release Captain Ahab from his obsession. His crew and the
This common writing strategy of short sentences to describe dramatic action and create urgency, and long sentences to build suspense and tension, is made visually apparent through graphic deformance. Throughout this chapter we see pages of text rendered barely legible through the too-tight tracking of staccato sentences (Figure
“Is my journey’s end coming? My legs feel faint; like his who has footed it all day. Feel thy heart,—beats it yet?—Stir thyself, Starbuck!—stave it off—move, move! speak aloud!—Mast-head there! See ye my boy’s hand on the hill?—Crazed;—aloft there!—keep thy keenest eye upon the boats:—mark well the whale!—Ho! again!—drive off that hawk! see! he pecks—he tears the vane”—pointing to the red flag flying at the main-truck— “Ha! he soars away with it!—Where’s the old man now? sees’t thou that sight, oh Ahab!—shudder, shudder!” (422)
An example of Melville using short sentences for effect in Chapter 135 ‘The Chase’.
This is followed by a long sentence, spread wide, shifting the narrative pace and providing a break in the action (Figure
The boats had not gone very far, when by a signal from the mast-heads—a downward pointed arm, Ahab knew that the whale had sounded; but intending to be near him at the next rising, he held on his way a little sideways from the vessel; the becharmed crew maintaining the profoundest silence, as the head-beat waves hammered and hammered against the opposing bow. (422)
This long sentence also creates an opportunity to build tension before the next round of action which follows (Figure
“Drive, drive in your nails, oh ye waves! to their uttermost heads drive them in! ye but strike a thing without a lid; and no coffin and no hearse can be mine:—and hemp only can kill me! Ha! ha!” (422)
This pattern of short-long-short, visually rendered by compacted line lengths and loose, drawn-out sentences, continues until the end, when Melville changes the pace to match the slow sinking of the
A pattern of short-long-short sentence lengths visualised in the penultimate paragraph of Chapter 135.
What the changes in the length of chapters or sentences means from a literary perspective is not for designers to speculate on. However, what we do know, as designers, is that meaning is graphically constituted, and therefore that making and remaking a text becomes a productive and generative research method through which to critically apprehend texts.
In this next deformance experiment, we first identify and then graphically isolate the speech in Melville’s text. By speech, we refer to conversations between two or more characters, as well as soliloquies and monologues. In
To isolate the speech on the page, we erase the non-speech text, leaving the area blank. Erasure, or the removal of text, has long been an important strategy in art and design practice.
an unprinted area … is not a given, inert or neutral space, but an espace, or field, in which forces among mutually constitutive elements make themselves available to be read … White space is thus visually inflected, given a tonal value through relations rather than according to some intrinsic property.
This strategy of graphically omitting the non-speech passages enables us to read the speech as it occurs in the book, on each page, chapter by chapter.
The most immediate effect of this graphic deformation is a sense of the volume of speech Melville creates, and where and when it occurs in the novel. For instance, there are chapters where Melville uses speech intensively, such as Chapters 37, 38, and 39 (‘Sunset’, ‘Dusk’, and ‘First Night Watch’) (Figures
Visually isolating Melville’s use of speech in Chapter 37 ‘The Sunset’.
Visually isolating Melville’s use of speech in Chapters 37, 38 and 39 (‘Sunset’, ‘Dusk’, and ‘First Night-Watch’).
Visually isolating Melville’s intense use of speech in Chapters 39 and 40 (‘First Night-Watch’ and ‘Midnight-Forecastle’) continued.
Here the reader encounters a range of lengthy soliloquies (internal monologues) as the book shifts from the ‘colloquial speech of Nantucket to the lingua franca of the sea itself ‘(
Chapter 92 ‘Ambergris’ contains little or no speech.
Chapter 93 ‘The Castaway’ contains little or no speech.
Chapter 93 ‘The Castaway’ using speech sparingly.
The first three pages of Chapter 94 ‘A Squeeze of the Hand’ uses no speech at all.
An example of Melville using no speech in his text.
Graphic evidence of Melville using speech sparingly in Chapter 95 ‘The Cassock’.
Graphic evidence of Melville using speech sparingly in Chapter 96 ‘The Try-Works’.
There are also long periods in the novel where there is no speech at all, only an endless sea of white, such as Chapter 32 (‘Cetology’), which is 12 pages long. Here Melville categorises species of the whale as if he were cataloguing his library of folios.
Long periods of prose are broken up by sightings of the whale.
Long periods of prose are broken by sightings of the whale.
While the speech first appears inconsistent, this process of graphic deformance reveals how Melville’s use of speech signifies the changing geographic stages of the
By viewing the chapters as thumbnails, graphic deformance enables us to see Melville’s arrhythmical use of speech, which is nonetheless strategic in the way it functions to drive narrative, and to mark the shifting geographic and psychological landscapes. This distant view reveals the changing dynamic between action and repose, described by Middleton (
Isolating the speech also enables intimate perspectives of the characters when viewed at the level of a single page. By removing the non-spoken text, the voice of an individual character is amplified. The detailed context within which the characters appear is silenced, enabling us to see their eccentricities and habits. Figure
An exchange between two characters Flask and Stubb in Chapter 50 ‘Ahab’s Boat and Crew. Fedallah’.
