The Z-Axis: A Haunting of Digital Objects

This wasn't what I expected it to look like.

It was a tepid fall day when I held a copy of Woman’s Home Companion for the first time, the kind of day you see often in South Bend, Indiana—sharp breeze and the impending threat of winter in the air. Or, perhaps it was a warm day, hot for that time of year, leaving us shedding our coats and sweaters as we entered Hesburgh Library. Maybe we had a storm warning, or a thunderstorm, or maybe there was nothing remarkable at all.

I couldn’t tell you much about the weather that day. But I could tell you about the collective grin worn by my fellow classmates from our Gender, Print Culture, and Modernity class. We were studying periodicals—the feminist press, the little magazine—all of the things that I, admittedly, tended to avoid before enrolling in the course, a fact that seems silly to think about now. From day one Barbara Green had kept our expectations realistic: the archive? Overwhelming in scale. Our scope? Barely scratching the surface. And because of the nature of periodical studies we had worked within a digital realm to access the documents we were studying. But after some scheduling, some manuevering and I’m sure a lot of grace from the universe, our class was able to get our hands on physical copies of a variety of periodicals—and I mean literally get our hands on them.

Maybe you’re thinking I’m exaggerating the experience, that there is no way this hour and fifteen minute long class changed the way I viewed the collective history of periodicals that drastically. After all, I’m a writer by nature, a poet by trade, and an avid theater and film lover by choice: dramatizing is my bread and butter. There’s no way holding some flimsy magazine was that profound, you might be thinking, what is this, the meet-cute of the academic world? And maybe it was. Interacting with the periodicals without the mediation of a screen didn’t change my perspective, but instead my perception. Our experience with the object of the periodical recontexualized how we viewed them, literally and figuratively. Take for example our, what seemed to be, collective experience with seeing Woman’s Home Companion for the first time, in person.

Woman’s Home Companion was published from 1873 to 1957. It was a monthly magazine that was circulated in America, a magazine that worked with authors such as Willa Cather and John Steinbeck. Publishing stories, poetry, household articles, woodcut images, work-from-home ideas, trinket ads, and more, Woman’s Home Companion hit their peak circulation in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Now, imagine a woman sitting at a table, flipping through her newest copy of Woman’s Home Companion. What do you see? How is she holding the magazine? Is it laid out on the table in front of her, or in her lap? Does she hold it in one hand while she uses the other to bounce her sleeping baby, or apply her Guerlain Paris lipstick, before snapping the lid back on the top, spinning the tube in her hand while she reads about patching trousers? Personally, I imagined a Guerlain girl, flipping through the pages, bored at this week’s ads or imagery.

Until I saw the April 1914 print: 15.5 inches in length, 10.5 inches in width closed, or about 21 inches opened and laid flat. This was not a magazine you could hold one handed, while aimlessly puttering with your other hand. This was a statement. It was a space-taker, claiming table tops or coffee tables. It was a shield, separating you from the rest of the world in the same way that a newspaper might. It demanded to be seen, whether across a room or right in front of you. The duration of class was filled with echoes of the same sentiment—This wasn’t what I expected it to look like.

Your Point?

As odd as it may seem after my musings over the life changing effect of my own physical interaction, this isn’t a manifesto for a return to the artifact as object, nor is it a rejection of the rapidly digitizing archive. On a graph where the X axis is the digital archive, and the Y axis is the physical archive, I want to imagine a Z axis: an intersecting point of both digital and physical, one that reconstitutes the object back into 3-D using virtual reality. In an interview with Revue Française d’études Américaines, Johanna Drucker said, “The great benefit of having multiple perspectives is that each provides a piece the other does not…The cross-fertilization is generative.” Admittedly, Drucker was speaking in regards to her experience as both a poet and academic. However, the cross-fertilization between the physical archive and the digital archive is where I believe the most transformative conversations could be taking place.

I view the unique differences each of the two states of the archive carry, the differences between the digital and the physical, as “additives” and “absences.” The language of “good” and “bad” carries an indictment of right/wrong or this/that. Instead of insisting we choose which archive we utilize more often, or which archive is more authentic, I want to look at how we can utilize the absences from both archives to create a new object, one that still resides in the virtual space, but allows for a more tactile experience, especially for those researchers, students, and individuals who may otherwise never be able to see the archive in person, but wish to engage with these materials.

