Visual Archives

I am interested in learning more about visual archiving. Some applications of technology appear far more useful than others. Digital narrative strikes me simply as an effort to apply new technology to old forms, rather than a true literary advancement. It does seem to mimic though, the current narrative style of short fiction: beginning, middle, no end. Hypertext shifts provide the same indecisive close. Online archives, on the other hand, organize materials in ways which are often extremely useful, as in the case of William Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience." It's hard to imagine the difficulties faced by scholars in the past, forced to travel across the globe to make comparisons between the different versions without ever seeing them side by side. I am interested in exploring further different archives for individuals and complete collections. I am thinking of pursuing this for a project.

"People don't see the world before their eyes until it's put in a narrative mode." Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, by H.Porter Abbott (6) I have been exploring connections beween artistic and textual modes. I am excited by an independent study that I am planning which challenges my undergraduate students in short narrative to create a visualization based on the text of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The student visual interpretations will be based strictly upon the text. I am interested in the tendency of some writers to demonstrate "painterly" tendencies in their descriptive passages. I also recognize the tendency of many painters to render narratives in their work, in particular, I think of Degas' Absinthe Drinker. I have used that painting in creative writing class, asking students to provide the story line. The woman's posture shows a story within the image. One of my professors says that that painting, emerging from the impressionist period, denies the attachment of a narrative, but the audiences I have encountered (the student writers) disagree, providing, with ease, a story line.