Distributing Services

Periodical Poetics

In Modernism in the Magazines: An Introduction, Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman track changes in the history of periodical studies across the twentieth century. Unsurprisingly, this study begins and ends with Ezra Pound. From Pound’s characterization of “the free magazine or the impractical or fugitive magazine” in the article “Small Magazines” to a series of articles published in The New Age under the unrealized title “Studies in Contemporary Mentality,” Scholes and Wulfman outline how Pound inaugurates “the serious study of periodicals as a way into modern culture.”21 Tackling problems of classification in the periodical, Pound characterizes his approach as that of a “simple-hearted anthropologist” sorting periodical specimens into different generic boxes.22 In contrast to the methods of ideological critique and genre studies that remain central to Pound’s periodical criticism, Scholes and Wulfman chart the movement of the field “from genres to database.”23 Their account highlights “a different approach, made feasible by the digital resources becoming available to scholars, . . . a move from ideological or cultural constructions to the collection of data.”24

Drawn from a chapter titled “Rethinking Modernist Magazines: From Genres to Database,” the argument is nevertheless concluded by an appendix comprised of a hundred-page reconstruction of Pound’s “Studies in Contemporary Mentality,” republishing a complete series of his column in The New Age. Indeed, through Pound, the critical voice reigns, even as the database attempts distributed scholarship. Not unlike the archival impulses that drive Eclipse, Scholes and Wulfman collect and republish Pound even while arguing for new modes of digital humanities scholarship in periodical studies. This tension among issues of archival scholarship, the categorical imperatives of analytical data, and the long-standing genre classifications of cultural criticism arise, they argue, from the “enormously intertextual affair” of reading a magazine.25 While pointing to an enormously intertextual affair is one thing, enacting intertextual formats as scholarship is another entirely. The focus on critique, inaugurated by Pound and carried out in their pages, distills reading little magazines to one mode of understanding, built on the negation of all other forms. Here, as elsewhere in The Little Database, my hope is to point toward an expanded practice of contingent reading that enables critical engagement while also making space to afford adjacent tactics of describing, mapping, performing, and making, all of which occur in embodied and contingent moments of articulation. In other words, in contrast to this model, I aim to introduce a poetics for creative engagement with historical materials through digital tools, which are subject to the same continuous technological developments that transform the works themselves.

For Scholes and Wulfman, the performance of periodical study calls for an unwieldy compilation of bibliographic information, circulation figures, reader demographics, content tags, subject analysis, advertisement catalogs, generic classification, and any number of imagined quantitative and qualitative data for large-scale textual computation.26 Ambitious in scope and supported by ongoing trends in digital humanities and critical data practices, this method of scholarship offers certain notable possibilities for the little database working in the present. Outlining the project of a digital periodical studies might begin with exhaustive bibliographic volumes such as Frank Mott’s A History of American Magazines, 1741–1930; rigorous cultural inventories like Jed Rasula’s American Poetry Wax Museum; focused periodical studies such as Eric Gardner’s Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture; extensive archival reconstructions such as Alan Filreis’ Counter-Revolution of the Word; or the exploratory catalogs included in works like Gwen Allen’s Artists’ Magazines, Beatriz Columina and Craig Buckley’s Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines, 196X to 197X, or Steve Clay and Rodney Phillip’s A Secret Location on the Lower East Side.27 Through each, and any number of other titles, a variable set of periodical metrics might be tracked. Taken as data, then, these books could be seen as corpora prepared for immediate computational applications. A wealth of analytic, archival, and interpretive supplements are already harbored in their contents. Of course, these studies are also models that could generate discrete digital approaches given any range of interests in periodicals: alternate databases could be compiled elsewhere. In either case, they argue, a digital humanist could then attempt to open new possibilities of undiscovered patterns and unimagined connections in these archival collections of periodical publications, moving from genre to database with any potentially meaningful bibliographic or semiotic components in the periodicals under examination.

By digitizing, standardizing, and networking periodical print artifacts, in other words, we might reveal patterns within the (quite large) datasets of the little magazine. Currently, for example, it’s possible to imagine the implementation of increased precision and wider scope within Rasula’s economic study of poetry publications, or a more exhaustive catalog of works forming the mimeograph revolution gathered by Clay and Phillips. However, patterns in content, form, and genre in little poetry magazines or data visualizations of groups of writers enmeshed in publication networks (to name only two potential outputs) remain subject to ongoing experiment. By deploying analytics at scale, Scholes and Wulfman suggest, “we can move beyond the methodology of Pound’s ‘simple-hearted anthropologist’ and dispense with boxes, large and small, altogether,” even while working within the same matrix of critical concerns.28 At first glance, this seems apt for sites like Eclipse, which presents a substantial portion of works catalogued in A Secret Location on the Lower East Side, for example. Indeed, even with just 301 current entries, Eclipse has outgrown a comprehensive accounting in any given study. With it rendered instead as a database, a scholar might attempt to locate the most compelling entry points by tracking the most useful or critically insightful datapoints to graph or map their statistical significance to a logical conclusion.