In addition to…

To fully understand what absences between the digital and physical archive are available for development it’s important to acknowledge what additives each format already has. Turning first towards the physical archive, as demonstrated by our collective class experience, the interaction with the physical archive of periodicals provides a perception altering experience. There is a physical manifestation of the object in the mind that occurs via tactile handling. I feel inclined to call a perception shift of this nature a “realizing” of the object, similar to the difference between concrete language and abstract language. The object itself is the concrete language that confirms or denies the abstract scenarios we have created in our minds, these daydreams of the consumers we never knew. Is it possible that the physical handling of the material could bring us one step closer to narrowing the temporal gap between myself, and that Guerlain girl sitting at her table in 1935? That’s the abstraction I’m aiming to solidify—this space between us. Which is where utilizing the digital archive comes into play.

There’s an impossibility of closing that space if we can’t reach the texts, if we can’t explore what exists, if we can’t discover to begin with. The digital archive has brought a new kind of searching and discovering. We can cross reference faster than ever, with developing search technologies that can target keywords or phrases across this seemingly endless expanse of materials.

Re: Absentia

Here we lack. Each archive has filled a space, and has in turn left a void. It’s in this emptiness that the unknown exists. In that unknown is something to be found. And isn’t discovery the spark of creativity?

There are many absences in the archives. However, I can’t stop thinking about my imagined Guerlain girl and how the act of handling the object itself shifted my perception of this character I had drafted in my mind. When I started this essay I had big goals to talk about all of these overlapping absences between the digital archive and the physical archive. I wanted to tackle accessibility, affordability, tactile handling, digital distribution, and morality. I’ve even written the beginnings of some of these thoughts. But every time I pull away from perception, and the difference between handling the object, and navigating the digital space I feel haunted. Haunted by the Guerlain girl—she's asking me to keep searching, to find her somewhere between the copy and the code, to bridge the gap so that others can find her too.

Me, May, and the Guerlain Girl

Stick with me.

The year is 1881. In the cacophonous town of Chicago, a little girl is born to her mother, Charlotte Maria (Bull) Massee, and father, Francis Spink Massee. She is the third of five children, and at age five she will move with her family to Milwaukee, where she will graduate from public school at age 16, and continue to further her education.

She will love drawing, painting, and reading. She will go on to work in the publishing industry, becoming most well known for establishing two out of three of the Junior Book divisions in separate publishing houses in the United States. She will work with writers and artists such as Don Freeman (Corduroy), Leo Politi (Juanita), Marguerite de Angeli (The Door in the Wall), and Hilda Van Stockum (The Borrowed House).

She was the first full-time editor of the critical review publication Booklist. She will be the first woman to join the American Institute of Graphic Arts. In 1959 she will be awarded the American Institute of Graphic Arts AIGA Medal. She will be the first woman to win the award.

Her name is May.

Stick with me.

The year is 1972. Kansas State Teachers College in Emporia, Kansas, now known as Emporia State University, holds a dedication for the May Massee Collection. The University houses the largest collection of materials from May Massee’s time in the world of publishing, including original drawings and illustrations, manuscripts, and audio recordings from dozens of authors. It is housed in Massee’s office, which was transported from Viking Press in New York City to be reconstructed in the university's library. The window that once looked out onto the bustling streets now looks out into the library’s stacks.

Stick with me.

The year is 2017. I’m in the middle of my undergraduate degree, studying Digital Media and Communications at the time. Three of my friends have a video game podcast and they extended an invitation for me to join them. I become the group's “casual gamer,” with a love of video games, but a lack of interest in being the most up-to-date with things like operating systems, game releases, or the social drama in the digital sphere. The purpose of my joining the team was to bring a lighter view, something less serious, something looking for fun over form.

We’re in the middle of recording an episode when we begin discussing accessibility in gaming for those who have medical conditions that affect their motor skills, or those who experience any sort of hindrance in a game based on medical conditions that most developers don’t consider throughout production. It's a conversation that evolves into something that I think of often with digital interfaces: how do we make digital interactions more inclusive on an experiential level, not just an access level.

Have you ever heard of Moss? my friend asks.

The green stuff on logs. I counter. Obviously.

He laughs.

No, the video game. It’s a VR game. The main character is a deaf mouse that uses sign language. You’d love it.

Stick with me.

The year is 2018 and I am working through the final semesters of my Bachelor degree at Weber State University, in Ogden Utah.

Stick with me.

The year is 2018 and 1,043 miles away, then PhD candidate Dr. Brady D. Lund, and archivist Shari Scribner begin working on bringing a fragment of Emporia State University’s May Massee collection into the plane of virtual reality. The project launches in June of that year.

Stick with me.

