“The centennial of the small town of Antonio Bay, California has finally arrived. However, the events of 100 years ago are about to come back to haunt the town, because a conspiracy of the town’s founders resulted in the deaths of several lepers in a shipwreck. The conspirators had planned to lure the lepers’ ship towards the rocks so that it would sink, and they could recover the cargo of gold and use it to pay for building the town. The sinister plot succeeded when a fog rolled in, blinding the crew, and forcing them to follow the false fire on shore. Now the ghosts of the Elizabeth Dane’s crew are back - and so is the fog that led them to their doom. Only now, it conceals and protects the ghosts of the crew, as they seek their revenge on the residents of Antonio Bay.”

Carpenter is one of my favorite directors and I rented The Fog for the second time when I began living in San Francisco 5 years ago. The film is an essay on those whose lives are deliberately sacrificed by those that accumulate wealth. Although Antonio Bay is not San Francisco Bay, it works all the same. I thought it was brilliant the way he used “Nature” (the fog) as the mediator both as a tool for the wealthy to secure their “natural” coastal town, as well as a tool for the dead to seek their redemption. Either way, the film recast’s Kant’s understanding of the sublime as an ideologic concept: ‘the sublime’ as a category is only possible when one has acquired a firm sense of detachment from history; and a detachment from those whose work enables the “natural” perspective that only something as modern as “leisure time” can create.

TEI WORKSHOP
Julia Flanders and Syd Bauman
Women Writer’s Project, Brown University

The Methods and Issues of Text Encoding for Humanities Scholarship

Friday, March 16, 2007
8:45 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

Stanford Humanities Center
424 Santa Teresa Street, Stanford, CA

This full-day workshop will address the following topics:

What is Text Encoding?

What and Why is the TEI?

The Impact of Digital Texts and Encoding as Disciplinary Practice

Innovative Research with TEI Documents

The resources and events in this program are all aimed at faculty and students in the humanities who have little or no technical experience but are interested in digital textuality. In addition to providing support in grappling with the technical topics, these resources also engage with the scholarly issues that surround these technologies.

With nearly two decades of experience and research, the Women Writers Project (WWP) is internationally known as a center of expertise in scholarly text encoding. Led by director Julia Flanders, the project has built an electronic collection of early women’s writings, covering a period from 1450 to 1850. With texts spanning genres from comic drama to midwives’ books, Women Writers Online presents a vivid cross-section of women’s writing and culture. The collection’s several hundred texts can be browsed, searched and analyzed online, thus providing access to rare materials by women that may otherwise go unread and untaught. The WWP is also involved in researching the complex issues involved in representing early printed texts in digital form. This workshop is the first in a series of 12 workshops at institutions across the United States, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Julia Flanders is the Director of the WWP and serves as vice-chair of the TEI Consortium. Her research focuses on the political and social dimensions of digital humanities scholarship and of text encoding in particular. She is also the editor-in-chief of Digital Humanities Quarterly, a new open-access digital journal.

Syd Bauman is the North American Editor of the Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines, and the Senior Programmer/Analyst at the Women Writers Project at Brown University. His work focuses on developing data standards, tools, and digital materials that reflect the real needs and constraints of humanities research.

I can’t help but remember The Spiral Staircase in a single image: Helen’s mouth blurred and absent through the eyes of her potential murderer. She has no voice, and the serial killer who sees her as imperfect envisions her as incomplete. Via editing, his very present and looming eye is replaced by her missing mouth. This speaks volumes.

Half way through the film, we learn why Helen lost her power of speech. Dr. Parry, the man who wants to marry Helen and “take care of her,” retells the story in order to shake his beloved from silence. On her way home from school one day, he recites, a fire engine raced by. Ten-year-old Helen followed it to her own home which was engulfed in flames. Held back by onlookers, Helen wanted to scream, to rush into the house to save her mother and father, but ultimately was unable to help. Her impotence was displaced onto her voice.

