The publication of Johanna Drucker’s new book, SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing, has sent me back to my notebook of drawings from our SpecLab and ARP days, the period from roughly 2000 – 2006 when, first as a grad student and then as a post-doc, I worked closely with Johanna and Jerry McGann on the lunatic fringe of digital humanities. (Jerry and I had gone down the rabbit hole some years earlier with the Rossetti Archive as well.)
These are a few of my sketches for the last iteration of the Ivanhoe Game, the one that’s still available for play. I must confess — as much as I loved the design process in all its stages — that I haven’t played a really good game of Ivanhoe since we moved away from the more prosy and simple interfaces of the Turn of the Screw game (undertaken when Geoffrey Rockwell was a visiting scholar at UVA and I wrote moves like this) and the Haruki Murakami / D. G. Rossetti games I played in the wee hours of the night with my first baby sleeping in my arms. (The Rossetti one, on Jenny, in which I imagined a company specializing in flesh-bot reproductions of Victoriana, was re-printed by Laura Mandell at Romantic Circles and in Jerome McGann’s Like Leaving the Nile.)
These images were done mostly after the process Johanna describes in her Ivanhoe chapter — although you can see, in JD’s book and in the Java application online, the on-screen rendering of some of the icons and navigation elements sketched below. A couple of the wackier ones — stemma trees that reach up to a starry sky of Ivanhoe moves — were never entirely realized. I’ll leave them without annotation.
The SpecLab years — our over-hummused, thoroughly pita’d luncheon-club heady think-tank days — were the most amazing moment in my working life as a digital humanist. Steve Ramsay, Worthy Martin, Andrea Laue, Nathan Piazza, Shane Liesegang, Ben Cummings, David Patch, Jim Allman, Geoff Rockwell, my old friends, will we see their like again?
I’m touched more than I can say that Johanna has dedicated her book to Jerry and me.
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Scholars’ Lab Podcasts
Jason
on Jun 5th, 2009
@ 4:19pm:
Thanks for posting these! Ivanhoe is such an interesting game, and one of its great features is that you can play it almost with any interface.
I’m getting ready to start some students on a stripped-down version of the game this summer.
Steve Ramsay
on Jun 5th, 2009
@ 4:24pm:
I remember Jerry McGann pulling me aside, back when I was working at IATH, and saying something like, “Enjoy this, Steve. I’ve been in this business a long time, and you can take it from me. You may never be a part of anything so intellectually invigorating again.”
He was talking about the whole scene at UVA back in the late nineties and early aughties, but the SpecLab was a particularly striking example of what he was talking about. I’ve had the great pleasure to work with a lot of very talented, brilliant people, but I don’t think I’ll ever be a part of anything so cool and intellectually energizing as the Ivanhoe Working Group.
So much of it had to do with the time. The Web still felt really *new* (I remember Nathan Piazza showing me this thing called a “wiki,” before there was such a thing as Wikipedia), and so there was a sense that we were on the verge of an enormous revolution. The result was a “meeting” that was more like the brainstorming sessions of some kind of art collective. I’ll never forget it.
Thanks for this, Beth. Those pictures are making me nostalgic.
Sterling Fluharty
on Jun 5th, 2009
@ 10:59pm:
It is easy for me to forget that the digital humanities does indeed have a history. I guess I am still in wonder over the newness of it all. Thank you for giving us some small glimpse of what it was like in the early years. I think it is telling that historians really have no social histories of their own profession. Perhaps things will work out differently this time around.
Bethany Nowviskie
on Jun 6th, 2009
@ 12:34pm:
@Jason: I’ve been racking my brain and wracking my old email folders to try to find a reference to a book we discovered long after the Ivanhoe design process, in which a British professor of English describes similar offline ludic exercises. I’ll ask Jerry for the name and post it. My husband is the Chandler Sansing who has published on using Ivanhoe concepts in his middle-school English classroom. There was at one time a rash of Ivanhoe-playing in the local school system here — all pen-and-paper games.
@Steve: Let me know if you ever see it happening somewhere again, so I can pack my bags. (Honestly, though — I think UVA’s about to get its groove back.)
@Sterling: Youngster, get off my lawn! Actually, that SpecLab episode was just *yesterday* in the history of the digital humanities. I’m happy Johanna has taken the time to document it while it’s fresh in our minds — and before I tossed out all my working notes (like I trashed all my early Rossetti Archive-building emails). If I turn up any other sketches or notes of interest, I’ll post them.
Johanna has written to say we weren’t the lunatic fringe, but rather the lunatic core.