Alongside the books listed, you cite three archives in the field examination proposal: UbuWeb, Eclipse, and PennSound. Naturally, it’s impossible to “read” these sites in any traditional sense of the word. How might one perform a reading of the database in this instance? Discuss the sites in relation to the three fields comprising your proposal.

NOSTALGIA FOR A LOST ORDER IS A FORM OF NOISE THAT NOISE HAS USES IS FAIRLY OBVIOUS TO WHOEVER READS THE NEWSPAPER OR LISTENS TO PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES THEY CREATE A BARRIER THROUGH WHICH IT IS NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE TO HEAR OR SPEAK TO WRITE POETRY TODAY IS TO ATTEMPT TO COMMUNICATE OVER A VERY NOISY CHANNEL . . . IN THEORY IT IS POSSIBLE TO COMMUNICATE EVEN OVER A CHANNEL OF NEARLY UNLIMITED NOISE WITH SUITABLE METHODS OF CODING HOW IF THE NOISY CHANNEL IS ALSO IN OUR OWN HEAD.

— David Antin, some/thing, 1965

If the generic format of my answer to the first questions can be marked by an academicized style complete with the density of references proper to bibliographic scholarship, the following exposition is modeled on a variety of new media writing technologies that compete with classic modes of narrative engagement in database culture. Following Antin’s method of thinking-while-writing (submitting a talk poem may be too radical for this forum) alongside the stunningly contemporary manifesto above, reprinted in Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005, this answer attempts to perform a reading of the database within genre conventions including the essay, memoir, digital movie, network transcription, and archival periodical. Naturally, only the first two of these genres can be presented within this document. However, the attached appendices perform tasks integral to my argument here. Further, each engages certain formal properties of the three databases under consideration. The basic proposition behind this answer attempts to reply to the possible modes in which I might “perform a reading of the database in this instance” with tactics that by necessity lie beyond the scope of the formal requirement of the exam. Given this arrangement, it should prove helpful to begin by describing this supplemental activity as an introduction to the writing performance featured on this page. After McGann, we might note the role of deformance in this response, both in terms of the database and the exam procedure. Or rather, following McLuhan’s citation of Lamartine—the book arrives too late—we open with descriptions of appendices as an entry point into the database.

Appendix II—Periodical Tumblr
http://dss-field-exam.tumblr.com/

                        Beginning with the title, “UPenn ENGL Field Exam 24Hour Periodical [DSS 2012]” dictated by the letter-count constraints of Tumblr’s titling mechanism, this site confuses periodical, citation, and digital archive. As a formal analog to the Eclipse archive, the Tumblr page produces image facsimiles of the pages cited in selected texts consulted in the writing of this exam. Strictly a twenty-four hour experiment, the Tumblr highlights the difficulties of imagining the periodical format from an archival standpoint, not to mention the more generalized problems in identifying the temporality of new media objects. The images remain unsearchable, presented in JPG format. Built-in Tumblr presets for images are deployed for both thumbnail design and full-size reading copies. Rarely used for image-based textual distribution, Tumblr proves to be as proficient at displaying digital texts as any number of digital reading platforms. Each image is stamped to the second, providing a detailed history of this exam’s reference practices. Augmenting this record are the assorted symbols used in the margins for exam preparation: each artifact bears multiple material histories, which may be read on any number of levels of interpretation. Serving as the appendix to this essay’s section on Eclipse, and primarily generated during the composition of the previous essay concerning periodical studies, the reference texts can be bridged from one potential use in the footnotes to indefinite speculative engagements with the Eclipse archive.

Appendix III—Keylogger Transcript and Ambient Writing Recording
http://dss-edit.com/field-exam/recording.html

                        Beginning at 12:00PM on April 25^th, 2012, I initiated the Aobo Keylogger program for Mac. The software utilizes terminal log functions to record every keystroke and every program opened. As I am typing this sentence and making mistakes, the program is silently and invisibly tracking my errors. There are two primary audiences for keylogger software: 1) those that plant surveillance on foreign computers with the hope of capturing passwords or financial data, and 2) those that want to spy on the computer usage of intimates, like children or significant others. It has also been used by Lance Wakeling to generate the luscious conceptual writing project titled Sic: Notes from a Keylogger, which records every keystroke for an entire year. I should also mention that this record is derivative of a poem entitled “Lift Off,” that while investigating a different writing technology, presents the same noisy channel of autobiographical error. In contrast to these two works, I have calibrated the keylogger to record only letters typed in sequence (unlike Wakeling, who records every delete, space, and enter command) so the result is misleadingly legible and directly reflective of the active generation of letters (unlike Bernstein, who transcribes only the ‘deletions’ of the typewriter).

                        As a soundtrack to this recording, an audio recording of standard reading length, compressed in MP3 format at 128kbps, captures the ambient environment and keyboard acoustic that accompany the performance of this paragraph. I began the recording in Audacity at the onset of the description of this Appendix. It has now been recording for 21 minutes. It should come as no surprise that this appendix introduces the PennSound archive, with which we are intimately familiar. Upon the completion of this exam, the PennSound archive will be augmented by a recent Edit Series non-event featuring Jarrod Fowler, who scripted a similar performance of the empty spaces of the Kelly Writers House (a dark and empty Arts Café, the mathematical generation of silence, a video recording of the Hedera Helix in the Writers House garden). This function is indebted to that collaboration and seeks to engage in a dialogue with the sound and annotation database presented by PennSound. Together, the components of this appendix ask, how can one record the audio of a written performance?

Appendix IV—Time-Lapse Bookshelf Animation
http://dss-edit.com/field-exam/bookshelf.html

                        Over the twenty-four hours of the exam, at thirty-minute intervals, I have taken a picture of the shifting configuration of books listed in the field proposal. Luckily all hard copies fit neatly in the span of two shelves adjacent to my writing desk. Originally, all books were alphabetized and straightened. As books are used and returned, references and scanned, a sequential narrative of citation emerges in time-lapse delay. The periodic nature of this appendix merges with the precise time-stamping operations of the Tumblr interface and the obsessive surveillance of the keylogger. Once all images are captured, the complete set of forty-eight digital photos will be compressed into a single animated GIF. The resulting movie responds to Andy Lampert’s recent lecture at Penn—in particular the expanded cinema installation Varieties of Slow (Whitney Biennial, 2008). However, where Lampert stages the constantly shifting projection of a film featuring a static shelf of books, this appendix retains the constant movement of books within the static frame of a GIF animation. Of course, this forges a dialogue with UbuWeb, the “YouTube of the avant-garde,” which, very much like that popular database, is best read in terms of its various compression formats and framing mechanisms.