It is interesting, though perhaps not surprising, that precisely the type of information called for by Scholes and Wulfman in Modernism in the Magazines is absent from contemporary databases of experimental writing like Eclipse, PennSound, and UbuWeb. These, and others like them, are notably focused on accessibility rather than computationality. It’s worth noting that projects like Blue Mountain (Princeton University) and the Modernist Journals Project (Brown and Tulsa University) bridge these gaps in their attempt at a fuller accounting, primarily geared toward the production of scholarship, rather than focus on the more prosaic features of public use. I will discuss the implications of the dynamics of access further in chapter 3, but for now we might recall Jerome McGann’s observation in Radiant Textuality: “Modern computational tools are extremely apt to execute one of the two permanent functions of scholarly criticism—the editorial and archival function, the remembrance of things past.”29 The little databases I examine perform this archival liaison beautifully and provide a rich network of access for students, writers, and scholars in the field. The other function, which we might summarize as critical reflection—or in McGann’s terms, the capacity to “imagine what we don’t know in a disciplined and deliberated fashion”—remains an ongoing challenge to critical data practices, now navigating machine learning alongside developments in network mapping and visualization. Notably, such practices rely on essayistic articulations to a broader scholarly audience that rarely make their way into a more general readership. McGann’s own solution can be found in the conclusion to Radiant Textuality, outlining the “quantum poetics” he developed with Johanna Drucker that emerged through playful performances of the speculative programming enacted by “IVANHOE: A Game of Interpretation.”30 His explorations in how computation might aid us in the endeavor to “imagine what we don’t know” by presenting new modes of play serve as one notable response to the analytical impulse of networked scholarship.

We might surmise that these early queries on the imaginative potentials of the digital humanities point more toward a problem of scholarly mores than to any inherent structural deficiencies in a computational approach. Listing successful endeavors is beyond the scope of this chapter: as the field continues to develop, new projects emerge regularly. Potential directions are emblematized by a wide range of online platforms like Ben Fry’s mesmerizing visualization of variant texts in On the Origin of Species: The Preservation of Favoured Traces, the Traditional Knowledge Labels and cultural protocols of the Indigenous hosting platform Mukurtu CMS, or the comprehensive multimedia database and hugely collaborative digital initiative SlaveVoyages.31 Critical data practices remain an open field for experimentation in digital scholarship that continues on the path to discover unseen patterns and provide new modes of engagement with digitized materials, while enabling the play of interpretation of future readers. Speculative analysis and critical scholarship still rely on digital archival practices to prepare data for any given engagement. While the database is an apt aid to memory, the poetics of scholarship yet demands a human actor to prepare a corpus capable of imagining critical activity “past Z,” as Filreis writes in Counter-revolution of the Word, and into the “miscellaneous, unidentified, anonymous, uncataloged, misindexed.”32

For periodical objects awaiting identification, cataloging, and indexing, we might return at this juncture to McGann’s canonical exploration of “the text as a laced network of linguistic and bibliographical codes.”33 Within this laced network, “textuality is a social condition of various times, places, and persons.”34 Whether the answer is presented through geographic mapping, community network analysis, topic modeling, cultural protocols, or periodicity charts, this “laced network” continues to offer some resistance to most computational analyses. Even the most minute levels of textual analysis, as seen in the mechanistic reading of variant texts performed by Randall McLeod, call for a human to interface with an analog collator to decipher the output.35 Unexpectedly, under this aegis, McGann argues that “poets understand texts better than most information technologists,” as the noise of materialist hermeneutics and autopoietic mechanisms escape the strictures of informational structures.36 Given the immense challenge of digital scholarship presented by periodicals and collections, a turn away from analytics and toward contingent modes of data poetics may serve to illuminate some possibilities for moving “past Z” in the study of a site like Eclipse.

Some of the most compelling contemporary poetic scholarship can be traced to an innovative use of even the most prosaic off-the-shelf tools for writing through digital platforms. Given the potential inherent to a wide range of computational aids, we might ask what tools are already in common use, and what poetic forms might transform our understanding of those tools. For example, on the most basic level, consider cut-and-paste. In a post to the Tumblr page hosting Troll Thread, a press for print-on-demand and digital publications, Holly Melgard published a remarkable work of poetry—or poetic scholarship—called The Making of The Americans. This work was simply composed. Melgard sequentially processes the entirety of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans by removing all but the first instance of every word in the book. Using Stein’s own poetics statements as a premise, Melgard describes the process in a foreword: “NOW ‘there is no such thing as repetition’ in The Making of Americans, because I deleted it. Herein, every word and punctuation mark is retained according to its first (and hence last) appearance in Gertrude Stein’s 925-page edition of the book.”37 The results are strikingly revealing. Though we may have long thought of Stein as a master of linguistic simplicity, after the first paragraph of Melgard’s poem, it becomes clear that Stein deploys an extensive vocabulary with a delirious lexicological register in this work. From the canonical first line to the final page, adverbial constructions begin to overcome the poem. Over a hundred pages are summarized by novel words in a single passage of Melgard’s editorial intervention: “drearily joyously boisterously despondingly fragmentarily roughly energetically repeatedly funnily hesitatingly dreamily doubtingly tilling boastingly delightfully touchingly quaintly.”38 Through this process, Melgard reveals hidden layers within the work in ways that would prove difficult to recapitulate otherwise. The poem produces a pleasurable poetic encounter while simultaneously performing a serious work of scholarship by the same formal gesture. Not only does the poem transform our sense of Stein’s book; it revises our understanding of what the ordinary process of “search, cut, copy, and delete” might accomplish, given the right conceit applied to a contingent set of objects and queries. In this sense, it is not the complexity of the tools that might be used to understand the little database, but rather the poetics that guide the use of any given tool to yield new knowledge. In other words, it is not necessarily more advanced tools that are needed for textual analysis, but the tactical and contingent use of poetic methods that may present novel discoveries.