Graphic deformance not only indicates the concentration of speech, but also the type: for example, dialogue or monologue. A monologue such as the one found in Chapter 9, ‘The Sermon’ (Figure
An examples of a monologue in Chapter 9 ‘The Sermon’.
Dialogue expressed as broken line lengths and white space on page 77.
By enabling a distant view of the novel, one which encompasses all of the chapters, as well as a close reading of a single page, the semantic potential of graphic materiality is made available for visual processing, and thus provides an alternate possibility for critically appraising a text.
The final experiment differs considerably from the three previous examples. It is simultaneously a linguistic and graphical deformance. We start by taking the entire novel
A close-up of
Graphically, it is typeset like a dictionary, a format that is highly regulated in terms of its structure, but it operates like a concordance. This process of expanding the text (taking an unusually long novel of 212,000+ words and making it even longer, over 7 million words) can be understood as linguistic deformation. While the text has not been reduced, it has been significantly altered, no longer resembling the narrative that Melville initially constructed.
At first glance this example may seem to be a relatively conventional piece of design work, reflecting the typographic practices of a reference text. However, this example also exhibits high levels of graphic deformation if we are to consider its origin as a novel. By transforming a page of prose into two columns, and introducing indentation, bold, and italicised text, as well the paratextual elements of a dictionary, we have transformed the text from one genre to another. Although it remains a recognisable archetype, it has been significantly altered.
This process of graphically altering the text, or defamiliarizing the novel, draws attention to individual lexical units. For example, we become aware of how many times Melville uses the word ‘whale’ (1120 times), and that he uses the word ‘giraffe’ (unsurprisingly) only once. There are also words in this dictionary that at the time were neologisms created by the author (for example, a curio—an unusual or odd piece of art or bric-a-brac). Second, these chronological entries also provide the reader with a history of usage in
A close-up of the entry ‘day’ as seen in the Dictionary.
Arguably different in approach to our previous experiments, this is still an act of graphic deformance, as the qualities of a page are altered so as to change the text’s interpretative framework—from novel to dictionary—therefore allowing us to encounter the text anew. Here the purpose of the work is not to ascribe new meaning to a text but to ‘reconstitute the work’s aesthetic form, as if a disordering of one’s senses of the work would make us dwellers in possibility’ (
Through these experiments, we demonstrate how the structural and formal aspects of Melville’s writing can be brought to the surface through the alteration of graphical elements of a page, thereby asserting the often-neglected role of graphic materiality as a form of critique. These methods of graphical deformance are not intended to be used in isolation or to replace existing tools of literary criticism, whether they are close reading or computational text analysis. Nor are they exhaustive—there are many other graphic and spatial qualities to explore. Rather, they are designed to show how a digitised text can be productively manipulated to create alternate ways of critiquing a text graphically. In this project, which Klein (
Not every digital humanist will become a designer, but every good digital humanist has to be able to “read” and appreciate that which design has to offer, to build the shared vocabulary and mutual respect that can lead to fruitful collaborations.
While we primarily position our experiments as graphic deformance, they can equally be understood as forms of information visualisation. Through methods of visual representation (shifting type size, tracking, and isolation) we reveal patterns within textual data. These newly created pages operate as both quantitative and qualitative forms of inquiry. However, in this paper, what we have begun to show is that the distinction between qualitative and quantitative methods is too simplistic, and that many of the problems with quantification in humanities research lie not in what aggregation can tell us, but rather in the visual languages used to present these understandings, which borrow heavily from scientific positivism, and thus embody values that are in opposition to core humanist values such as subjectivity, partiality, and uncertainty (
Drawing on the domain expertise of visual communication design, we are proposing an alternate way of critiquing a text, one that takes into account the importance of graphical materiality and therefore embraces the inherent epistemological value of the visual (
We are not assuming that meaning lies exclusively within the material, and is therefore accessible through a rich description of physical properties, which would be to fall into the trap of literal materiality (
Some recent notable exceptions include Johanna Drucker (
For the poem, see
For an excellent account of the typographic conventions of the novel and their disruption, see Zoe Sadokierski (
This includes
As long as the inner margins don’t make the text disappear into the gutter.
A recent special issue of
Seventeen of the book’s 135 chapters focus on whale anatomy or behaviour. These chapters include ‘The Sperm Whale’s Head – Contrasted View’ and ‘The Right Whale’s Head – Contrasted View’. Phillip Hoare (
Inspired by Stefan Ramsay’s (
Thanks to Gemma Warriner who co-designed ‘One Chapter, Two Pages’ and the ‘Moby-Dick Dictionary’. Thanks also to Kristelle de Frietas, design research assistant for the tracking and speech experiments.
The authors have no competing interests to declare.