Large-scale digitization appears to put literary collections at one’s fingertips, but, as some critics warn, the books themselves are increasingly out of reach as university libraries continue to shift from being ‘physical repositories’ to becoming ‘access portals’ to digitized materials (Stauffer, 2012: 336). People who are drawn to print books often find that digital surrogates ‘lack feeling’ (Piper, 2012: 15), and scholars of book and media history help us recognize how digitization imperils the historical information embedded in, and readerly experiences elicited by, the materiality of print artifacts (e.g. Brake, Littau). This is due in large part to the necessary shift in materiality from print to digital media and the limitations imposed by common modes of digital display. And yet, as many critics acknowledge, ‘digitization takes place in an economy of loss and gain’ (Mussell, 2016: 25, original italics), and part of the promise of the digital humanities is that ‘digital media can be used fruitfully to redirect and reinvigorate humanistic inquiry’ (Hayles, 2012: 18) and our engagement with literary collections. In sum, while we may lose access to meaningful physical features (size, weight, paper texture, bindings, etc.) that contain valuable historical traces of print technologies, markets, and readerly interactions (Stauffer, 2012), we gain opportunities for large-scale analyses of corpora and for alternative modes of display and interactive play.

This paper is based on the premise that changing how we physically interact with texts also changes how we sense and make sense of them. Our considerations are based on our own attempts to digitally represent a print-based science fiction collection in ways that engage meaningfully with its unique aesthetic and material artifacts. We start by describing this collection’s unique artifacts, our representation approaches, and the inherent challenges we encountered. We then outline theoretical grounds to promote more responsible remediation of print materials that remains sensitive to both the specificity of print artifacts as historical witnesses and the transformative potential of digital media to help us engage with historical materials in new ways. Drawing insights from aesthetic theory, book history, reception studies, literary studies, information visualization, human computer interaction (HCI), and digital arts, we propose possible ways to experiment with digital on-screen and tangible representations of print collections that explicitly aim to translate — not replicate — sensory and sense-making experiences inherent in interacting with print collections. We hope that these considerations will fuel new, provocative modes of digitally displaying and analyzing print collections and archives in all their material, historical, and semantic complexity.

The Gibson Anthologies of Speculative Fiction are exceptional in many ways and as such function as a particularly interesting test case for thinking about the complexity of print artifacts. Arguably, the more unusual the print object, the more its ‘total form’ (McKenzie, 2002: 307), including binding, page size, texture, and weight, matters, and therefore the more is potentially lost when it is digitized. Part of the University of Calgary’s Special Collections, these 888 booklets were hand-crafted by Canadian collector, science fiction (SF) fan and artist, Bob Gibson (1908–2001). Gibson harvested more than 13,000 little-known specimens of speculative writing and illustration from 570 different popular magazines published between 1844 and 1992. He then bound these materials himself into unique booklets of different sizes and colors, using paper scraps and other household materials for the covers and bindings (see Figure 1). He provided a title for each of these anthologies (based on their source magazine), illustrated many of their covers, and provided a table of contents, handwritten with bibliographic details for each item. The table of contents also includes symbols through which Gibson rated the ‘SF content’ of the items he collected. We have identified approximately 78 symbols, however Gibson left no key to their exact meaning, even if he did sprinkle his anthologies with marginalia that provide some clues about his approach to classification.

To help us make sense of this unusual collection and its vast potential, we began by combining archival and exploratory visualization methods in an intertwined way (Forlini et al., 2016; Hinrichs et al., 2016; Hinrichs et al., 2018). Working with a subset of 50 digitized anthologies, we produced detailed metadata (including titles, date and place of publication, author name and gender, keywords, and abstracts) from reading more than 1,500 individual items in Special Collections. In parallel, we developed the Speculative W@nderverse which provides different perspectives on the Gibson anthologies and this underlying metadata through an interlinked visualization (see Figure 2). The W@nderverse visualization consists of four interactive and interlinked visual views that showcase the topics present in the SF items through keyword motifs and also in relation to the Gibson symbols, the temporal distribution of SF items, and the large variety of titles and authors included in the anthologies (for more details about the visualization see Hinrichs et al., 2016). The W@nderverse thus offers multiple points of entry into the Gibson Anthologies. People may scroll through story titles and access abstracts, or they may select SF items based on a particular range of years by manipulating the timeline. Alternatively, people may browse the keywords through the tag cloud and/or the radial tree diagram, which offers greater insight into the granularity of our extensive keyword system, or they may focus on Gibson’s symbols (at the center of the radial tree diagram) whose meaning is (even to us) largely unknown. Additional filters at the top of the visualization help balance exploratory with more targeted content searches.