If one contemporary strand of experimental poetics comprises diverse projects utilizing found and recontextualized text, the long-standing practices of editorial theory, social text, and material textuality present a robust and underused apparatus for understanding the fluid dynamics of semantic modulation in transcoding processes online.39 For example, consider a rearticulation of what John Bryant has termed the “fluid text,” given the radical transformations to editions in digital networks.40 Borrowing a term from editorial theory opens a productive array of historical discussions around editing textual objects and charting the changes in ongoing compositional processes. Slightly transforming Bryant’s study of versions and revisions in Melville’s Typee to suit contemporary media poetics, we may cite a resonant passage to define the editorial interventions that define the poetics of a fluid text:

To come to the point, the cultural meaning of a fluid text is in the pressure that results in changes made in one text to create another and the degree of difference, or the distance, between two texts. Thus, a poetics of the fluid text is a poetics of revision. . . . When we read a fluid text, we are comparing the versions of a text, which is to say we are reading the differences between the versions, which is to say we are reading distance traveled, difference, and change.41

This “poetics of revision” is an invitation to reimagine historical texts through inventive filters that illuminate what was once unseen to a contemporary readership. It is precisely what Melgard achieves with The Making of The Americans. To this dynamic, we might add algorithms, file formats, contextual shifts, large language models, and other bibliographic operators. The poetics of revision remain pertinent to the republication of historical materials as unique editions under dramatically altered textual conditions. Bryant notes: “A revision occupies space and reflects the passage of time; it reveals options and choices; it has direction. It is a chord of dissonances and harmonies, and not a single note.”42 As Drucker, McGann, Bryant, and others within the tradition of editorial theory have often argued, to edit is to transform. Importing this lesson to the digital collection bears all the difficulty of the source materials (say, LANGUAGE magazine) alongside the challenges of scholarship operating within the shifting terrain of networked databases.

In this regard, the study of the little database could find no better vantage for tracing revisions to social texts than by retracing the challenges presented by the little magazines. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker adapt McGann to construct a useful inventory of possibilities for “the periodical codes at play in any magazine,” worth citing here at length:

. . . a whole range of features including page layout, typeface, price, size of volume (not all ‘little’ magazines are little in size), periodicity of publication (weekly, monthly, quarterly, irregular), use of illustrations (colour or monochrome, the forms of reproductive technology employed), use and placement of advertisements, quality of paper and binding, networks of distribution and sales, modes of financial support, payment practices towards contributors, editorial arrangements, or the type of material published (poetry, reviews, manifestos, editorials, illustrations, social and political comments, etc.). We can also distinguish between periodical codes internal to the design of a magazine (paper, typeface, layout, etc.) and those that constitute its external relations (distribution in a bookshop, support from patrons). However, it is often the relationship between internal and external periodical codes that is most significant.43

Tracking these codes, each facet of the little magazine can generate works of scholarship in its own right. Radiating out from the material text, each magazine offers a wealth of interpretive possibilities built on the relationship between internal and external periodical codes, among textual actors, media formats, and social contexts as layers for interpretation. A thick description of these various relations—in concert with a close reading of the semiotic codes of the digital object itself—may construct a more nuanced understanding of digitized works circulating within a larger network or social text. A poetic response that deploys these vectors of signification as a means to “imagine what we don’t know” offers a similarly rich potential for understanding.

This networked poetic analysis is precisely Craig Saper’s approach to reading the “intimate bureaucracies” formed among experimental writers engaged in periodical exchange.44 Following French literary theorist Roland Barthes, Saper presents a sociopoetic mode of reading the various assemblings of “receivable” art and poetry, which find meaning in various schemes of distribution and reception. Sociopoetics are characterized by a scenario wherein the “inherently social process of constructing texts is expanded to the point that individual pages or poems mean less than the distribution and compilation machinery or social apparatus.”45 Adding to McGann’s expanded field of material hermeneutics, Saper considers the periodical in relation to Barthes’ concept of the receivable, differentiated from both the readerly texts of narrative realism and the writerly texts of modernism.46 Highlighting this third category of intimate distribution, Saper presents a mode of reading periodical-based experimental writing from the 1960s and 1970s that sidesteps the dominant art-historical discourses of pastiche within the neo-avant-gardes. Intensely intimate, collectively constructed, and decidedly off-market, Saper frames fugitive publications through the perspective that this “sociopoetic practice was the production, distribution, and use of periodicals as artworks and poetry.”47 We might hear this sociopoetic practice echoing Bernstein’s “Conspiracy of ‘Us’” from a periodical perspective:

We see through the structures which we have made ourselves & cannot do even for a moment without them, yet they are not fixed but provisional . . . that poetry gets shaped—informed and transformed—by the social relations of publication, readership, correspondence, readings, &c (or, historically seen, the ‘tradition’), and, indeed, that the poetry community(ies) are not a secondary phenomenon to writing but a primary one.48

Perhaps the most remarked upon aspect of periodical studies from the avant-garde through to contemporary digital iterations is the construction of groups and the constellation of traditions or politics within group formations. The magazine provides one material basis for unraveling these knotty issues. Beyond reading exceptional objects or symptomatic inscriptions, the magazine provides literary history with networks of association to chart and vast bodies of interrelated documents to map. Within a single issue of LANGUAGE magazine alone, a robust network map of contributors might draw out community dynamics in ways that an essay might find difficult to approximate. This approach, for example, has been deployed insightfully in the network graph of linked data presented by the Black Bibliography Project: mapping titles, publishers, and personal names listed in William Andrews’s “Annotated Bibliography of Afro-American Autobiography 1760–1865.”49 Similarly successful network mapping projects have been deployed at the Modernist Journals Project and elsewhere. For our purposes here, it should suffice to note that much has already been written on the networks of association and sociality through which the Language Writing movement coheres.

