Dale Hartman

Bringing Linn’s Writing into the Digital Age

December 12, 2016 by Dale Hartman

My job for the final project was to design a website that our Linn anthology could live on. Many of my peers went out and did some excellent analysis of Linn’s writings. However, if we keep doing what we have done in the past with our studies on Linn, these works are going to be loosely connected with no real description of what they are or why our study of James Merrill Linn is important. I wanted to make sure that our work could be published in a way that makes it understandable by people outside of our classes.

Before I could do any coding, I needed to generate a diagram of what our site would look like, both at a high-level map view, and a specific page-by-page view. I did this the old-fashioned way, by creating some pencil-and-paper sketches of what elements I thought needed to be included in the site, and how different pages were going to connect to each other. At this stage, I decided that a navigation bar would be the best way to organize all of the sections of our site, providing easy-to-find links to both our editorial comments and content.

Using the online color palette generator at Paletton.com

As I was beginning development of the site, I discovered that color is a very important consideration when doing web design. In the computer science curriculum here at Bucknell, I’ve learned that identifying a bad interface is quite easy, but picking out what’s wrong with it is much more challenging. As someone without much artistic skill, I needed some help when it came to making the website visually pleasing. Thankfully, there are plenty of tools out on the web that provide a number of different services for web developers. The site I primarily used, palleton.com, helps designers generate aesthetic color schemes. I fiddled with the available settings for quite a while until I managed to find a palette that I thought fit our historical research quite well.

Using HTML’s ‘li’ elements and CSS’s built-in classes to create a working navigation bar with a dropdown menu

Another major part of my work was creating the navigation bar that would link all the parts of our site together. To do this, I followed a standard method of turning an HTML list of links into a functioning navigation bar using CSS. In order to create elements that respond to a user’s cursor, I had to use the CSS :hover selector to change the properties of elements whenever the cursor was hovering over it. The most challenging thing to implement was the dropdown menu when navigating to our editorial content. CSS can recognize some classes, such as “dropdown-content,” and automatically apply certain properties to elements of that class without the designer needing to explicitly code it in the stylesheet. Learning to use this built-in dropdown feature, and modify it to work the way I wanted it to, took quite some time. But, the end result greatly benefits the layout of the navigation bar.

Overall, I’m quite happy with what I’ve managed to accomplish in this final project. If I had a bit more time, my next step would probably be to spend time setting up a genuine image gallery, with the ability to scroll through images and open them up in an overlay screen. Using Javascript, I could also automatically populate this gallery with every image in a folder, without needing to explicitly code each one of them in the HTML file. After working on this project, I feel more comfortable with web design, and I look forward for the opportunity to do more work in this field in the future.

The Linn Letter Process

November 18, 2016 by Dale Hartman

All of the transcription we have done in this unit has been very much a collaborative effort. From the very first transcription activity we did, there wouldn’t have been much progress made had we been working alone and isolated. More sets of eyes looking at a single line is one of the best ways to speed up the transcription process. A lot of words can be recognized with just a simple look-over, but some words are more challenging to interpret. The best method I’ve found for these words is to go through one character at a time and try to compare and transcribe each letter. Generally, these problematic words arise when the start or the end of a word are hard to read, so getting the other part and making an educated guess is also a valid strategy.

The document transcribed from and the end result text marked up in TEI

There were a number of advantages to working with the actual documents in the Bucknell Archives. The simple black and white scans we were using as the source of our transcriptions lost a lot of details that were in the original letters. For instance, one word that was giving me trouble in the scanned document was something that looked like it should have been ‘had,’ but had way too many lines to be those three letters. When I finally got to look at that part of the document in the archive, it became apparent that the word was indeed ‘had,’ but Linn had originally written ‘were’ there first, and changed the word to ‘had’ by writing over it. This intricacy was lost in the monochrome black scan we were originally working with. However, the processing that went into creating the digital scan did help to pull better information than the human eye could. It’s easy to see bleed-through on the physical document, which made some words harder to read. However, in the scan, this bleed-through was filtered out.

Here is the word in question, hard to decipher in the scan but easily understood when looking at the actual document.

A lot of what Linn writes about in the March 2nd letter and journal entry are the same, the visit from Morris, learning of the occupation of Nashville, Memphis, and Savannah, etc. He even describes these events in nearly the exact same words in both the letter and the journal. However, in his journal, he noted that the instructions from Morris were against army orders. This is not something he notified his brother of. He also spent more time in his journal complaining about the little irritations of everyday life (poor weather, broken kitchen equipment). In his letter home, he spent more time discussing the state of the war and world overall, talking about US relations with the Rebels, England, and Mexico.

