The ‘Romantic lyric’ as an idea or critical entity finds itself doubly maligned in contemporary lyric studies. As a perceived product of New Criticism, it finds itself accused by historicists of bringing about the ‘lyricisation’ of poetry in twentieth-century criticism, and, as a mimetic model of subjective expression, it’s disfavoured by lyric theorists who view it as a stepping stone towards the currently common misconception that lyrics are a species of dramatic monologue. Yet returning to the Romantics themselves, we discover other models of the lyric that sit outside the expressive model or the paradigm of lyricisation, and which may well be of use to contemporary lyric studies. This essay offers a reading of one such model in the works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in the form of lyric’s semblance character: Coleridge is peculiarly and persistently concerned with the way the world appears to be (which is often not how the world really is), and his lyric poetry figures as a kind of seemingness in its own right, and one that reflects on the nature of appearances themselves. Before making a case for lyric semblance, this essay offers an overview of the state of lyric studies today, taking as exemplary the work of Virginia Jackson and Jonathan Culler; it places emphasis on the role of the ‘Romantic lyric’ in both accounts, and teases out some of what’s at stake in the tension between historicism and formalism that is at the centre of lyric studies today.
Convergence, Ahead of Print. Digitalisation and computation presents us with a vague empirical world that unsettles established links between measurements and values. As more and more actors use digital media to produce data about aspects of the world they deem important, new possibilities for inscribing their lives emerge. The practical work with digital methods thus often involves the production of social visibilities that are misfits in the context of established data practices. In this paper I argue that this dissonance carries the distinct critical potential to design data experiments that (a) uses the act of operationalisation as an engine for creating intersubjective clarity about the meaning of existing concepts and (b) takes advantage of algorithmic techniques to provoke a reassessment of some of the core assumptions that shape the way we pose empirical problems are normally framed. Drawing on the work of Kant, Peirce, Dewey and C.I. Lewis I propose to think of this critical potential as the possibility to practice what I term 'experimental a priori' and I use qualitative vignettes from two years of data experiments with GEHL architects to illustrate what this entails in practice. Faced with the task of using traces from Facebook as an empirical source to produce a map of urban political diversity, the architects found themselves in a need to revisit inherited assumptions about the ontology of urban space and the way it can even be formulated as a problem of diversity. While I describe this as a form of obstructive data practice that is afforded by digital methods, I also argue that it cannot be realised without deliberate design interventions. I therefore end the paper by outlining five design principles that can productively guide collective work with digital methods. These principles contribute to recent work within digital STS on the recalibration of problem spaces and the design of data sprints. However, the concept of ‘experimental a priori’ can also serve as a philosophical foundation for knowledge production within computational humanities more broadly.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, literary manuscripts came to be seen as tangible evidence of the creative process and as a key to the personality of the author. The material traces of writing were understood to outlive their creators and promise to resurrect the authorial body through the magic of the relic. This article reconstructs how authorial script gradually transformed into a collectible object pursued as a memento and a commodity. Letters, drafts, and fair copies by major modern writers found their way into the collections of British aristocrats and American industrialists at the same time that hunting for literary autographs diversified into a middle-class pursuit. Surveying recent scholarship on nineteenth-century collecting and material culture, the essay offers a condensed cultural history of the literary manuscript as a collectible and draws attention to how collectors and collecting feature in fictional texts of the period. It focuses on the artefactual mobility and custodial afterlives of Romantic papers in Victorian literature and culture, exploring a form of collecting which crossed boundaries between periods and national literary traditions.
Convergence, Ahead of Print. Examining the case of the Chilean influencer industry, this paper argues for situating affordances within a wider context in which the features of platforms acquire meanings. Our analysis focuses on two dynamics. On the one hand, we examine how the Chilean influencer industry is shaped by a ‘technological frame’ that structures the valence of affordances. We show that affordances are neither ‘naturally’ nor ‘neutrally’ imagined by actors but rather culturally located within technological frames that shape the discourses, values, and practices from which they obtain cultural meaning. On the other hand, we analyze how affordances provide a material support for the temporal and spatial expansion of these technological frames. Thus, cultural contexts and platforms’ features mutually configure each other in ways that have not always been recognized in the scholarly literature about affordances. We situate negotiations about what it means to be an influencer in Chile, the role of intermediaries (eg branding agencies), communication with followers, and the global influencer industry as part of this mutually constitutive relationship.
Convergence, Ahead of Print. This paper aims to understand the practices and meanings associated with the creation and use of private chat groups on instant messaging services such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger and WeChat that are accessible only to platform workers of online food delivery services. We draw on participant observation in five countries (Italy, Spain, Mexico, China, and India), in-depth interviews with 68 food delivery couriers and digital ethnography (Pink et al., 2015) within dozens of online private chat groups of food delivery workers. Our fieldwork shows that private chat groups are extremely relevant in the daily work of delivery workers and are appropriated to restore forms of mutualism not afforded by the food delivery apps. Following Costa (2018) and her concept of affordances-in-practice, we describe how the practice of online private chat groups created by platform workers affords: (1) the emergence of communities of practice; (2) resistance and contempt; (3) mutualism and solidarity. We argue that these workers ‘enact’ the affordances of instant messaging apps, to supplement – from below – the affordances of food delivery apps that were denied or ignored by food delivery companies. We argue that these affordances constitute cooperative affordances. This concept captures the cooperative nature of peer-to-peer communication that occurs within the informal online chat groups created by the workers themselves. Finally, this article contributes to affordance theory by highlighting how affordances are not immanent properties of artifacts, or ‘invariants’, as argued by Gibson (1979), but can be ‘enacted’ by specific users, like food delivery workers, within specific social and cultural contexts.