This interactive visualization was produced through an iterative design process informed by our archival work and feedback from different audiences (general public readers and SF fans as well as humanities and visualization scholars), and it allowed us to interrogate a subset of the Gibson Anthologies in an exploratory fashion and to identify large-scale patterns that were difficult or impossible to see without computational assistance. This intertwined process of visualizing the Gibson anthologies as a collection combined with archival work enabled us to: 1) decipher several of Gibson’s SF content symbols providing insight into his own categorization of SF works; 2) identify numerous writers not included in authoritative bibliographies of the genre; and 3) learn of a range of Victorian periodicals not previously suspected of contributing to the development of SF (see Forlini et al., 2016; Hinrichs et al., 2016).

The Speculative W@nderverse can be considered a milestone in our process, but we do not think of it as a final result, in part because we approach visualization as a speculative and critical intellectual process. We have referred to this process as ‘building visualization sandcastles’ (Hinrichs et al., 2018), a method of research thinking through visualization and a variation of ‘thinking-through-practice’ (Burdick et al. 2012: 13). We consider the W@nderverse a product of our early explorations of the Gibson anthologies. It is a visualization sandcastle that has, through its very limitations, motivated our theoretical explorations of ways to embrace the unique aesthetic and material characteristics of print collections while translating them into digital form. The W@nderverse emphasizes the content-related metadata of the Gibson anthologies, but it only hints at the qualities of this collection of unique print artifacts. While the item list (see Figure 2, on the right of the interface) provides a glimpse of the anthology covers, this does not effectively convey what the Gibson anthologies may look and feel like (e.g., their size, weight, and paper material) neither does it allow the navigation of the collection based on aesthetic or material features.

This neglect did not remain unnoticed. The academic scholars, general interest readers, and SF fans to whom we presented the Speculative W@nderverse at different events were fascinated by the visualization and the unique collection it represents, and visibly engaged in the exploration of anthologies and SF items. However, they frequently commented on the striking visual and material aesthetics of the anthologies (‘My favourite part is the cover snippets—they are beautiful & have character’), all the while pointing out the lack of presence of these very characteristics in the W@nderverse. For example, one participant suggested the need to present ‘some alternate representation of the anthologies as artifacts. I think it is important that this is still visualized, as Gibson created these [the anthology covers] as a way to understand the content’. These critical discussions of the W@nderverse with different potential audiences motivated us to consider how best to translate print collections into digital media in ways that are not only driven by their content but also their aesthetic and material characteristics. We realized that the process of remediating cultural artifacts into digital environments must be informed by research (and researchers) from a wide variety of fields, including humanities-based areas (e.g., book history, literary studies, and critical theory), library and information sciences, and the cognitive and design-oriented sciences (e.g., psychology and human computer interaction and visualization). The goal is to translate (critically and creatively) embodied experiences with physical print objects into digital environments, recognizing the strengths and limitations of each medium, their associated perceptual habits, and their entanglement in larger media ecosystems (Piper, 2012; Hayles, 2012). In the following we present these considerations that are the result of our review of a broad spectrum of perspectives from the humanities, the sciences, and design. We introduce these considerations as a theoretical foundation to drive design innovation, but also to provide a critical perspective on current approaches to digitization and the design of interfaces for cultural collections.

Unusual collections such as the Gibson anthologies and other ‘mixed material items … pose special cataloguing, access and interpretive challenges for archivists and researchers alike’ (Zboray & Zboray, 2009: 101), but they also offer unique opportunities for pushing the boundaries of digitization and digital display precisely because they do not easily fit pre-existing categories. These are what Walter Benjamin referred to as ‘booklike creations from fringe areas’ (1970: 66), and more recently, what Zboray and Zborary call ‘whatchamacallits’ (2009: 101). While we do not believe in a one-size-fits-all approach, we do believe that thinking through challenging test cases, such as the Gibson Anthologies (hand-crafted, fanzine-like, scrapbook-like folk art booklets), can inform the digital representation of other print artifacts. Here, we briefly present some of our own speculations based on our work with the Gibson Anthologies.