Beyond group formation, Saper recovers threads in his alternate history that enable us to observe that, “from the perspective of the twenty-first century, assemblings [periodicals] may look like experiments in networked productions in general and serve as a model for electronic media networks.”50 As forms of experimental archiving continue to evolve across the dominant social media platforms of the present, the study of periodicals presents both a robust frame for a distributed sociopoetics and a wide array of alternate futures for networked digitization. Immediate analogies are abundant. Scholes and Wulfman figure Pound’s periodical series “Studies in Contemporary Mentality” as an exercise in blogging (“something like contemporary bloggers, discussing what comes to hand, taking up a new project each week”).51 Similarly, extended engagement across issues of magazines and sociopoetic publications were intensified by the development of forms like the poetry listserv or personal blog. Independent publishing throughout the mimeograph revolution anticipates instant digital “publication” (“in a very real sense, almost anyone could become a publisher”), and the list goes on from here.52 In this way, digital initiatives like Eclipse both expand and continue the dialogue initiated by the formal and material codes of little magazines.

It has become commonplace since Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media that previous forms of media make up all “new” media. In Remediation, David Bolter and Richard Grusin characterize this process of remediation as the double logic of hypermediacy and transparency: “Our culture wants both to multiply its media and to erase all traces of mediation: ideally, it wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them.”53 For precisely this reason, attention to historical formats of time-based networked distribution (the periodical publication) has much to offer the study of contemporary digital collections. If “all mediation is remediation,” as Bolter and Grusin argue, and “older media can also remediate newer ones,” there is no aspect of media communication that escapes the forces of remediation, including archival digitization and transcoding.54 The importance of this approach is a recurrent aspect of digital media studies. Take, for example, the way in which Lev Manovich has demonstrated the computer’s cultural operations according to the history of cinema, or Lisa Gitelman’s imaginative explorations of the character of digital markup languages via “the editors’ barbed wire” in the six-volume transcription of Emerson’s journal.55

Experimental writing magazines have always offered this kind of protracted catalog of effects, given the relative freedom from normative economic pressures as a consequence of their playful poetics. The array of bibliographic codes, experimental arrangements, distribution mechanisms, and formal inventions on full display in the archive of little magazines provide various passages that highlight the complexities of digital platforms operating today. It’s difficult to conclude this media-historical line of reasoning without recourse to a soft citation of Friedrich Kittler’s maxim: “Media determine our situation, which (nevertheless or for that reason) merits a description. . . . Operating at their limits, even antiquated media become sensitive enough to register the signs and indices of a situation.”56 In this way, the “antiquated media” of Xerox and mimeograph textual reproduction might register the signs and markers of a digital situation indexed by Eclipse. In the other direction, the periodical positioning of Eclipse may offer a momentary glimpse back into the medial situation of the objects it remediates. Taken together, Eclipse and the little magazines like LANGUAGE that it hosts, work to mutually illuminate the conjunction of material-print histories alongside contingent digital networks.

Periodical Preservation

Like the solar event invoked in the site’s title, Eclipse flickered out of sight in December of 2012. Due to an oversight in the restructuring of university servers—as much a surprise to the editors as the site’s users—one day the collection simply vanished. When I began this chapter, the site was functioning regularly at an “.edu” URL hosted by the University of Utah. Over the decade since, it has run smoothly at a new address, eclipsearchive.org, on a server hosted by XMission, a company based in Salt Lake City with a particular devotion to hosting sites for local businesses and nonprofits. Before either of these iterations, from early 2002 until the spring of 2006, Eclipse ran on Princeton University servers. After a summer offline, the site returned in the fall of 2006 through the University of Utah’s English subdomain.

Charting the rhythms of academic semesters, university technical restructurings, and Dworkin’s passage from one university position to another, the archive bears witness to a personal history alongside its material contents. The current iteration’s reliance on XMission, instead of any number of global providers, emphasizes the collection’s link to a geographic locality within global media networks. Further, the spatial coordinates of each new edition of Eclipse signal the full republication of its materials. In much the same way, each time a user loads an image, its representation is reassembled anew from its underlying code. The play of presence and absence in digital preservations, Wendy Chun reminds us, works to “create, rather than solve, archival nightmares. They proliferate nonsimultaneous enduring ephemerals.”57 Written and rewritten in each refresh of a page online, the periodical poetics of Eclipse demand new ways of registering the social text of digital files in the moment of their use. All of these relations became most clear in a moment of occultation.

