First movement (Allegro Appassionato): Excessive Theory can lead to blindness.

For all the wonderful machinery that post-war theorists in the humanities have built to help us speak truth to power, many are particularly blind to their own appetites within the institution that shelters them from the elements. Nowhere is the operative ideology more evident than at the two points-de-capiton that bring us here: Building and Theory.

Fun fact: The discursive class depends on the already-built: Google, libraries, bibliographies, editions, audiences, Zotero, etc. You wouldn’t know this by the patronly anxieties of some of the inmates of the Republic of Intellectua. These anxieties have a long and honorable genealogy that according to one imaginary, the dominant one, harks back to Aristotle.

According to the original peripatetic, Dh’ers, or βάναυσοι as he called them, didn’t get to be citizens of his ideal Republic. Not because we are truly descendants of the Greeks (we are not), but because so many of us have a family member who traces their lineage to the divorce, the desire to banish the βάναυσοι still haunts our family reunions. Case in point: At the Po-Co dinner table, where I frequently break bread, most folks have an ongoing beef with what we call instrumental reason, justly associating some forms of it with a litany of evils. Without meaning to do so, many of us often get caught in the rhetoric and end up joining Aristotle instead of Fanon. When such embarrassments occur, as always, alibis and disavowals ensue.

Ay, que risa, impotent and opaque, when I smell denial (from the Greek, ὑπόκρισις). The denial comes in several flavors: Some, like Aristotle, unapologetically place themselves above the clang of the anvil: The labor that sustains theory is visible, but unworthy. Others with more democratic aspirations re-appropriate the word ‘work’ —or as we would say, the work that the word ‘work’ is doing. Focusing on the wrong difference internal to work itself —my critical work vs. your what-is-it-that-you-do-again? work—, these folks inadvertently reaffirm their privilege, ending up back on Aristotle’s hillock where the clang don’t reach. An even more astute bunch builds elaborate and useful discourses on tools and work. They slum it, as the vox populi would have it. In many cases, though, they too abstract the work that enables their own. An endearing new offspring of the former acknowledges the instrumental intellect that makes discursive spaces possible in the first place, but claim their hands are tied to change the reward structures: Je sais bien, mais quand même… 

In all cases, an old class is perennially performed into existence: the service class. It doesn’t help that some folks are eager to accept the title and the role on unfair terms. We have now an opportunity to make a dent on the unbecoming tradition of la Distinction, and I hope we embrace it. It will involve a shift in both constructs: not towards a community of over-extended multi-classers (everyone knows an all-bard party would suck). We can push instead for spaces where both (de)formative activities, building and debating, occur simultaneously on equal footing, that individual tendencies may bloom to the benefit of the party formation.

I bear witness. Despite having won the service trifecta —graduate student, textual scholar and digital humanist—, I have always enjoyed playing the critical rebel; and, because a textual scholar and all-around tinkerer knows how to construct the materials he and others critique, I have always enjoyed what Hegel saw as the bias of service: absolute Wissen.

The oscillation between theory and practice, between solitude and service, discourse (the quintessential form of solitude) and building (the quintessential form of community) is our only hope out of our disavowals. I’m the first to admit knowledge does not belong exclusively to those with their backs bent over a Hinman collator or their eyes glued to a UNIX shell. I claim that detachment from such activities, even when they are your own, often leads to unwarranted arrogance and avoidable error; and, even more confidently, that the self-aware design and implementation of hermeneutic machines (whether editions or apps), can yield unique counter-intuitive insights with the cherished rigor of our most revered by-laws.

Second Movement (Pianissimo): The database is NOT the theory.

At the Scholars’ Lab, we recently wrapped up work on the first year of the Praxis Program. The tool we built, Prism, is a replica of a pen an paper exercise. We designed it for people in and outside the digital humanites. Our goal was to enable an exercise out of which new interpretations could be born. While we built it, we learned an enormous deal about the nature of annotation, fragmentation, constrained categories and hermeneutic difference. And if indeed we learned how to play with CoffeeScript, Cucumber, Sass, and a bagful of gems, we (and I mean everyone playing Praxis) still continued to engage, tacitly and explicitly, with old and new discourses. Without a doubt, many of our decisions about the direction of Prism owed as much to books we read eons ago as they did to the Law of the Rails. (If you are curious, some traces of our sentimental education persist in the blog). Besides the in-process theory, oftentimes internalized before we could make it public, the door is now also open to discourse on the texts under scrutiny, and/or the tool as a model for interpretation in general.

