Disciplines like literature, history, and philosophy give us an approximation of contemporary public consciousness: what’s going on in people’s heads at that moment in time, which in turn informs the critical reception and commentary on subsequent works in those disciplines. It’s cyclical. Title A shows you something you’ve never seen before, then Title B comes out and copies it completely. Suddenly it isn’t so special anymore and your standards have risen. But any particularly groundbreaking or unconventional work is still fundamentally a product of what that came before it. If I read The Great Gatsby in 2018, the story would still hold up because of its rich thematic substance that can be reconstrued and analyzed in a thousand different ways for a thousand different audiences with little dissonance caused by the era it was written in being so far removed from the time we live in today. But I find Fitzgerald’s writing style and use of figurative language to be incredibly distracting and obnoxious, not by any fault of the novel itself but rather because my interpretation of the work is firmly rooted in the context of Gatsby as required reading for a high-school freshman.

Do you know what symbolism is? Well take a look at this giant sentinel of a billboard with glaring ever-present eyeballs that keep watch over this desolate, ash-covered wasteland. How do we represent Gatsby’s longing for Daisy without having him say “I long for Daisy”? How about a literal beacon flashing in the night that’s always visible but just out of his reach.

Pass. Don’t even get me started on the alliteration. But my contempt is solely driven by the familiarity of the material: I’ve seen this before, it’s not impressive like it was the first time, show me something different. And that’s the central reasoning that drives any kind of change in culture and the work that people are producing. We want new and different, but new and different are concepts intrinsically dependent on the old and familiar. You can use literary devices in interesting and unexpected ways, but without my experience with Gatsby I might fight those devices to be too avant-garde or esoteric. So how do you strike that balance of delivering something fresh and original that adheres to tried-and-true storytelling techniques without becoming a slave to those conventions and without being blatantly contrarian? I don’t have the answers, I’m just a student.

This is in response to the talk on Thursday.

The presentation covered a digital humanities initiative led by Dr. Shelley Fishkin and Dr. Gordon Chang, which aimed to recover the lost history of the Chinese workers who built the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s. The massive project intends to bring together all of the available data on the subject to create a cohesive historical narrative for the Chinese workers whose labor has since gone unrecognized; Who were they? How were they recruited? How did they get to America? What were they looking for here? It’s interesting to me that despite the significance of the transcontinental railroad, both to the economic prosperity of its’ many stops and stations and also to the cultural identity of a united America, we know so little about the people who built it, in part due to the fact that there are next to no primary sources from that era to draw on for historical research. In the words of Dr. Fishkin, their goal is to “reconstruct the lived experience of people who wrote no records themselves.” To do this, they have to make use of digital archives and tools. The bulk of their research came from photos, immigration records, private letters (what little there were), investigations into the villages where these immigrants would’ve come from, and surveys from the descendants of these workers. They also took advantage of cooking vessels, game pieces, and opium pipes recovered by archaeologists to get a better understanding of what daily life might’ve been like for the laborers. All of the data and references they gather are consolidated into a single digital media package online where it’s available for the public to discover. The web page takes full advantage of online databases, digital news archives, ancestry.com research, digital magnification and enhancement of film stock, digital maps, timelines, and so many more tools made available by digital technology.

Online communication enables data sharing between academics at a level never before possible in the history of mankind, and the crowd-sourcing of historical data and interpretation is a phenomenon that will allow us to continue to shine light on the dim and forgotten moments in history. A project of this scale is something that would be significantly more difficult without the use of digital tools. While the research team created physical exhibits with the same data to display in-person, I think the sheer amount of information here is something better explored in a digital space where you can scroll without limit and have the full range of multimedia to work with, and it’s a project that couldn’t exist anywhere but the connected world we live in today.

Early on in The Glass Castle I’m finding inklings of a few recurring themes/ideas. Home, obviously, in the story about the girl who grows up in what she describes as a “nomadic” family. But also maybe of ownership, possessions, maybe broken things. Jeannette’s mother at one point refers to her digging in the trash as her way of recycling, and something about that idea of discarded items echoes in my head at the moment Jeannette leaves behind her melted Tinker Bell doll and hopes someone will find her. One bit of (unintentional?) irony that stands out to me is three-year-old Jeannette, who would grow up seemingly to be raised in poverty, saying she would happy in the hospital forever because “You never had to worry about running out of stuff like food or ice or even chewing gum.”

Jeannette’s upbringing is already setting a fluctuating foundation for what home could mean to her. As a child she moves place to place quite frequently, so the only constants for her are her parents and siblings, despite the odd relationship she has with her parents, one where she seems to know better as a child than the adults who are raising her.

Her father fights with a doctor about how to best care for his daughter and lashes out in a fit of rage, but when he comes again later to take Jeannette, she doesn’t show any hesitation or reluctance to go with him. She remarks on his scent of whiskey and cigarette smoke, that it reminds her of home.

In the opening glimpse we get at Jeannette’s life as an adult, she’s still living in proximity to her parents, now vagabonds apparently, roaming New York City. She lives in apartment but never refers to it as her home, and in fact explicitly says she tried to make a home there but can’t enjoy it without worrying about her parents on the streets. It seems to me like Jeannette’s home seems to be where the important people in her life are.