In the shadow of this 2012 syzygy, sketching the contours of the site’s disappearance, we might pause for a moment to consider the de-publication of Eclipse from the internet. While offline, the files once physically inscribed to subdirectories within university servers could be found only amid the petabytes gathered by the Internet Archive in San Francisco. As anyone who has lost a domain server or looked for a defunct site might tell you, there is little need to turn to the Internet Archive unless one requires access to a site no longer available online.58 However, upon browsing the haphazard collection of captures, date by date, a whole network of automated and variable processes can be traced over time. From a bibliographic perspective, the reader may thus contend with the trickier aspects of digital publication: continually updated (or disappearing) content, changing forms and formats, and a host of contextual and intertextual modulations. Each of these features dramatically impacts our understanding of the material conditions of a little database like Eclipse. Looking at the site note, aside from the occasional missing links to scanned pages or slips in HTML and CSS (cascading style sheets) markup, the site functions perfectly in its newest iteration, as though it had never returned a 404 error or lost a server. Turning instead to the partial preservation of Eclipse through the Internet Archive, the slow development of the site over time can be charted and a social text can be reconstructed from the fragments of what has been lost or gained over time.

Through this mechanism, the careful reader might explore the variantology presented through a range of captures of the site from the Internet Archive “Wayback Machine.” That is, this would be possible if the Internet Archive crawler had uniformly captured the high-resolution facsimile images of the Eclipse collection in each instance. Unfortunately, that was never the case. As Dworkin has described the “negative ontology” of the library, wherein “libraries are defined not by what they have on their shelves, but by what they exclude from them,” the Internet Archive records of Eclipse might best be understood by what they lack.59 Through lapses and shadows, the remnants of Eclipse in the Internet Archive alert us to how the site was used. Only the most popular pages and most accessed works are captured. A web crawler called Alexa (a reflexive counterhomage to the burning library of Alexandria) determines what is shown and how often sites are preserved based on usage statistics. For example, in 2012, there was not enough time for the images of Gil Ott’s Paper Air magazine to yet be paged through by the site’s users, nor enough exposure for Clark Coolidge’s Polaroid to be fully captured. Other facets of the archival interface are not captured at all: javascript navigational tools and unrecorded images mar the page with “Error” notifications, red X’s, and broken symbols.60 Within this glitch-ridden record, the persistent presence of LANGUAGE marks the magazine’s continued use. Popular interest and course syllabi are sure to maintain the magazine’s Alexa ranking and hence its preservation. The Internet Archive records of Eclipse remind us that, unlike paper books whose sustained use promises disintegration, frequently accessed digital objects are only more likely to endure.

An attentive user of the Internet Archive might also gain some insight from the periodicity of Eclipse. From the twenty-three titles featured in the site’s first capture (February 15, 2002) to the most recent snapshot, a series of discrete archival release dates can be broken down for examination. The various captures of the site’s index, as presented by the Internet Archive, can be seen in the figure above. Of particular note is Alexa’s continued querying of the defunct URLs long after the site moved to a new host. Like a subscriber who was never notified about the end of a periodical, it continues to submit inquiries into a void. Collating the data contained on captures of Eclipse pages that feature a full site inventory—first titled “facture.html” and later changed to “titles.html”—we could reconstruct the release patterns of Eclipse as published by an external entity. From this vantage, it is as though Dworkin continually edits a magazine that is only periodically distributed by an unpredictable algorithmic publisher. Insofar as the previous iterations of Eclipse have ceased to exist on their original university servers, the Internet Archive has subsumed them into a massive archival publication. As the calendar view of the Internet Archive captures of Eclipse notes, “this calendar view maps the number of times http://www.princeton.edu/eclipse/facture.html was crawled by the Wayback Machine, not how many times the site was actually updated.” The authorship of these pages is maintained by an automated crawler rather than the editor of the site. With lapses of months between captures, it is not possible to recreate the precise movements of Eclipse’s construction, although a general arc can be calculated between the data points. Of course, this system of preservation discourages such computation. Like Eclipse, the Internet Archive is a platform built toward the use function of preservation. Unlike Eclipse, the periodicity of the automated capture process is its most significant feature: these are not just sites to be read in general, as stable texts, but sites at a given moment in time to be read through the variantology of the fluid text. In this way, it also diverges from digital humanities collections geared toward analytics beyond questions of periodicity and variance. Rather than discourage these types of readings, they are precisely what the site demands. Variant and periodical codes are made valuable not just because they demonstrate the ongoing preservations of the collection but also as a metric to index how the collection itself changes over time, like any little magazine online or offline.

Focusing on the periodicity of use, these intermittent site captures encourage retroactive engagements with the most stable elements of the site’s infrastructure. Based on the arbitrarily periodic nature of the Internet Archive, Eclipse, already diverging from the special collection or perverse library, now inches toward the formal properties of the periodical, the generic conventions of which anticipate so much of the time-stamped internet. If lacking in discrete paper-based “issues” of the site, the Internet Archive reveals an arbitrary periodicity that may nevertheless be tracked. In every regard, the little database, like the little magazine, is subject to the circulation of content over time. Updating the periodical codes that constitute the online collection’s material text, we might expand the “range of features” enumerated by Brooker and Thacker above. This expansion may include changes in CSS and HTML, organizational features and outward links, bibliographic records (and what they exclude), embedded content on external sites and social media, usage statistics, institutional server configurations, regional prices of hosting and internet services, available screen resolution and browser affordances, software workflows for web development and document scanning, file hierarchies, hidden folders, database configuration, and file formats, among other manifold technical and social artifacts of its moment of access. Each of these may be read into “the relationship between internal and external periodical codes”61 Enfolding the magazine within the mechanism of the format, the material conditions of both may come to light only in a moment when preservation is overshadowed by accessibility, when the archivist is eclipsed by the algorithm.

