Please join us for the next in our digital humanities series, the Tuesday Forums, brought to you by the Scholars' Lab, of the Library's DH Center. These presentations invite prominent digital humanities, geospatial, cultural heritage, and information technology practitioners to engage with a friendly student, faculty, and staff audience. This is a virtual event. All are welcome, but please register to receive Zoom link.

Poetry in the makerspace: Plotspaces as tools for spatial visualization, scalar epistemology and materialist thinking

This talk presents the plotspace, a 3D-fabricated sculptural object which represents the spatial and scalar shifts in a poem, and which can be printed in plastic or resin or milled out of metal. A plotspace includes the text of a poem engraved or embossed on its inner faces, alongside a curved shape which plots the changing scales of the entities in the poem. This curve extends in a three-dimensional wave-like form which emphasizes the shifts in scale in the poem, with the intention of prompting—and provoking—viewers to think about what might be illuminated by reading the text of the poem in conjunction with the three-dimensional form which 3D fabrication makes possible. Beyond these literary and hermeneutic affordances, however, plotspaces function more broadly in line with the design researcher Sara Hendren’s exhortation to “build something so that you can think with that thing”, as the processes involved in their construction open up wider questions around bodies, labor, and accessibility. While literary studies has long been preoccupied by materialist concerns, scholars have more commonly considered these in the abstract, rather than via bodily proximity to noisy, glitchy, hot, and potentially dangerous machines. If applications like CAD software make it easy to design digital objects in virtual space where the constraints of friction and gravity can be temporarily evaded, then the makerspaces where these designs are translated into physical artifacts bring these and other real-world constraints sharply into view, showing for instance the latent ableism in putatively neutral software packages. By considering some of these questions, I suggest that as well as helping to conceptualize literary space and scale, a plotspace can also cast light on the fictional frictionlessness of digital design processes, and thereby act as visualization which, as Lauren Klein puts it, serves “not as evidence or proof of results, but as a tool in the process of knowledge production”.

Anouk Lang teaches English literature and digital humanities in the Department of English and Scottish Literature at the University of Edinburgh, where she is also an affiliate of the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She is the co-editor of Digital Futures of Graduate Study in the Humanities in the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (with Gabriel Hankins and Simon Appleford, 2024), Patrick White Beyond the Grave: New Critical Perspectives (with Ian Henderson, 2015), and the editor of From Codex to Hypertext: Reading at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (2012).