Markup Breakdown

November 1, 2016 by Dale Hartman

The first piece of text I worked with was section 5 of “Murder in the Rue Morgue”. This particular assignment involved diplomatically and semantically marking up the source text. Of those two components of the markup, the semantic tagging was the most involved by far, requiring much more thought going into every tag. I think my markup was greatly affected by the content of this section of the text. My portion of “Murder in the Rue Morgue” was very monologue heavy, with the character Dupin discussing his deductive reasoning involving the way the killer entered and exited the scene of the crime. One interesting decision I made during my markup was to treat some of the verbs used by Dupin as well-defined events.

Examples of my event tags in "Murder in the Rue Morgue" — Examples of my event tags in “Murder in the Rue Morgue”

Whereas egress, descent, and my other event tags might be regarded as more general verbs in most contexts, Dupin talks about them as specific events in the timeline of the murder.

The question can then be raised: did the encoding of this text help me to better understand the subject of this writing? I would have to say yes. When simply reading Murder in the Rue Morgue, it’s easy to get lost in Dupin’s monologues, and lose out on important details of his deductions. When doing a semantic markup on the text, you have to pull out those important details and really think on why they stand out in the text. You have to understand what exactly is going on in the source text in order to create an effective encoding. As Ramussen puts it, “in order to contribute actively to the edition’s production of knowledge, it is necessary to have prior knowledge of both the scholarly edition and the published work” (Ramussen, 128).

Our work on the personography of the signers of the Declaration of Independence forced us to work with a text in a very different way. Instead of highlighting and marking up the information in the source text, our job was to bring in information from other sources and link them to the source in our edition. This kind of encoding practically reverses the tagging we did in the Poe assignment. Instead of finding important words in the text and appropriately tagging them, we laid out a system of important tags and then filled them with the correct information.

This kind of encoding most closely matches what Rasmussen defines as a “Knowledge Site.” As she defines them, “Knowledge sites can thus better identify the relationship between

Linking information in TEI using unique tags

the work’s texts and other texts that relate to the work” (Rasmussen, 125). Our edition of the Declaration of Independence was made of the source material and many smaller texts detailing the signers.

Overall, text encoding is a fantastic way of expanding knowledge about a particular text. In the case of our works, we not only experienced detailing specific parts of the source text in the Poe assignment, but also bringing in and linking new information with the Declaration of Independence project.

The Thrill of the Heist

September 26, 2016 by Dale Hartman

The project my team and I are working on is an extension of the classic heist story, where a character must make their way through a secure facility to steal something of great value. There is some universal appeal to a heist, and we feel that it ties in very nicely with some of the standard ‘choose your own adventure’ cornerstones. Specifically, we plan on tying in elements of mystery and puzzle-solving in order to make our story engaging. Our story focuses on a recent college graduate and his two friends, who get involved with a museum heist. One of the other graduates will serve as a kind of coordinator, and will be our tool for passing important information on to the player that their character would otherwise not know. The other is kind of the ‘inside man,’ and will challenge our player to keep another person in mind when they are making their decisions. Our story paths are going to branch out quite a bit, which I feel cements the validity of our story as a work of interactive fiction as defined in Literary Gaming. The introduction stresses that interactive fiction “would lose something of its aesthetic and semiotic function if it were removed from [the digital] medium.” We can’t reflect the branching story and puzzles we wish to create through a static medium.

Mystery is a challenging sensation to create in a text adventure. We want the player to be drawn into the story, and for them to want to continue in order to reach the conclusion. However, if we leave the player confused and unsure of what’s going on, it’ll have the opposite effect. We can’t really use visuals or other media to get our point across. Literary Gaming, defined literary video games as experiences where verbal components are the foreground. One of the methods we are using to mitigate this confusion is providing distinct choices to the player every time they need to provide input. Under the hood, every text adventure game has this going on.

A screenshot from Open Sorcery. Every bit of text in red is a button, which is the player's method of gaining information and progressing the story — A screenshot from Open Sorcery. Every bit of text in red is a button, which is the player’s method of gaining information and progressing the story

For every fork in the road, there are only so many paths you can take. The program will only be able to understand and act upon the specific responses it’s programmers expected and coded in at that location. We plan to turn that into an asset for the player. By showing them those choices, we can be sure the player will not be lost simply because they can’t find the words we expected them to type in at that location. Our group got this idea from one of the Case Studies we played: ‘Open Sorcery.’ This text adventure game took user input by turning specific words in the display text into the choices. While playing this game, I was never lost as to what I could do, but I also never felt like I was being constrained by the choices available.

Our group is working together very well so far. The overall idea for the story came out of the time we spent in class brainstorming. We did a great job of building off of each other’s ideas in order to get to the semi-final story we have now. I am the most experienced coder in the group, so my #1 focus is going to be the difficult parts of the game code. Ella and Neil have been focused more on the writing.

A helper function to get player choices. Functions like this help keep the logic code of the game clean, and prevent retyping similar lines of code over and over.

However, as the project continues, we will all mix around and I predict each of us will work on all parts of the project. As of right now, I’ve been working on a few Python functions to serve as helpers when we are writing out the full code of the story.

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