Here is one of those claims I would build on top of Prism:

Interpretation is a social phenomenon whereby we map our differences unto a shared text. 

That is a theory, NOT a database. Disagree with me and we can have a word, not a database.

All that to say, I wish my friends would avoid the infelicitous formula, “the database is the theory,” itself a caricature of the worst paradox-mongering coming out of the High Theory that the phrase tries to undermine in the first place. “They stab it with their steely knives,/But they just can’t kill the beast.” The problem as I see it is that those who feel they stand outside the traditions of humanities computing hear an easily disputable theory, when in truth, it is evident we ALL build and we ALL make claims. If we sometimes feel undermined by the discursive class, we should not retaliate by too readily collapsing the distinction between praxis and theory. Too many farm revolutions have failed because the pigs have moved into the farmer’s house. If we could diligently advertise instead that no one around here is confusing building and discourse as the same activity, I think that would go a long way to undermine our imagined and coagulating borders.

The phrase also distracts our audiences from, because it gets conflated with, a more important argument coming from Bethany Nowviskie, Steve Ramsay and other McGanners. To wit, that building can be an interpretative act. Those wonderful interpretative acts can only be a database, though, via weak metonymy. If we skip the catchy phrase, I think we can all agree: while all theory is interpretative, inasmuch as it can be extra-discursive, not all interpretation is theoretical (c.f. modernist sculpture). If we want spaces, even departments, with builders and theorists sharing professional rewards and the pedagogical load, I vote we continue to refine this promising theory.

In all fairness, the database needs to be a theory as much as a fish needs to cross the Niagara Falls on a bicycle. A more productive exploration of the relationship between the two would attempt to uncover the algorithmic, tabular, mechanical structures behind theory, and/or would attempt to make explicit the theory that walks in line with building a particular database, or a digital archive. Both of these humble approaches, coupled with the above, would surely ingratiate us to the barbarians at the door.

Of course, we must continue to ensure we are not saddled with unnecessary burden from folks who would see us as the help, eternal september and all. I suggest we turn the tables and recognize that discourse provides us with a service.  In order for us to perform such a wonderful legerdemain we must constantly re-acquaint ourselves with the fragile and unique deformities of the humanities and the social-sciences. I’m not kidding when I say that talkers are hackers too —yes, even if most of them just work those legacy systems we call books. If we were to lay bare their own mechanical and material exigencies, find the lingua franca that is always-already there to unite us, and do so without confirming their worst fears of obsolescence in the age of Google, we might just save ourselves from our exilic tendencies.

…

At the time when that crumbling democracy was transitioning from an oral to a written tradition, Aristotle’s intellectual grandfather, a stonemason by some accounts and a gadfly by all, was found guilty of seducing the young. Before he approached the hemlock, the man forbade the next generation from mourning; instead, he asked them in no uncertain terms to carry on the conversation. We have this in writing: Socrates is dead, long live Socrates!

After two and some years hanging around the Scholars’ Lab and earning my badges in the DH community, I finally learned a lesson that should be required learning for all new-comers: plumbing is real. I mean, I was more or less aware of its existence, brief-sightings, a shudder here and there from a ghostly presence. Problem is, I’ve been focusing on the flashy, large, important, big, fancy, loud, loud, loud uses of already-made tools or those tools I dream of, five-million dollars and the-rest-of-your-life tools. You know: The shiny stuff.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been working instead on the small stuff that needed to be done to roll Prism into production. Enter the plumbing. What I thought would be a series of small tasks turned out to be a major time vacuum. At issue was getting Heroku to play nice with what we had built in the development branch. The first two weeks, Heroku would not even display our site. A series of ‘Application Error’ messages was all I got. The culprits, in no particular order: the Asset Pipeline, Devise and Jasmine. Eventually, with help from above (i.e. E. Rochester and W. Graham), we got the site running …and then the Herokulypse.

Once in a while a bug comes, so uncanny, so daunting, that it makes you want to become a novelist. That was the Herokulypse. I obsessed about it for three days at the expense of my dissertation and everything else, with no results. The great obi-wayne-kenobot finally found the problem. To my relief I was on the right track trying to solve it. I just didn’t figure out the part about disabling page caching on the pages controller. Live and learn, and learn I did: Plumbing is real.

