Itiration, Iritation, Iteration
Due to the mechanics of writing for a web-based medium, it streamlined the writing process for me to create the multimedia content, add images and video to Scalar as media, write the pages around these objects, and then stitch them together into a chapter.[1] This mode of writing was so focused on the objects that I began to experiment with the visual vocabulary and navigational features of the chapter. I developed the chapter’s structure around Williams’ letter to his son, using the four subjects of his lantern show to organize my approach to the material archive. The natural history lantern lecture had an accompanying script, enabling me to describe what kinds of narrative strategies were recommended by the manufacturer. The kings of England slides afforded me an opportunity to trace the relationship between slides and print sources. The scriptural subject would include a sequence of several pages that reconstructed what these images would have looked like when they were projected (and how this ultimately undermined Williams’ theology). The chapter would close with a slide of martyrs as a means to discuss Victorian reactions to Williams’ own death. Remediating Companion to the Improved Phantasmagoria Lantern created an opportunity for me to develop a table structure that not only mimicked the visual layout of Carpenter and Westley’s catalog but also facilitated exploring slides and images by offering a macroscopic view. The design of this page worked so well that I adapted this approach throughout the chapter, using tables to organize Polynesian objects and to compare different editions of the announcement of Williams’ death.
Unfortunately, this produced an incredibly convoluted structure that did not follow the chapter template that I had described in my introduction. In an effort to reconcile the object-oriented structure with the task-based one, I created a visual chapter outline that contained clickable icons. These linked to the pages and subsections that represented the beginning of the sections on lantern show content, cultural context, and publication strategies, thereby addressing the discrepancy between the chapter’s intellectual movements and the website’s table of contents. The visual outline provided a structure that was different from the website’s table of contents. As I was building this chapter, I was writing reflections on the techniques that I used to represent materials in a digital environment. “Hypermediation and Navigation” represents an early attempt to describe how digitally remediating magic lantern ephemera was shaping the visual layout and navigational features of the dissertation. What emerged from this reflection was a realization that remediation was central to the dissertation, not simply as a means to talk about my application of digital tools but also as a framework for thinking about how nineteenth-century technologies remediated the lantern show. From there, the dissertation’s intellectual and mechanical structure fell into place as performing an “archaeology of mediation” became my focus.
[1] This workflow works well for any web-based platform, including Esri Storymaps and Jekyll pages. To keep track of drafts, I wrote in Google docs and then cut-and-pasted my prose into Scalar. As the project progressed, these Google doc drafts would include an increasing amount of HTML because it was faster for me to cut-and-paste code directly into the document than to add tags through Scalar’s interface.