Projecting
This is a small sample of my digital projects. Some are ongoing, while others have been completed. This list does not include larger collaborative projects conducted at previous institutions or ongoing work at my current position at the American Antiquarian Society. For a complete list of my digital projects, please contact me.
Projector Poetry
Projector Poetry
https://twitter.com/projectorpoetry
December 2019
Projector Poetry is a Twitterbot created in December 2019. The project began in the spring of 2019 when I began to digitize my personal library; in March, there were over 7,000 titles in the collection. The digitization process started with the titles categorized as “poetry.” The automated account @ProjectorPoetry randomly extracts a single line of verse from the first 400 titles digitized.
The Project is part of a series of experiments tied to the digitization of my personal library. These works question the meanings of material collections and their transformation into the digital. They also explore the ways we read, collect, organize, preserve, and share text. This part of the series might also be read as a remix project—each line of verse, a sample. It wants to see what happens when texts collide.
Revolutionary Renderings
Revolutionary Renderings
July 2017
Revolutionary Renderings is an exercise in creating kinetic poetry using After Effects. As users click through the web-based document, text morph into a word clouds that take the shape of the author’s silhouette. The texts selected here are key documents from the American Revolutionary period.
Texts represented in this project include:
Francis Hopkinson’s A Pretty Story (1774)
Thomas Jefferson’s A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)
John Adam’s “Novanglus” Essays (1774-1775)
John Trumbull’s McFingal: a modern epic poem (1775, 1782)
Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis (1776)
Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Papers (1787-1788)
Philip Freneau’s American Independence, an Everlasting Deliverance from British Tyranny (1778)
Roving Eye Press
Roving Eye Press
2012-Present
Roving Eye Press, initially founded in the late 1920's by Bob Brown and co-managed by his wife Rose, was part of a larger literary and artistic movement of small presses that served the modernist avant-garde. Those presses included Hogarth Press, Ovid Press, Shakespeare & Company, Black Sun Press, Hours Press, and Contact Press, among others.
Roving Eye boasted an impressive circle of readers that included Kay Boyle, Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein, and Langston Hughes. The press was mobile in both geography (moving with Brown from the spa town Bad-Ems, Germany, to Cagnes-sur-mer, France, and much later, in the 1950’s, to New York City) and scope (publishing art, poetry, political pamphlets and even cookbooks).
In 2014, a small group of some of Bob Brown’s (Robert Carlton Brown II) great grandchildren together with a group of scholars re-launched Roving Eye Press. The group has, in turn, commissioned editor-scholars, artist-designers, printers, and production supervisors to start republishing the most important books from Roving Eye Press.
Maryland By Mail
Maryland By Mail
2012-2016
MD BY MAIL was a digital archive and scholarly experiment in critical-making designed to explore the visual culture of Maryland post offices. It consisted of three components: (1) a free tour guide-exhibition catalog; (2) an augmented reality walking tour and mapping project, transforming the mundane experience of visiting the post office into a tourist attraction; and (3) a digital exhibition and archive, which included my collection of postal ephemera and memorabilia.
Sections highlight the architecture of some post offices in the region; the Works Progress Administration (WPA) post office murals commissioned during the Great Depression (and their artists); Baltimore’s streetcars and railway post offices; postal routes and other professional and bureaucratic texts; and even historic post cards depicting these sites (which include others' travels and memories).
Here, the post office is not examined as a business, a governmental department, or even a civic institution. Instead, the project asks the question “What if we view the post office as a work of art?” While this tour addressed local history, art, and architecture, the project is intended as an interventionist work that criticized public space and memory, as well as collecting, touring, and publishing.
The ELASTIC Textbook
The ELASTIC Textbook
2016
The Electronic Liberal Arts and Sciences Text Instruction Course (ELASTIC) was part of an orientation guide to the Digital Humanities and the Digital Publishing Lab at the University of Maryland Baltimore County.
The textbook is an electronic, interactive resource and “how to” guide for those interested in the history and development of the Digital Humanities and in developing their own digital projects.
The course walked users through four different types of DH projects: (1) text-centric practices that used tagging, mark-up languages and metadata; (2) large online projects and virtual organizations dedicated to innovative new modes of learning and research that emphasize community, sharing, and open-access; (3) experimental works in the Humanities that break new ground and invent rhetorical, writing, and publishing tools and practices for the Internet—emphasizing H’MMM (Humanities, Movies, Music and Media); and (4) projects related to social media publishing and mobile devices, including Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Extended Reality (ER) technologies.