I found the lesson timely at a moment when we are debating the obstacles and affordances of coding for digital humanities. The experience with the Herokulypse really brought home for me the idea that code is labor, and that the digital humanities really puts pressure on our notions of leisure, labor and power. I am still working out these issues –issues which all my predecessors seem to have encountered in one way or another– and will be sure to report back to the public when I have more insights.

In the meantime, I won’t ask you to be careful of what you wish for. On the contrary, I will encourage you to scurry down the rabbit hole of code, that you may never think yourself superior to anyone who leans on the side of hack over yack.

Around here we usually wake up around 6:30 am to Henry’s complaints. He asks to be let out of the room, but has not learned how to open the door himself. I’m sitting on the couch in the living room with half an eye closed. Henry stares at me with an impish face covered with ink. In a father-son compromise meant to give me the time to write this blogpost, I gave him a rare treat: pen and paper.

Fail…

Thus begins my Day of DH 2012. Read more….

If you mention tokens and strings to a textual scholar, do not be surprised to receive a polite reprimand in response. Most consider the vocabulary inherited from computer science undeserving of the rich realities of the texts they hold hear, and with good reason. We have already endured an uphill battle against older, more insidious forms of abstraction that would have us believe texts are written in the heavens with capital T’s. At the same time, a growing number of well intentioned scholars are content to use digital tools that manipulate texts precisely at this level, without asking too many impertinent questions about the black-box processes that give them handy results. The classic example of this disavowal is the black-boxed use of Google, which I venture has become a staple of scholarship everywhere. In a sense, we are all forced in one way or another to rely on black-boxing. Slowly but surely, we realize we are in a world of “black-boxes all the way down.”

Despite the need to black-box some areas of our workflow in order to move along, we ignore some black-boxes at our own peril. Not only do we risk transferring agency to a half-understood process, we may miss key insights on our own scholarly procedures. After a few years of using the Juxta tool to help me collate the fascinating mutations of Aimé Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient, I finally took a peek inside the internal processes of the software. In my defense, I really wasn’t ready to look behind the curtain before dusting off my math skills, learning some of the basic vocabulary of computer science and acquiring basic code literacy. Although I still feel there is much more to understand, I have seen enough to know that I can never look at comparisons or textuality the same way again.

Perhaps a bit of background would be in order. As I pointed out in an earlier post, Juxta cannot handle the Césaire texts adequately unless you break them into smaller chunks. The main problem was and is the large amount of transpositions between one version and the next of Et les chiens se taisaient. I did the work of cataloguing and diagramming the many ‘moves’ by hand, using Juxta to compare each block of text internally. Earlier this year I started having doubts about my ability to capture all matching blocks between one version and the next, especially those comparisons that revealed upwards of 70 moves! I noticed that Juxta caught some matches, so I tried a small experiment.

I took my working text of the typescript (TS) and the editio princeps (EP) and processed them whole through Juxta. I carefully used the results to remove from the original TS and EP files all the matches caught by the first run. Once I had removed every match from both files, I ran those smaller files. Of course, the next set of matches was different than the first. I went ahead and carefully removed those matches from the files. This process continued for 10 or 11 runs, until I eventually had two tiny files with text I was reasonably certain was mutually exclusive. I was so excited, I even made a screencast explaining the process. (Later I realized that this method does not guarantee 100% accuracy, but I’m getting ahead of myself).

The experiment proved that I had indeed missed some matches, despite months of working with these texts the traditional way. I was very satisfied with my ingenuity, but I still didn’t understand why Juxta matched some things and not others. While I was thus occupied, a team of friends and colleagues were beginning to see some positive results porting the output of SuperFastMatch to the Juxta API. My dream of having my texts represented using the powerful Juxta visualization suite was getting so close I could taste it. But… I understood even less about SuperFastMatch than I did about diff. Enough was enough.

I had the faint notion that Juxta used a modified version of the diff utility, so I started my research there. Apparently, the diff family builds on a solution to the longest common subsequence problem. What Juxta was catching as a match in every run of my experiment was indeed a longest common subsequence. Here is where a hundred questions, questions I would’ve never thought to ask had I stayed outside the box, took center stage in my research: What does it mean that a complex comparison set has several levels of overlapping subsequences? What do these levels tell us about textual sequence in general? What’s the relationship between these sequences and the process by which a text is actually rearranged from one version to the next by human agency?