The year is 2019 and then PhD candidate Dr. Brady D. Lund and archivist Shari Scribner publish their article “Developing Virtual Reality Experiences for Archival Collections: Case Study of the May Massee Collection at Emporia State University” in The American Archivist. The goal of their project was met. After successfully creating and programming a section of the May Massee collection, Lund and Scribner were able to overcome one of the first obstacles to accessing a collection of objects: physical distance.

In 2016 the collection had 69 in-person visits, 233 in 2017, and 186 in 2018. However, after its launch date in 2018 the collection had 241 virtual visits. The last reported numbers were in 2019, only taking into consideration the months of January - April (when the article was published). The May Massee collection had 81 in person visits by April, and 132 virtual visits by the same time.

Stick with me.

The year is 2020. My partner and I are opening Christmas presents. Our tradition is simple: one “larger” gift (usually an item off an agreed upon list), and a few smaller trinkets, if that. When I unwrapped the Oculus Quest, the most affordable but advanced VR headset for the time, I had no questions about what game I was downloading first.

“Moss” was a game like I’d never had before. It opens with a fairytale-like story, complete with a grimoire style book that tells the prologue. As a player you are transporated into the book itself, and the experience is practically cinegraphic. While the visual rendering was breathtaking, the game was simple to understand yet challenging enough to be entertaining. Not to mention the character design. My friend was right. I fell head over heels for Quill, a deaf mouse that makes her way through puzzles with your help, defeating miniature foes as the game progresses.

What captured my attention was the fact that Quill was small. Not because she was a character you played on a screen you held in your hands, or because she was confined to a 3840 x 2160 pixelated screen in your living room. She was small because she had been designed to be perceived as small. As a player you are cast the role of a masked, glowing orb, and unlike other games, Quill seems to be aware of your existence, literally looking up at you from below as she communicates her needs and wishes. The puzzles appeared as intricate board games that would take up the space of a dining table. Granted, sometimes Quill has to be the size of a rat for the game to function, but I love her all the same.

Stick with me.

The year is 2022. I am writing a third draft of this article for my final project and I am doubting myself. As I write I am consumed by a cavern of worry: what gives me the right to worry about the archive, will people think I’d prefer a digital world to a physical one, what are the moral obligations of the archive, what are the ways we demand a moral obligation of the archive, how can I talk about the ephemeral nature of both the digital and the physical archive without making the very people I admire upset, or uncomfortable. My article has fallen off track and so I start from the beginning—with perception and the idea of the Z axis.

Two things can be true at once: I need a break, and I need to keep writing.

Two things can be true at once: I plan my next break [some sort of game as an incentive for writing the opening paragraph again] and I click on the next link in my list of possible resources [an article written by Dr. Brady D. Lund and Shari Scribner].

Two things can be true at once: I see May Massee Virtual Archive across my screen and I think of Quill.

Two things can be true at once: She does, and doesn’t exist. The Guerlain girl, that is. She’s back again—sitting on my carpet with a copy of The Little Review held against her chest. We glance at the box under my coffee table, the one covered in fabric and a zipper that sticks. I can’t help but laugh when she asks if I want to play a game.

But First: The Ghost in the Archive

Dr. Lund and Shari Scribner’s experiment with the May Massee collection showed a clear rise in viewership of the collection, given the opportunity. In the article’s conclusion they state:

“Virtual reality does not rival a physical visit to the archives, but it does give a taste of the collection to those who otherwise could not experience it. As archives and museums expand how they engage the public, VR offers a way to reach the public where they are and draw them into a collection.”

While May Massee Virtual Reality Experience allows those who may not have been able to access it otherwise a glimpse into the collection, it also allowed the objects of the collection to exist on the digital plane of existence in the viewers homes. The interaction acts as a viewing, but also as a conjuring, a summoning of the past into the present, both in object—the books/objects of the collection accessed through the VR experience—and in space—utilizing the reconstructed office of Massee as the location that virtual visitors were “placed in”.

This kind of haunted summoning holds affordances for viewers that neither the physical nor digital archive can provide a visitor. The digital archive gives researchers and interactors access outside of the bounds of the archive location, but remains a more passive experience, with the majority of motion, such as the turn/scroll of a page, relying on the mediating device itself, like a phone or a laptop. Physical archive interactions are active and demand a physical component to access information within the object, but must typically, however, remain in the location of the archival space, such as the library or museum. A virtual experience, while not completely negating either absence of the archives, has the potential to offset some of these missing pieces from both archives.