We begin with a consideration of what becomes possible when we integrate representations of paper texture in digital displays of digitized print collections. As mentioned above, Gibson’s hand-crafted booklets are made up of speculative fiction stories and illustrations harvested from a wide-range of periodicals originally published between 1844 and 1992. Because Gibson harvested these items directly from periodicals before reassembling and rebinding them into handmade booklets, the anthologies not only contain thousands of little-known works of SF, they also contain physical traces of the history of periodical publishing and the involvement of ‘pulps’ (cheap pulp paper magazines) and ‘slicks’ (more expensive glossy magazines) in shaping the evolution of SF. In particular, the earliest works (1844–1930) offer unprecedented insight into the literary and publishing experiments that first helped establish the SF genre and paved the way for the emergence of specialized SF pulp magazines in the 1930s.

Notably, the earliest periodicals harvested by Gibson are increasingly available only in digital forms that do not preserve information about paper type and size and are viewable primarily through interfaces that promote indiscriminate mining of verbal content. Integrating the representation of paper types into digital displays has the potential to accentuate the significance of the anthologies beyond their literary content, highlighting also the history embedded in the very stuff of their pages. Standard digitization does not preserve this information, but this does not mean that digitization cannot help accentuate it.

Bibliographers have long employed raking light as a way of examining and distinguishing paper types (Gaskell, 1972: 227) and the same method has been employed to accentuate surface texture of paintings and other kinds of artifacts, including, for example, photographic paper (see Johnson et al., 2014). Close-up raking light imaging has the added benefit of not requiring any other additional equipment than is routinely employed in digitization. Another approach to be considered would be employing microscopic imaging in raking light (such as was used, for example, in a study of ‘foxing’ or the ‘small, roundish spot stains of reddish or yellowish brown colour’ in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century drawings (Manso et al., 2009: 2029)) to accentuate texture even further, though this does involve more specialized equipment. Using close-up raking light imaging we have started to explore how to showcase visually the tactile differences between paper types (see Figure 4 for examples).

These extreme close-ups of paper material under raking light accentuate texture, and although they showcase detail not immediately apparent to the unassisted eye, they evoke a synesthetic sense of the relative ‘feel’ of papers in the collection. The images themselves can augment qualitative and quantitative metadata about paper types. In the absence of sufficiently granular standardized vocabulary for nineteenth-century machine-made papers (Elmore, 2016), this type of imagery could facilitate a tailored qualitative classification of paper material which, in turn, could be supplemented with quantitative methods to computationally distinguish between the relative graininess of paper samples at a large scale (as, for example, through wavelet-based multi-resolution analyses for texture discrimination (Laine and Fan, 1993)).

Such seemingly innocuous details as paper texture constitute physical evidence of evolving paper-making and publishing practices that necessarily impacted the development of the SF genre. While some will find information about paper interesting in its own right, it also implies different kinds of content, contributing authors, and audiences. A visualization that clusters stories according to paper types provides information about the context in which these stories were published, with grainier paper more often associated with cheaper weekly periodicals aimed at broader audiences and finer paper more often associated with more expensive monthly periodicals usually aimed at a supposedly more discerning readership. The distinction may also suggest what kind of authors might be writing for each type of paper, and may even provide insight into whether upper and lower market publications showed any preference for (or bias against) publishing men or women writers.

However, the display of raw paper material would also indicate that there is no simple and easy division to be made solely based on paper type, since Victorian periodicals were often published in a variety of forms at a variety of price points aimed at different audiences (including bound book-like in semi-annual or annual compilations printed on better paper and intended as more permanent parts of a personal library for those who could afford them). This range of paper types (and their associated price points) is also significant as it highlights the diversity of forms of Victorian periodicals — a diversity that is erased in current digital displays of periodicals (Mussell, 2016). Making visible raw paper material may also help alert readers to the fact that the appearance of paper will also bear the marks of environmental exposure and age (through things like ‘foxing’ for example).

Once combined with representations of literary content (from metadata manually derived through archival and curatorial work, or computationally derived through text analysis), these visual representations of paper ‘feel’ can invite readers to explore the broader significance of the Gibson anthologies. By analyzing the content of these early SF stories by paper type, we can begin to tell a more ‘textured’ history of how literary innovation was tied to changes in paper-making and periodical publishing. Such a combined analysis of paper type and content on a large scale offers a new approach to large-scale literary history (something we could not feasibly do with print artifacts alone).