String matching 101: The longest common subsequence of any two strings compared to each other is that set of tokens that follow each other in the same linear order in both strings, despite any intervening tokens. In the case of Juxta, which seems to be running a wdiff flavor of the Google diff tools, the tokens in question are words. For example, given the following two strings, where each token is represented by a letter of the alphabet: 1) ABCXDEYFZ, and 2) ABMCDXYZEFN, the sequence ABCDEF can be said to be the longest common subsequence. If we ran this example through Juxta, M, N, X, Y and Z would be highlighted in green, while the longest common subsequence would remain unformatted. This is the principal method by which Juxta can claim to mark difference. As long as you work with simple texts, texts in which there is one clearly recognizable longest common subsequence with minor interruptions, this technique can be very effective. On the other hand, texts with many transpositions ‘break’ because mutually-exclusive large subsequences intersect eachother. Realizing the reason for Juxta’s limitations, I couldn’t help but think that textual scholars have also been operating using a human version of the diff, assuming a long stable sequence against which differences move about.

A few weeks ago, I also started thinking about the possibility of automating my experiment by writing a script to do what I was doing ‘by hand.’ I baptized my method Poor Man’s String Matching, but it could more appropriately be called an iterative diff. Once I set out to do the work of recognizing and stashing sequences programmatically, I started seeing the problems with my solution. Though these problems are not insurmountable, they reveal an enormous amount about our assumptions.

The two main problems are handling ‘noise’ and defining what counts as a coherent textual block. The latter is too difficult a problem to cover in a blogpost, but it is important enough that I dedicate a chapter of my dissertation, endearingly called “Legology,” to solving it. I take Noise to be those little isolated fragments, usually single words, that are part of the longest common subsequence, but which cannot be said to belong to a textual block. Here is where the humanist parts way with the computer scientist or the mathematician. For these two, even a value of zero can be counted as a sequence! Although there can be isolated tokens that could interest a scholar comparing two texts (rare words or proper names, for example), we are more often than not going to worry about two or more concatenated words, and we would certainly not call anything less a sequence. At least, I wouldn’t.

Noise can be of two kinds: The noise that happens outside of the blocks of interest, and the noise within blocks of interest. In Juxta these can be seen as white fragments in a sea of green, and green fragments in a sea of white. These are very different creatures and also need to be dealt separately. Noise can lead to small errors if we were to run a straight iterative diff, eliminating every longest common subsequence in each iteration. The errors come from the probability that a word caught in a sequence belongs to a smaller intersecting common subsequence.

To understand this properly, imagine we compare the results of the first diff run to the results of a human being who only matches blocks of text that are clearly matches. The human’s results would not be exactly the longest common subsequence, but they would definitely be more useful. Since we are interested in blocks, chances are letting the computer net everything would probably lead to the accidental disintegration of smaller blocks of interest.

Just as I learned some odd lessons about the role of sequence in comparison sets by studying the longest common subsequence problem, I also found some unexpected lessons about textuality from trying to solve the noise problem. If you’re interested in my solution, I invite you to read my dissertation when it comes out. In the meantime, I encourage the textual scholars who are reading this to try to solve these problems on their own, to engage with the procedures that make our machines tick, and to do it without taking off their humanities hats.

If we don’t learn how to think with our machines, what choice will they have but to think for us?

There are two kinds of publishing practices I can distinguish from my limited POV. One is exemplified by the work of one of Dominican Republic’s foremost living thinkers and poets, and one of my first mentors: Armando Almanzar Botello. He has disassembled his book of poetry, Cazadores de Agua, and re-mediated each of the poems on Facebook and 2 blogs (I still don’t know why he has two blogs). He has re-published each of the poems in their entirety several times on Facebook using the note feature, effectively recycling the poems every so often. I have never seen a similar publishing rhythm, and under such constraints. Paradoxically, at the same time that he limits his audience to his ‘friends,’ he has never reached a larger audience (as far as I can tell).  The poems look clunky on Facebook to say the least, but they are read and commented on by a large group of interested readers. In that sense, the community he has built around his work using Facebook is not that much different than the small communities DHers in the north build around their public work in more open venues.