This could be the strongest argument against the categorization of Eclipse as “archive.” Turning instead to the re-publication of materials within the transformative contexts of periodical release patterns in a little database, we retain the active forms of transformation at play in the performance of publication. In his writing on the collection, Dworkin rightly considers the conservative paradox of an “avant-garde archive.” This phrase, he suggests, “highlights the Janus-faced logic of all archives, which look in two direction as they realize their own position: they conservatively index the past, and they index the future with a wagered risk (or revolutionary delusion), anticipating some user and some use, some moment for which the archived material is being saved.”62 While Dworkin makes a compelling case for the feverish archival logic of preservation and presentation at play on Eclipse, one wonders whether the editorial model of the little magazine might not be a more appropriate print-based tradition for understanding a site like Eclipse. Little magazines redistribute text under significantly revised bibliographic codes; they publish new contexts and yet-unrealized conversations among various textual materials that often circulate elsewhere. The editorial selection and digital transformation that Eclipse introduces is at least as radical as these transformative elements. The site grows periodically, with “releases” not unlike the issues of a magazine. Unlike archival acquisitions, which rarely go viral online, new issues of online magazines reliably draw visitor counts, and the latter characterizes new archival drops in the Eclipse collection. In this way, the collection is never a passive recipient of materials, but an active force in redistributing text into circulation across the sociopoetic networks of the present.

Here, the orbit of our hermeneutic circle returns to LANGUAGE magazine, featured in each capture of the site, dating back to the origin of Eclipse. I contend that LANGUAGE can be seen as a metonymic conceptual arsenal within the little database of Eclipse. It emerges as such through excerpts and reviews, lost documents of the avant-garde and new provocations within historical traditions, bibliographic details, and distribution services. As Dworkin notes, by “archiving books, the archive itself adds to their bibliographic information, and the digital archive produces entirely new editions.”63 By digitizing magazines, Eclipse folds new periodical codes into each release within the ongoing shifts in its own role as a little database. There are Princeton University editions, University of Utah iterations, and independent XMission versions, each with a new bundle of contextual registers appended to the periodical codes of the magazine. Alongside this continual republication, we might consider that the LANGUAGE Distributing Service photocopied as many issues of its own magazine as were ever printed in the first place. With this reminder, we may turn to the magazine hosted by Eclipse as a scattered set of HTML documents, GIF images, and PDF files, each with a unique set of formal properties to examine.

Variable Formats

In shades of gray, the full run of LANGUAGE is hosted in both GIF facsimile images and slightly higher quality PDF reading copies. Like these images of LANGUAGE, the site itself is styled in gray tones. More precisely, the background of Eclipse can be coded as #303030. It is perhaps no accident that newer versions of Firefox present a slightly darker gray (#222222) as the most neutral background for image viewing. At any rate, the emphasis on grayness in Eclipse is of particular note in relation to the PDF format, which Gitelman argues is a kind of formal equivalent to “gray literature” in Paper Knowledge: “. . . gray in the field of library and information science because they are typically produced and circulate outside more formal publishing channels, often in small editions that can be hard to locate, prove problematic for cataloguers, and quickly become obsolete. . . . Because of the vagaries of online publication, the digital medium may itself turn communications variously gray, in other words, in ways that compound gray subgenres of the document.”64

The PDF of LANGUAGE magazine was made in February 2003, while Eclipse was still hosted by Princeton University. This is validated by the Adobe Acrobat creation data, which points to version 5.0, released in 2001, long before the OCR (optical character recognition) feature was implemented that currently affords embedded layers of searchable text in line with the facsimile images. The browsing GIF files were generated in August of 2006, when the full run of the magazine was coded into the new servers hosted by the University of Utah, and again in February of 2013 when the files were rewritten to XMission servers. When I began research on this chapter, I wrote the phrase “the page itself hosting the magazine is last modified on September 30, 2010 at 1:44:59 PM, the precise date and time that the first index to LANGUAGE was published, hypermediating the full contents and creating a new interface to the magazine as a whole.” The information was true at that writing. The exact point in time was particularly compelling in that instance, since it seemed to suggest how the publication of an index could radically alter the publication date of a release. But the time of this page’s publication has now changed, and should be revised to “05/10/2017 09:34:40,” as the current last modified HTTP date indicates. It is only the most recently refreshed edition that the user can speak of without further remediation by services like archive.org. With this metadata written into both the web page and the digital facsimile, the string of constantly disappearing dates trace the history of the archive along with its objects.

If the Internet Archive charts the temporal patterns and maps the spatial conditions of the database, the variable formats of Eclipse’s facsimile images present the most telling narratives. For the first four years of operation, the images were all presented as GIFs, encoded in a highly compressed grey scale. Despite the promise that full-resolution TIFF (tag image file format) images were being archived elsewhere, in practice the site presented only GIF files encoded for grayscale presentation. Starting in 2006, these GIF files were gradually replaced by higher resolution JPEG files (joint photographic experts group; also as JPG) in full color, and the site has variously suggested that this process is underway for all files. At the moment, however, few works in the collection retain their GIF encoding, with LANGUAGE magazine notable among them. The “lossless” pixelation of the GIF format perfectly reflects the earliest stages of the periodical’s publication patterns. Poorly transcoded images of the magazine transport the reader to a medial environment of Xerox and photocopy, of distributing services and mail networks. This is the bibliographic paradox of compression. Beneath the accelerating arc toward greater “fidelity” to analogue formats, there is a strange magic in the lo-fi defiance of the GIF image. Put differently, through a more radical transformation of the historical document, these processes of transcoding can better surface the questions of materiality in all iterations.65 As Bolter and Grusin might articulate this effect, the loss of immediacy draws attention to a range of remediating factors. Dispelling the illusion of immediacy, the “poor image” reveals deep layers of technical remediation while pointing to the historical specificity of both original and facsimile.

