Bibliography by Claire Ihlendorf


Annotated Bibliography Assignment

 

By Claire Ihlendorf, Playful Visualizations at Work/Working Visualizations at Play Team

 

 1. Agustín, José. La tumba.  México, D.F.:  Organización Editorial Novaro S.A., 1966.

 

La tumba is a short novel by Mexican author José Agustín.  It was written in 1961, first published in 1964 and ultimately published again with a few changes and through a different publishing house in 1966.  It is a first person narrative, telling the story of an adolescent protagonist, Gabriel Guía.  Guía lives in an affluent area of Mexico City in the 1960s.  He is an only child, and there is visible tensión between he and his parents.  His father is a lawyer and his mother does not work.  Guía interacts with his parents throughout the novel, but the relationship is antagonistic and distant.  Most of the incidents he details in the novel occur as he and his peers socialize around the city or at their country houses, drinking in excess.  He is also a member of a writing group, and spends time in his room writing poetry, short stories and novels.  A string of female characters accompany Guía throughout the novel, with most in the role of lover.  His complicated romantic relationships originate from elaborate plans of revenge (in the case of Dora), incest (with his aunt Berta) and finally obsession (with Elsa).  Despite Guía’s apparently privileged life, he is both anxious and increasingly discontent with his personal life and that of society.  The novel ends with Guía’s aparent suicide with a revolver while listening to Lohengrin, his favorite Wagner opera. 

 

Despite its occasional classification as juvenile literature, Agustín’s novel holds an important position in Mexico’s twentieth century canon.  Previous Mexican authors only voiced the youth experience from outside of that referential group.  Agustín, however, wrote directly for the youth from the voice of youth.  He was sixteen when he penned the novel in 1961 for a literary group not unlike that of his protagonist, Guía.  La tumba ushered in a new period of literature in Mexico with a new group of young writers who looked outside Mexico for inspiration.  These writers, often referred to as the Onda writers or “los onderos” referenced sources ranging from American rock music to European philosophies.  The authors and their novels became the voice of a generation, and the literary precursor to later student movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

 

[This novel is the main source of my research and in digital form is what I use for the visualizations I have already made, and for future visualizations.  Currently, there is no public digital form available, nor is there an English translation.]

 


2. Cohen, Matt. "Transgenic Deformation: Literary Translation and the Digital Archive." The Walt Whitman Archive. 2006. Web. 1 Dec. 2011. <http://www.whitmanarchive.org/about/articles/anc.00165.html>.

 

In this essay, Cohen confronts issues of translation and the digital archive.  The work he examines is that of Walt Whitman’s poem, “Eidólons” and his theoretical framework is that of Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels’ concept of deformance.  While working on a digital archive, Cohen notes that there are many opportunities for “deformed” works written with the XML mark up language.  By noting this connection he recognizes the utility of digital tools to create deformances.  He states, “Creative digital deformation of imaginative works in all media makes available the unique insights possible through computer processing.” This connection between using digital tools to create a deformance is not explicitly suggested by McGann and Samuels in their work “Deformance and Interpretation,” a chapter in McGann’s 2001 work Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web, but it seems the natural progression of deformance in our digital age. 

 

Cohen suggests that if the translations themselves represent a sort of deformance of the work, then the deformance of the interpretations would then represent deformance to another power.  He notes that this may be problematic, since the habits of the initial translator affect the interpretive aspects of a deformance of the translation.  For example, Cohen works with the 1912 translation of “Eidólons” in the book, Poemas by Alvaro Armando Vasseur.  According to Cohen, Vasseur took many liberties in his translations of many of the poems, cutting works and changing formats and titles.  As such, Cohen suggests that it would be useful in an archival sense to have this information readily available so that comparison can be made between the deformed texts.

 

Cohen utilizes the tool TokenX to demonstrate different deformances he has created of the poem.  TokenX was created by Brian Pytlik Zillig from the University of Nebraska and it is still a functioning tool today.   It has many different tools for manipulating a text along with basic concordance and ordering tools.  Some of the more interesting deformances that Cohen creates are the word highlighting visualizations to compare the translated and original text spatially, and also a word/image replacement tool. 

 

Cohen argues that the creation of these digital deformances mimics the work’s own evolution through time from its spatial layout changes to different translations.  Furthermore, he points out that while the evolutionary changes of the work through time are difficult to represent through encoded texts, digital deformance tools might aid in this representation.  Although Cohen himself appears to be in favor of the inclusion of these tools/deformances in a digital archive, he notes that this idea is considered controversial. 

 

 


3. Gunia, Inke.  ¿“Cuál es la onda”? La literatura de la contraculture juvenil en el México de los años sesenta y setenta.    Frankfurt: Verveuert, 1994.

