Although I take Drucker’s point in “Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display” that humanities scholars should re-conceive of data (information that is given) as capta (information that is taken and subsequently constructed by scholarly interpretation), I argue in my proposal and in my final essay that medieval thinkers would have readily acknowledged with Drucker that “all data [are] capta” (n. pag), especially when it comes to medieval forms of graphical display. Medieval maps of the world (known as mappae mundi), for instance, display biblical, historical, and mythological events contemporaneously, consciously prioritizing theological significance over geographic and historical accuracy.

That being said, the geographic and temporal information I gather from the text of the Siege of Jerusalem is far from objective, and remains dependent on my interpretation of the poem. Like Alyssa A., who in the presentation related that she found herself actively looking for specific types of information from the raw data she gathered from Bret Easton Ellis’s Twitter account, I pulled passages from the poem that fit my preconceived notions of what constitutes temporal or spatial data. As you can see from this preliminary spreadsheet I created from the prologue and first section of the poem, what constitutes temporal and/or spatial information information in Middle English poetry does not necessarily translate to “objective,” graphable data. Any kind of graphical expression of this spreadsheet would be as subjective as a “traditional” close reading of the poem. In her presentation, Caleigh noted a similar difficulty with Voyant: the tool may provide new interpretive possibilities, but the interpretation itself still follows the methodology of established humanities research.

The subjective nature of this kind of literary data collection led to my decision to encode the text of the Siege of Jerusalem in TEI-compliant XML before I convert the text by means of XSLT transformation into XML compatible with SIMILE’s Timeline Widget. Sharing my original XML with users of the widget will not render my data collection process less subjective, but will allow those interested to view and subsequently accept or reject the interpretive process that will provide the framework for the Timeline visualization of temporal events in the Siege of Jerusalem.

Yet visualization itself also proves problematic. The “representation of knowledge,” Drucker contends, “is as crucial to its cultural force as any other facet of its production” (n. pag). Even if I disclose every step of my interpretive process to my users, the model I develop for the internal narrative time and space of the Siege of Jerusalem will still participate in the history of graphic representation, making it subject to the critical problems shared by the post-Enlightenment models of temporality and spatiality I critique. This tension between literary interpretation and digital graphical display speaks to Stephen Ramsay’s observation in “Algorithmic Criticism” that there lies a “fundamental disjunction between literary critical method and computational method” (n. pag). Subjective and highly rhetorical, the humanistic interpretive method destabilizes the rigid categories and boundaries required by computation. Yet perhaps this perceived weakness of humanities computing is also its strength: visualizing subjective data (or capta) points to the problematic affinity between opinion (of an individual scholar) and perceived fact (displayed graphically), a relationship that other disciplines do not necessarily acknowledge.

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Author: Alyssa McLeod
Word Count: 534

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