The GIF transcoding of LANGUAGE magazine seems to offer a prime example of the aesthetics and politics of the “poor image” theorized by Hito Steyerl: “It transforms quality into accessibility, exhibition value into cult value, . . . contemplation into distraction.”66 It is “thrust into digital uncertainty, at the expense of its own substance. . . . It is passed on as a lure, a decoy, an index, or as a reminder of its former visual self.”67 We might recall here that Dworkin notes how images on Eclipse operate according to a “continual dynamic between fidelity and degradation, accurate facsimile and serviceable impersonation,” wherein “the twin impulses of the digital archive—to preserve and to present, to reproduce and to distribute—are at fundamental odds with one another.”68 Even Cory Arcangel, an artist best known for working with highly compressed image formats, maintains that, with JPG compression, the user creates “an image which is only a shadow of its former self.”69 The alignment of these values attributed to the poor image produces a misguided appreciation of low-resolution archival objects on an internet increasingly marked by high fidelity forms of replication. Not incidentally, the same rhetoric pervades discussions of “degraded” print technologies. In a response to Steyerl entitled “The Defense of Poor Media,” Silvio Lorusso argues that “the whole history of the book, not just since the advent of digital networks, can be understood as the sacrifice of a certain idea of material quality in favor of a faster duplication or a broader reach.”70 The Gutenberg Bible was, of course, a heavily compressed form of the hand-painted medieval manuscript. By the same token, the duplicators of the “mimeograph revolution,” from which LANGUAGE stems, were a cheap and unruly offshoot of office-based exigencies.

And yet, when reading LANGUAGE magazine online, are the only qualities of note those of accessibility, cult value, distraction, and degradation? These are, of course, qualities of the image rather than the text of LANGUAGE, which remains clearly legible. Is the admittedly compressed GIF nothing but a decoy, an index, “a reminder of its former visual self” from a material text perspective? If the focus is on an absent “original”—a pristine filmic artifact, in Steyerl’s case, or the remarkably precise material substantiation of a codex, as Dworkin has articulated—these readings of the digital object bear the truth of archival duplicity. However, might it be possible to imagine these objects beyond their analog iterations, as new editions with revised material codes that are as significant, complex, and layered as the substrates from which they derive? More readers have encountered LANGUAGE magazine online than have ever handled print copies: what if we began by evaluating this reading experience in its own right? Indeed, in the case of LANGUAGE, this approach gains heightened urgency under the sign of “the resonating of the wordness of language.”71 In an expanded field of poetics concerned with material, form, and structure, it is hard to overlook the experience of the page in the process of reading, especially if that page is on a screen. The surrounding fields of bibliographic notes, suggested magazines, and residual print artifacts all amplify the specificity of the reading experience, as mediated by the digital image. As the gap between contemporary writing technologies and the paper-based networks of the mimeograph revolution continues to widen, these mediating layers only lend greater visibility to the temporal distance of the reader and present the depth of significance across medial formations subject to ongoing processes of transformation.

Despite the fact that digital objects lose “the facture and material specificity of the book or printed document as an object,” Dworkin contends for an intensive reading of precisely these bibliographic qualities in his account of Eclipse.72 As though peering through the distortions introduced by digitization, Dworkin demonstrates the ways in which even facsimile images direct the attentive reader to the semiotic codes through which the paper-based material texts continue to signify. “Hypermnesia” is built around a series of “instance[s] of the bibliographic information recorded by the archival scanning protocols for Eclipse.”73 Variously, this bibliographic data reads Dracula into the fangs of rusted staples in Lorenzo Thomas’s Dracula; typographic resistance in Tina Darragh’s Avant-Garde typeface in on the corner to off the corner; periodicity and binding techniques in Lyn Hejinian’s Gesualdo; and the significance of self-flaps in a 1981 edition of Bernstein’s Disfrutes. Each example is persuasive. Indeed, these facsimile images record a deep array of textual codes that we may project into interpretations of the small press publications digitized by Eclipse. However, reversing the direction of this analysis, we might focus not on the preservation of bibliographic traces etched by the original works, but rather on the bibliographical specificities that the digital files introduce. In so doing, a reading of LANGUAGE as a new edition within a little database that yields its own periodical and bibliographic codes may yet emerge.

In the powerful conclusion to “In Defense of the Poor Image,” Steyerl sharpens this point: “The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence: about swarm circulation, digital dispersion, fractured and flexible temporalities.”74 This is not to deny a reading of the “facture and material specificity of the book or printed document as an object,” but to call for the expansion of these specificities to include the real conditions of the objects radiating out from Eclipse, in the flexible networks of digital dispersion that facilitate their use.75 That expansion is not without its difficulties. Textual scholars must still contend for the very significance of material substrates in the literary arts, despite decades of editorial theory and material text study. Once this “facture” is fractured by new and unpredictable temporal and medial layers, each contingent on a host of technical protocols and viewing environments, the case is yet more difficult to make.