The virtual space insists upon some kind of physical interaction, giving visitors a reason to turn around and examine the space, or move controls to point and click on hotspots of information within the virtual object. In the May Massee experience most interactive objects were set at the eye level, allowing visitors to easily see the digital materials which they could interact with. The few elements that were not at eye level, such as a carving on the office ceiling, was indicated towards with the use of auditory cues and directions. They “intentionally selected and arranged every object in the experience, just as a film director would do. The aim was to take advantage of every possible aspect of the VR design space.” Lund and Scribner even used visitor interaction feedback to make adjustments to the experience.With information gathered on where virtual visitors were choosing to spend their time looking in the collection Lund and Scribner were able to add more auditory components to give guests alternate ways of gleaning information without reading.

Virtual experiences also combat geographical access issues by allowing virtual visitors to access the collection through devices such as the Google Cardboard, an extremely cost effective option that currently ranges in price from $7-$40. The costs that can be incurred with travel to reach physical archival objects can feel astronomical in comparison, depending on a visitor's distance from the archive itself. And there are other costs that the virtual experience actively reduces, ones we can’t always put a price on.

In the aforementioned interview with Johanna Drucker, she says that:

“Not ‘everything’ is or will be digital. Digital files are not archival or permanent. Digital technology is ephemeral and vulnerable. And digital networking has very high ecological and political costs. Not only is the digital not immaterial, it is complexly, contingently, and expensively material.”

However, the physical archive itself carries its own ecological and political costs. With many archives residing within the academic system, an individual's access can be severely limited to the physical archive not just by distance, but also entry into a specific collegiate sphere. The admittance process is preceded by education systems that have yet to fully combat the disparities among students that fall outside of privileged race, class, sexual orientation, or gender. A virtual experience that permits access to these same archival documents can start to break down aspects of the socio-political barriers to the archive.

While the digital archive is not permanent, or archival, the physical archive itself has its own impermanence. Virtual experience could potentially limit the daily wear and tear of documents that are accessed more frequently. If a student or researcher is looking for a more immersive experience than the digital archive, but doesn't necessarily require a physical interaction with the object itself, the virtual interaction stands as a desirable option. While virtual reality will “likely will never be viewed as a substitute for the ‘real thing,’... it can be better than no access to a collection at all.”

I want to utilize the virtual archive experience to bring the ghosts of the archive into a 3-D plane of existence. In her essay “Ghosts in the Archive” Jennifer Lloyd believed that there, within the archive, existed literary ghosts, able to be seen with “a change in perspective” and that “a literary ghost enlarges the field of our visual (and temporal and spatial) perception.” I too believe these literary ghosts can change our field of vision, our perspective, our perception. If only we have patience enough to conjure them.

Ghosting the Guerlain Girl

I want to summon the Guerlain girl. I want to be with her while she sits on her stoop, and offer her a lucky strike. I want to sit in this haunted space together while we read the next installment of May Sinclair’s Mary Oliver. Instead of pushing farther away from the digital sphere, I want to pierce through it.

These virtual experiences need not be overwhelming. They can be as simple as forced perception experiences comparing the size of the objects. On the otherhand, with the developing technologies in the video game industry, I also believe that the virtual experiences can be pushed into an even further interactive space; lining up woodcut images for a feminist press within a virtual office, laying out an issue of Votes for Women and sending it to the virtual streets, reading Woman’s Home Companion in the Guerlain girl’s home in 1935, turning the pages with integrated technologies.

I’m not sure I’ll ever lose the Guerlain girl from my mind, just as I will always find my way back to Margaret Anderson, and Katherine Mansfield. I’m not sure this haunting is one of history, or one of person. These archive ghosts bubble beneath the surface of every book, every periodical, every magazine I read. It’s a haunting of the archive, it’s a haunting of the editors, it’s the ghosts of the past, but perhaps, more importantly, the ghost of connection.

Can you see her now?

Sources

Brady D. Lund, Shari Scribner; Developing Virtual Reality Experiences for Archival

Collections: Case Study of the May Massee Collection at Emporia State University. The American

Archivist 1 September 2019; 82 (2): 470–483. doi: https://doi.org/10.17723/aarc-82-02-07

Drucker, Johanna. « An interview with Johanna Drucker on Poetry, Research, Digital Humanities

and their future », Revue française d’études américaines, vol. 151, no. 2, 2017, pp. 86-97.

Loyd, Jennifer. (2021). Ghosts in the Archive. West Branch, 97, 40

“May Massee Collection.” Emporia State University,

https://www.emporia.edu/libraries-archives/special-collections-archives/access/special-

collections/may-massee-collection/.

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