Convergence, Ahead of Print. This paper is a reflection on the points of convergence between live performance and the media within Indian stand-up comedy. Traditionally, live performance has been seen in opposition to the media. While the former is defined by spatial and temporal co-presence of the audience and spectators, the latter has neither (Auslander, 2012). While stand-up comedy is primarily live, digital and mass media are used extensively by comedians to build a professional reputation for themselves through their presence and participation on social media. However, after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, much of performance art – including stand-up comedy – has moved online. That is, comedians are experimenting with the online media: Zoom, Instagram Live, Facebook Live and so on, to put up live performances that would otherwise have been performed within a comedy club or café. This paper derives its theoretical basis from Philip Auslander’s postulation of liveness in a mediatised culture and digital liveness which ‘results from our conscious act of grasping virtual entities as live in response to the claims [technology makes] on us’ (2012: 13). The paper attempts a theoretical reflection on how to ‘read’ a stand-up comedy performance for pedagogical purposes in these different contexts as the idea of liveness, mediatisation and our experience of the live evolves with time and context.
The majority of interdisciplinary studies on nineteenth-century Japonisme perpetuate an assumption that most connoisseurs of Japanese art in Victorian Britain were men. Despite recent feminist studies which have restored women to histories of private collecting and curatorship across Europe, there is a lack of consideration of how travelogues by women contributed to public discussions of Japanese art and anthropology in Victorian Britain—including accounts which complement or predate publications by celebrated connoisseurs such as A.W. Franks, James Lord Bowes, and Charles Holme. This article will examine brief passages from travelogues by Anna d’Almeida (1863), Alice Frere (1870), Isabella Bird (1880), and Mary Bickersteth (1893) which chronicle the authors' experiences purchasing ceramics and lacquerware in Japan. The women's careful attention to the history and features which distinguish valuable, antique art pieces from lesser factory productions contradicts the Victorian characterisation of female collectors as indiscriminate participants in commercial or ‘decorative’ trends. Furthermore, the women redress false Victorian conceptions of ‘Japanese’ aesthetics and report on the changing conditions of art production in post-feudal Japan. In context with the popularity of the travel genre across classes and genders in the mid- and late-nineteenth century, d’Almeida, Frere, Bird, and Bickersteth's accounts simultaneously signal their competence as discerning collectors of authentic Japanese art while providing an accessible introduction to Japanese art and aesthetics for aspiring lay-collectors of ‘things Japanese’.
Convergence, Ahead of Print. This paper discusses the role of technology under the framework of Critical Technical Practice specifically in the form of constructing artefacts and deconstructing tools in order to produce what Philip Agre would describe as ‘reflexive work of critique’ (Agre, 1997:155). By presenting the activities and methods used in the teaching and shaping of undergraduate courses, this paper aims to show how technical objects, such as data, datasets, application programming interfaces and machine learning models, can be considered as discursive subjects, demonstrating pedagogical understanding across fields. The courses operate in the humanities tradition and take critical technical practice as a didactic approach, insofar as software and data are understood and manipulated on an instrumental level, while encouraging critical engagement and embodied reflection that bridge the technical and social/cultural domains. Within this pedagogical approach, critical is not only understood as a paradigm of rationality or quantitative, data-driven argumentation, but as adopting a critical position – that is, to research and reflect on the social structures and cultural phenomena entangled with digital objects, bodies, tools, methods and software production. By embracing work-in-progress and reflexive exploration, we aim to extend the notion of critical technical practice by unfolding how (de)constructing machines can be achieved beyond thinking of technology as neutral instrumentalisation. The challenge is how to find a balance, not only as researchers but as educators, unfolding aspects of both formality and functionality as well as questioning and understanding technology at a discursive and critical level. We argue that learning technical practice in an educational setting is not an end, but rather a means to question existing technological structures and create further changes in socio-technical systems.
International Journal of Cultural Studies, Volume 26, Issue 6, Page 714-731, November 2023. This article examines queer international students’ negotiation of sexuality and family ties maintenance during the Covid-19 pandemic. In considering the transitions in queer identity making, I highlight the complexity of coming out to parents. The performative dimension of social media allows queer international students to curate selective presentations and connect with their families digitally in immobile times. However, the technological affordance of social media is porous and productive, triggering the possibility of leakage and accidental outings but enabling negotiation afterwards. Drawing on two rounds of in-depth and social media scroll-back interviews with 20 Chinese queer female international students in Australia in 2021, this article identifies the social roles of social media in managing ties between queer international students and their overseas parents (shielding, leakage, and routing). It also complicates the extant implications of pandemic immobility in a specific context of queer transitions.