The same can be said of the second kind of publisher, exemplified by senior Dominican historian Frank Peña. Dr. Peña publishes highly charged polemics on his page, ranging from 1000 to 2000 words, also using the note feature. The pieces are well documented and written in unimpeachable Spanish. He usually draws 50+ comments on these pieces, even several days after they are published. In contrast to Armando, Dr. Peña is publishing original material of the sort one would associate with a political blogger. He is not the only one using Facebook as a blog. If I had to venture a guess, I would say the practice is born out of Facebook’s ease of use, as opposed to even the most user-friendly blogging platforms. Or, we could say that these intellectuals have found a vital way of building community in a way that can reach that ever-elusive anonymous public of public humanities. Although I remain critical of locking the content within a bubble of followers and the unsearchable abyss of the Social Network, I do have to admit the intellectual communities bubbling up around these writers are vibrant, relevant and anything but ephemeral.

I’m finally settling back into my C’ville routine. My last stop this winter break was the MLA convention in Seattle. Like many of my colleagues, I also felt that “the MLA’s heart (like a post-holiday Grinch) grew at least three sizes over the four days of the 2012 conference.” While last year echoed a prominent informer‘s assessment that DH was “the next big thing” with anxiety, this year felt more like “Hey, I like that. How do I do it?” This was especially a good year for those in the business of rethinking the future of graduate methods training (ahem, ahem) and of graduate futures in general. Needless to say, I felt really great about being part of the first cohort of Praxis.

Saturday evening I had a chance to catch up with one of my early undergraduate mentors. He had questions. He wanted to know what I knew about the DH world. I’m sure half of his curiosity came out of an earnest desire to hear the tale of my travels. The other half was a shrewd (and responsible) move to build a vocabulary for conversations his department will inevitably have this year with the dean, other departments, the library, etc: Can an isolated DHer work well with limited resources? Do you need a center? How do you get graduate students involved? Our conversation went on for a good three hours and it was very rewarding to offer a candid assessment of the field from where I’m standing.

I also realized that where I’m standing is what in battle we would call higher ground. I don’t mean the privilege of hobnobbing with the enormous DH talent we have on grounds. Nothing, of the sort. Although projects are a whole different affair, you could develop decent DH skills and ideas were you connected from Pie Town. I mean the privilege of seeing graduate methods transformation first-hand. I agree with Brooke that there is a continuum that links us to analog models in the department (at least at UVa). But the continuum does eventually lead to new ground.

What I’ve seen, of course, has been well recorded by all the Praxis bloggers. If this is your first time hearing about Praxis and you are interested in the fresh air blowing our way, I encourage you to read more…

Maps are texts, and texts are maps.

At the beginning of the movie The English Patient, as Márta Sebestyén’s “Szerelem, szerelem” overcomes our senses, a paintbrush traces the figure of human swimmers on a yellowing page. The black-ink soon gives way to a skin-colored desert landscape sifting beneath our aerial view, evoking hands moving over human curves. Skin, page, territory all united by the theme of lost love. I can’t think of a better image to describe how we are wedded to the n-dimensions of the textual condition.

As we get ready to think about design I wanted to outline a few of the ways we can abstract the material reality of print to a totality of 1′s and 0′s. In my own work I have been trying to create a digital edition of Aimé Césaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient that is both pleasant to read and that allows for some algorithmic manipulation of the textual territory. My goals lead me to seek the chimera of html forgeries as opposed to the classic images with texts beneath them. The experience taught me an enormous deal about the process of remediation.

There are many ways we can remap texts online. We can have a simple image. We can have text behind that image, like your typical PDF. We can map out the position of text and white space on that image by overlaying a basic Cartesian x and y grid on top (or is it below?). We can name areas on that grid like land-grabbers use contracts to justify their fences. We can query  the areas, we can query the points, we can query the text. We can overlap those areas, like the map of Aztlán tensely overlaps with the map of the United States, like our Prism diffracts difference. We can create replicas from scratch using HTML, using Canvas, and trade grain for the possibility of playful deformation and a digital audience born into cool media. We can standardize our geo-textual mark-up, make a TEI out of HTML/CSS, opening the door for large scale analysis  of page design in book-history. Heck, we can just put our UTF-8 txt’s out there and just sit back and wait for our computer overlords to tell us that the eternal present of spotless text was all we ever needed. Lord knows, most literary scholars haven’t done better than that. (I will rebel against that last possibility the way I rebel against propaganda, the way I rebel against the early Wittgenstein, who wanted to get rid of love because we couldn’t fit it in just one map).

Let us move towards a geo-textual humanities conscious there are swimmers in the desert of the page.

(to be continued…)

“Computers are inherently dumb.” I hear this all the time, even from folks in computer science. I like to think of them as marionettes.