Boris Groys articulates this challenge in his article “From Image to Image File—And Back,” which examines the nonidentity of image files, oscillating between “invisible” code and visible image. Reading along with Groys we might say: “The digital image is a copy—but the event of its visualization is an original event, because the digital copy is a copy that has no visible original. That further means: A digital image, to be seen, should not be merely exhibited but staged, performed. . . . But to perform something is to interpret it, to betray it, to distort it.”76 This is perhaps the best case for a contingent or performance-based method of digital scholarship, and is written into the ethos of the creative scholarly arts theorized by McGann, Drucker, Liu, and others. To take Groys’s argument out of context, we might agree with the sentiment: “There is no such thing as a copy. In the world of digitalized images, we are dealing only with originals.”77

Reading Copy

Where Textz demonstrates the mutability between file formats, based on the textual equivalence of numerical representation, Eclipse highlights a renewed specificity to each file format in the republication of historical artifacts. In contrast to the stripped-down text files of Textz, which emphasize algorithmic use, Eclipse almost exclusively presents transcoded objects for human reading. A great irony in the site’s organization concerns the presentation of digitally re-set documents in PDF presented by links that read “Download Reading Copy.” Many of these carefully retyped documents sacrifice all traces of the material specificity of the books they transcribe in order to present “clean” reading copies to supplement the facsimile editions that define the site. However, these files are also some of the only machine-readable texts in the collection, the only artifact files that Google can easily index for its algorithms or that scholars might repurpose for in-document searches. For whom is the PDF reading copy presented? On Eclipse, each “reading copy” is an offering to potential algorithmic or human readers uninterested in the texture of the page in the digitized works. Or, in an important note of access, these two readers meet for the vision-impaired, for whom a “reading copy” requires text-to-speech functionality. Unlike the text-utility of Google Books, the GIFs and JPGs of Eclipse remain largely unsearchable relics entirely dependent on visual parsing by human readers. In particular, “poor” GIF images like those that constitute LANGUAGE online resist even the most advanced OCR software that might convert the image into a machine-readable text. This resistance mirrors the various resistances that were articulated in the poetics of LANGUAGE magazine, such as to the “accessibility” of the lyric voice or to the easy parsing of clear meaning from a text.

And yet, alongside the “read” links to issues of LANGUAGE magazine in GIF format, the user finds corresponding links to “download” full issues of the magazine for external use in PDF format.78 These PDFs present the comforting stability of a text that can be printed on paper that is 8.5 inches by 11 inches and can be read online or stored in a local folder as “documents” rather than images. The PDF is an unusual format in that it was always planned as a postscript device for printing, and became popular as an archival format for digital media only through a confluence of preferences for print-based reading habits within enterprise solutions for business documents. The ubiquity of the PDF reinforces its invisibility as a mediating format. It is remarkable that despite the fact that JSTOR (short for “journal storage”) is built entirely upon its delivery of searchable PDFs to academe, there are practically no critical studies of the PDFs on its server—Gitelman’s Paper Knowledge provides the exception that proves the rule. In contrast to the GIF images of the early Eclipse, these reading copies offer what Gitelman has isolated as a primary feature of the PDF format, “a measure of fixity because of the ways they simultaneously compare to printed documents and contrast with other kinds of digital documents that seem less fixed—less print-like—as they are used.”79 Unlike TXT, HTML, or PDF, it is exceptionally unusual to “read” images on the internet, aside from the bold face captions of the image macros that facilitate memes, article headline images, and social media clickbait. Hosting archival copies of radical press books in GIF and JPG images is an increasingly perverse endeavor, especially as the PDF expands its pervasive role as the standard for all scanned documents that circulate online. In this way, the image files of Eclipse combat the illusion of immediacy, reminding the reader that every page is a newly transcoded file.

When John Warnock developed Postscript and the PDF for Adobe Systems in 1991, the format was imagined as a solution to the transmissibility of the specifically bibliographic qualities of the page: type, layout, and size. A history of Adobe Systems, developer of the PDF, could be written through the bibliographic proclivities of its inventor.80 Aside from being part of the original team out of Xerox, Warnock is an accomplished collector of Shakespearean texts (from early quartos down through a range of ephemeral textual artifacts). His development of the PDF standard was scripted to serve both as a vehicle for the “paperless office” of the early nineties and as a way to deliver facsimile images of Shakespeare to the computer through his short-lived CD-ROM company “Octavo.”

Unlike the codex, which is bound by certain material limitations, the open-standard PDF continues to develop beyond its proprietary origins with Adobe Systems.81 Despite the fact that the format’s freely available specifications are unprofitable by necessity, Adobe may yet capitalize on more sophisticated articulations and expanded features of the PDF, the TIFF file, and the Creative Suite of applications that make these publications possible, including advanced editorial options in newer editions of Adobe Acrobat, as featured in the following interlude. Over time and responding to use patterns, the PDF has increasingly skewed toward machine reading in both bureaucratic and archival systems. With embedded text, the PDF can present facsimile images simultaneous to searchable text through automated processes that put no significant demands on a human editor. This capability facilitates everything from the JSTOR database to Google Books. Such massive data operations throw a little database premised on image files like Eclipse into sharp relief. The entire site could be indexed for full searchability, rendered machine-readable through OCR, offering a concomitant range of network graphs and semantic analyses. However, the obscurity of the image file presents a markedly different reading protocol for nonalgorithmic users who might linger between the bibliographic codes of digital formats under the influence of paper artifacts under the influence of digital formats.