Although focused on synesthetic connections between visual and tactile cues, we could imagine involving alternate sensory modalities. For example, we could sonify paper types (‘pulps’ and ‘slicks’) or augment their texture to be explored using haptic interfaces (for example, as demonstrated in the haptic puck introduced by Marquardt et al., 2009, a haptic device to make visual features in digital images presented on large horizontal displays tactile and, hence, more palpable).

Similar imaging of the Gibson covers could help give a ‘feel’ of the diversity of paper that makes up individual anthology covers and that simultaneously suggest the crafted, homemade nature of the Gibson archive. Gibson was not a collector of expensive first editions; his anthologies gather ephemera largely neglected in histories of the genre. His homemade archive is appropriately made of household papers, signaling his work as that of a bricoleur (tinkerer or crafty handyman) who makes do with the materials at hand, including old wrapping paper, paper bags, used envelopes (still bearing traces of an address or stamp), waybills, and repurposed covers of old IBM manuals or even accounting papers (see Figure 5 for examples). The Gibson anthologies thus showcase what he has done not only with the materials he harvested from periodicals but also materials sometimes sourced and repurposed from other kinds of print artifacts. This is one of the many ways we do things with print artifacts other than (or in addition to) reading them as suggested earlier.

To highlight the crafted nature of the anthologies is to attempt to use the digital medium against the grain, so to speak. The anthologies are the work of one’s hands, and as Piper notes ‘there is a profound sense of person that comes through the work of one’s hands that cannot be fully replicated digitally’ (2012: 81). However, if we move away from attempting to ‘replicate’ digitally, we could better imagine ways to evoke or elicit different but nonetheless meaningful related experiences.

For example, in the case of the hand-crafted Gibson anthologies, we could invite readers to engage in the kind of performative archiving that Gibson practiced through the work of his hands, and we could do this both on screen and through data physicalization. Tapping into the malleability and versatility of the digital medium we could invite readers to engage with the crafted nature of the anthologies by permitting the disassembling and reassembling of collected pages according to different variables (dates of publication, authors, literary or formal features, etc.). This would accentuate the scrapbook-like nature of the anthologies and the practice of scrapbooking itself as a form of meaning-making through print artifacts that has migrated into the digital realm through ‘the “cut and paste” terminology used by computer programs and applications’ (Grubar Garvey, 2012: 21). At the same time, such digital remaking of the anthologies offers what the print anthologies enclosed in Special Collections do not — an opportunity to take these compilations apart and reassemble them in new ways to test out different ways of making sense of what they are and what they contain. Here we could tap into the fact that what the Gibson anthologies are has a lot to do with what they do. They were for Gibson a means of preserving and organizing the detritus of print culture (the many forgotten works that nonetheless fundamentally helped shape the emergence of SF). Allowing others to remake Gibson’s anthologies, we can explore what readers and researchers can do with them. We can certainly learn about Gibson’s own handiwork and from his categorizations, but in addition to this, we could also emphasize the role of new readers in making and remaking histories of a living genre.

Moving beyond on-screen representations, we could explore digitally-enhanced data physicalization as a means to translate information one gets from handling the anthologies and noting their scrapbook-like nature. This means understanding the ways Gibson himself implicitly re-thought the structure of the book and the page as he deconstructed existing periodicals and, by cutting, pasting, and binding, reconstructed from their individual pages anthologies of his own making. As others have also suggested, we believe that translating print into a digital environment should involve a rethinking of the formal structure of the page and the physical structure of the codex book to take advantage of the fluidity and malleability of the digital medium (Piper, 2012). We could enable the compilation of Gibson items into new reader-driven anthologies represented by digitally enhanced physical tokens that could visually and/or physically reflect on their source anthologies and, when placed on a display, allow reading of the items. One could even explore different fabrication methods that would take the Gibson anthologies’ material aspects and/or readerly habits and practices as input. This latter reader-driven example involves understanding both print and digital objects as fundamentally social, and the act of embodied reading as a generative act. Gibson’s reading (with scissors and glue), much like ours (with different digital tools such as visualization, raked light imaging, and text analysis), is also a form of making and sharing reading materials and experiences.

Offering multiple possible views, sensory experiences and analogies, and modes of interactions becomes a way of accentuating the richness of the material print collection, and, at the same time, of inviting numerous kinds of readers with different interests and inclinations to engage with it.