In the end, it is not Helen who kills the murderer but rather the stodgy and outspoken matriarch. Helen’s only response is to scream while Mrs. Warren, upright and at the top of the stairs, yells down to her dying son below. “Murderer,” she says, loud and clear, firing not one shot but rather an entire revolver full. Helen’s moment has come. She is to find Dr. Parry, but can only do so by speaking his number into the receiver of an old-fashioned crank phone. “One, eight, nine,” she says, her voice broken and breathless, unused for more than a decade. The operator connects. Our protagonist gathers strength and says “It is I, Helen.” In four words, she takes possession of herself. No one will speak for her again.

Rich wonderfully contextualizes this 1947 film and the contemporary Hannibal Rising with precise and incredibly perceptive analyses. His writings on this Silence of the Lambs prequel and the cultural context out of which it emerges provoke us to rethink the story of Solejman Talovic, the 18-year-old Bosnian refugee who opened fire in a Utah shopping mall the night before Valentine’s Day.

According to Utah reports, Talovic and his family moved to the U.S. in 1998 after living as refugees in Bosnia for five years. Talovic was only four years old when he and his mother fled their village on foot after Serbian forces overran it. Many attempted to leave the village, but only a few survived. Over the course of three years, approximately 200,000 individuals were slaughtered, including 8,000 Muslim men and boys, murdered by Serb forces in 1995. Solejman Talovic left the war, but it did not end when he arrived.

When he turned 16, Solejman’s mother pulled him out of school so he could work instead. On the day of the shooting, he showed up for his regular shift. Perhaps, in a life of dispossession, violence, and displacement, this young Bosnian refugee developed his own case of aphasia. And when he fired his gun into the shopping mall, he repeated the word “murderer” in an act swinging between autonomy and occupation:

“It is I, Solejman Talovic.”

Even here, in the foreground, it is clear something is awry. The boats’ masts are all fallen over, broken almost. And the water is too blue – a sea of ink the same hue as the woman’s dress. Then we see the smokestacks in the distance – the factories on the opposite coast made small and quaint by distance and summer afternoons. These chimneys give lie to this unnatural ocean: they are the chemical-dye factories slightly upstream from Argenteuil. They are the same factories which pour their indigo excess into the water.

But now, there is no indigo sea made unnatural by industry. There are only manmade lakes and spewing fountains around which seagulls confusedly fly. They’d be better off at the ocean, looking out over precipitous cliffs to the unrelenting water below. The wind is natural there, and it rushes thousands of miles with salt inside it. But then there is no dump nearby, no heaps of trash to be scavenged, no new deliveries by the hour. That dirt by this water’s edge stands firm and compressed, concealing tons of rubbish beneath. At the end of Embarcadero, where the earth begins to rise to the right and left, the only cars that pass are those full of people not wanting old things. The don’t stay long, but their broken chairs and cream-colored cabinets remain, jutting up from the soil in this temporary skyline. The black smoke from industrial towers no longer latches onto buildings and leaves. It has been rerouted underground, and the only token of its presence is the increasing shine of perspiration across our foreheads and backs.

What does Silicon Valley smell, taste, look, sound, and feel like? It smells like empty shoes arranged carefully across a doorstep, or a paper bag which minutes before held warm bread. It looks like earth overturned and delicately folded by the slight shift of feet now passed, or raindrops which have fallen around a parked car which is no longer there. It sounds like the small shreds of disposable chopsticks blowing across a plastic table, or the rope from a homemade swing sinched and gnawing the bark of a stout branch. It looks like reflection in rapid fire, located in the privacy glass of building after building, or a room full of dislodged chairs and used napkins at 1.05pm. It feels like missing the train you don’t want to be on but everybody is riding. It feels like remnants of the living, like they were just here but didn’t care to stay. Like drinking from an empty glass or cutting on a bare plate. Like setting the table for guests who will never come.

But sometimes, sometimes it feels like potential.