After Wagner called for a Gesamtkunstwerk, many European artists and thinkers reacted strongly to it (Nietzsche being the most famous case). This reaction eventually led to a modernist distrust of theater in general, and of human actors in particular. Think for example of Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. Somewhere in between Wagner and Brecht, the English artist Edward Gordon Craig suggested that human actors should be replaced by marionettes. As you can imagine, this did not go well with the actor’s guild.

I hear echoes of those debates and cultural shifts in our moment, when computers are starting to resemble us more and more. Computers don’t replace us always in the way that machines replaced farmers or smiths, although there are still parallels between ours and the anxieties of the industrial and agricultural revolution. And just like machines then generated monstrous forms of mechanized human labor, computers do the same (If you don’t believe me, ask any of my students for Project Tango). However, there is another anxiety I see which is not necessarily that of the repetitive tasks of machines replacing familiar mechanical tasks with unforeseen ones. I’m talking about our fear of marionettes. Even more specific, the fear that we will confuse the marionettes for human beings.

Quixote fights the puppets

The true marionette is always controlled by a human, so are computers… ultimately. We ventriloquise through them, and they only talk back to us according to our ridiculously precise instructions. I’m not talking about Bina48. She’s kind of creepy. I’m talking about the ways in which a google search acts like an operator at the end of a 411 call; or the way that netflix suggests what we might like. There are two approaches to figuring out what counts as a title in a large repository: we can tag it, or we can write an algorithm that does it for us. Don’t worry, we’re not there yet completely. At some point that meta-data might pass the Turing test. When it does, by definition, users will think a human did the work… but wait a second.

Prism is not really interested in how humans might be fooled by the marionettes more than it is in how we can fool the marionettes to behave like us. Sometimes that line is blurred. The ‘text mining’ component, as I have understood it, seems like the bastard child of natural language processing and web crawling. The goal here is not to count words (although that is a time-honored human activity), but to abstract semantic relationships that can be used to query large data. When we Google something, we are doing something akin to that, except we never think Google is run by a million efficient munchkins. When we get results for our perhaps-to-be Prism queries, we use those results in public at our own risk. That there will always be Quixotes in the audience… well…

Take home tweet: Even if we replace actors with marionettes, the plot stays the same.

Prism is not many things, one of them is itself… for now. There is a history behind the identity crisis. As Bethany pointed out in her flagship post, Prism began as a Demon. Hearing McGann talk about it nowadays, you would think that we have found Richard Rorty’s ultimate intellectual ring, the one eye that encompasses all other. The pata-critical Demon owes its name in part to Alfred Jarry’s pataphysics, “the science of imaginary solutions,“ from which we also get Pablo Lopez’s pataphore, “an unusually extended metaphor.” When the folks at the SpecLab began playing around with markers and transparencies, they were in a sense blending science with play by making literal the idea that we all read differently. Although we all knew for centuries that there was room for interpretation, footnotes and marginalia safely occupied different places on the page, reinventing the author at the moment of its undoing. The Copernican move was to take the idea of difference seriously enough to overlap it. McGann, in most other cases a visionary, hesitated before the chasm. Today, he still wants to feed commentary to the Demon. Our prism ventures out on a different path.

Prism ray trace

Then there is the knack that some folks have to try to reduce it to the most mundane digital tools. Two in particular surface often: Diigo and NowComment. I hope I am clear when I say, Prism they are not, and they are not for the same reason: They are not focused. A prism refracts light according to a specific set of rules. Diigo and NowComment allow for a very diffuse set of comments and monotone highlights that cannot be wrangled easily for analysis. Both are helpful to provide feedback for one reader who has a vested interested in reading the comments. If we were to read interpretation as a social phenomenon, their usefulness runs its course. Our prism understands that we all wiggle under controlled vocabularies and that it is there that our differences thrive.

So now that I’ve said my peace about what I think prism is not, let me leave you with a vision:

On one of those slow dry desert days where Saint Anthony receives his motley crew of visitors, he has a vision. He sees a man wearing a wig before a strange glass pyramid. He sees strange markings on several pages strewn about a table rife with even stranger machines. A ray of light flashes through the window and the wigged man fumbles for the triangle. He offers it to the light like a bishop offering the host. Miracle of miracles. The crystal gives birth to a rainbow which fills up the room with the brightest colors, like the garments of his demons.