 

Inke Gunia’s study focuses on counterculture literature in Mexico during the 1960s and 1970s.  She has a special focus on the literature of the Onda, specifically novels by José Agustín, Gustavo Saínz, and Parménides García-Saldaña.  Gunia details the great effects that the publications of La tumba (by Agustín) and Gazapo (by Saínz) in 1964 and 1965, respectively, had on the world of Mexican literature at that time.  Additionally, she creates a heuristic model of the literature that followed that many critics have classified as being in response to the works of Agustín and Saínz.

 

Of particular interest is a section of comparative analysis where she examines and highlights the differences between Agustín’s 1964 and 1966 versions of the text, La tumba.  The main changes are the increase in plot surrounding Guía’s cousing Laura, and the use of more vulgar slang.  In addition to these narrative changes, Agustín utilizes some stylistic changes as well, including taking away the section titles and numbers and using dashing for dialog instead of brackets.  While these changes may seem minor to the overall effect of the novel, Gunia demonstrates that these additions and alterations have strengthened the “irreverent” tone of the novel. She notes, “Puede constatarse que la segunda edición de la novela pone más énfasis en la actitud irreverente, iconoclasta de los adolescentes…Dan por resultado una formulación aún más pronunciada del conflicto generacional y una crítica-con respecto al lector enfocado mucho más incisiva de los calores constituidos por la sociedad en que vive el protagonista”(89). 

 

[It can be argued that the second edition of the novel places more emphasis on the irreverent, iconoclastic youth...As a result there is a more pronounced formulation of the generational conflict and a critique, with respect to the reader, that is much more cutting of the problems created by the society in which the protagonist lives]

 

[For my current Project, Gunia’s discussion of the Onda and its members is particularly valuable.  Her thorough investigation and definition will add to my other collected sources of the current definitions and descriptions of the Onda.]

 


4. History Flow. IBM, 2003. Web. 10 May 2012. <http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/>.

 

History Flow is a visualizations tool created by IBM.  It is described by its creators as “ a tool for visualizing dynamic, evolving documents and the interactions of multiple collaborating authors”  Currently, it is being used to track changes in Wikipedia entries.  The visualizations it creates are eye catching and colorful.  They are “woven” together from information based on the changes from multiple users; text that has stayed the same is connected, while changed or new text in not connected, leaving a blank space.  Different viewing options are available; one can choose to look at just one author’s contributions or recent changes.

 

The program is available for free online at this IBM site: https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?source=AW-0JU  It is written in Java 1.4 and its authors recognize some initial problems between matching changes that users might confront:  “One problem with this approach is that tiny changes, such as the addition of a single comma, will show up as a change to an entire sentence.”  While keeping in mind this issue, I believe that this tool has possible uses outside of visualizing Wikipedia edits.  Users could visualize changes in one document over time or the way a blog has evolved.  Below is a screenshot of the tool visualizing the evolution of one of the chapters of my visualization.  The picture is not as complicated as other visualizations I have seen, but this is because I am the only author:

 

Here is an example of a Wikipedia page, specifically that of José Agustín.  Note that it is a more interesting visualization. 

 

A benefit of this program when used with Wikipedia pages is that it is available in any language with special directions.  In order to make the Agustín visualization, I had to download another program to make it work.  Directions on this process (and how to change the Wikipedia page language search) are located here: https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/HistoryFlowHowTo  With this extra downloaded program, you need only type the page name into the search it provides:

When the Visualization is open in History flow, you can drag the cursor on the visualization to get specific information about what was changed:

 

I plan to continue working with this tool to see if I can get better results from a non-wiki source.


5. Many Eyes. IBM Research, 2007. Web. 10 May 2012. <http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/>.

 

Many Eyes was created in 2007 by the Visual Communication lab at IBM research. It is available free online at: http://www-958.ibm.com/software/data/cognos/manyeyes/.  This tool takes user submitted data and publishes different types of visualizations.  Users can upload data in the form a spread sheet or basic text.  Once published, the visualizations and data sets are available publicly.  Depending on the type of research, one might want visualizations kept private, which is not an option with this tool.  If a visualization is not published, it will not be made public; however, the visualization will not be saved (but the image can be copied and pasted elsewhere). 

 

The different types of visualizations depend on the type of data entered.  Text data produces word clouds, tag clouds, word trees, and phrase nets.  Data in spreadsheet form produces a number of different graphs, and visualizations that show the relationships between different values. 

 

[In my own research, I have found this tool very useful.  The amount of text you can input in the tool is large (up to an entire novel), and I found that it was relatively easy to use and understand.  My main issue with the tool (as with many of the tools) is that there is not an option for a foreign language text (in my case, Spanish).  That stated, there are ways to get around the language barrier.  In the word cloud and tag cloud, there is an option for a stop list in a different language, and the word trees do work in Spanish (as they are a basic concordance).  The other text tools are not as flexible with a different input language.]