With the passing of the age of print, we have become increasingly aware of ‘the assumptions, presuppositions, and practices associated with it’ (Hayles, 2012: 2), and, by contrast, we glimpse the apparent devaluation of materiality that appears to haunt digital culture (Hayles, 1999). It has become a critical commonplace that print and digital media are being defamiliarized for us by their very co-existence in seeming transition. Ongoing mass-digitization efforts underline the multivalent value of print artifacts and the need for traditional collections of print artifacts that can ‘tell us things no image can’ (Grafton, 2009: 311). However, these same digitization efforts also continue to hold the seductive promises of democratizing access to cultural heritage and of the ‘wonders’ that might be revealed by opening up large corpora to computationally assisted large-scale analyses (Stauffer, 2012: 341). Taking on the challenge of remaking collections means taking on a simultaneously technological and aesthetic challenge with profound social, scholarly, and cultural implications. The speculative possibilities we present through the example of the Gibson Anthologies are not meant to be prescriptive but rather suggestive of alternative approaches to this challenge. If, as some theorists suggest, aesthetic experiences are those which arrest our attention, interrupt perceptual automatisms, and provoke us to feel and think differently and often more critically, then aesthetic considerations offer particularly fruitful opportunities for reinvigorating our engagements with digitized print collections. Based on our own evolving cross-disciplinary speculative practices, we outline in conclusion a set of more generalizable practical possibilities:

Data Misgivings: Data (etymologically speaking) means that which is ‘given’, but data is not without its misgivings. It is also necessarily about the givens we choose to attend to, how we choose to attend to and measure them, and how we endeavor to make them perceptible and understandable to others. All of these critical steps involve various kinds of decisions and interpretations that should remain open to critical deliberation and debate. When it comes to digitized print collections, metadata collection must be informed by the specific historical and cultural context of the collection and with uniquely tailored interface design/visualization in mind. We should explore ways of moving beyond the descriptive and start to develop standard alongside free-form vocabularies that can be more specific to unique artifacts and their visual, material, and performative aspects.

Opening Editions: As part of the efforts toward open access to cultural materials and knowledge, we might also consider opening editions of works to ongoing curation. The mutability and accessibility of digital media is here brought to transform the notion of the scholarly edition of any one work or set of works. Researchers, students, citizen scholars, and unexpected readers can contribute new metadata, in a layered, filterable, and transparent way to promote participation in cultural heritage and the rich resonances it offers for different audiences. Of course, such participatory digital editions already exist to some extent. However, the opening editions we envision would make the traces of participation directly visible and customizable in the resulting digital (or physical) interfaces, and would be informed by studies of readerly and interactive experiences with both print collections and their digital representations. To do this, we must engage different audiences (scholars, general-interest readers, amateur experts, fans) in discussions of how best to transform print collections into digital media. In-depth (comparative) studies that investigate readerly experiences with interfaces to cultural collections are still rare. However, such studies would not only provide empirical evidence into experiments in remaking collections, but also inform and inspire novel design explorations.

Tailored Interfaces and Aesthetic Provocations: In parallel to developing general one-size-fits-all ‘tools’, we should continue exploring unique interfaces that speak to the specific character of print-based collections. The graphical interface is here understood as a dialogue with and interpretation of the collection, visible and/or tangible in visual and haptic aesthetics that might incorporate physical aspects of the print-based artifact directly or metaphorically. Interpretative reflection on the collection might also manifest itself in interaction design and performative aspects considering how readerly ‘performance’ will evolve with the collection as transformed into digital space. Drawing and extrapolating from sensate and sense-making experiences inherent in print media, we can harness the potential of new media rather than trying to replicate (usually rather poorly) print media in a digital environment. Synesthesia’s crossing sensory modalities offers interesting opportunities for defamiliarizing habits and gestures of reading/engaging with print and digital media. We believe that this could be important in getting people to think more critically about their experiences of different media through suggestive bridges between physical and seemingly weightless digital worlds.

Representational Palimpsest: Transforming a print collection into digital form — be it through a visualization or an interface of a different kind — is not a straightforward process, and different approaches and solutions are not only plausible, but desirable, especially if we think of digital interfaces to cultural collections as critical engagements or dialogues from multiple situated perspectives. For any given print collection, we should therefore aim not for one single best solution but multiple digital manifestations that each reflect on different critical and designerly interpretations of the same metadata. Digital representations within such a palimpsest could be discernable individually or in concert; they could be rough static sketches, or high-fidelity interactive marvels. What is crucial is that we experiment critically, creatively, and variously.