VIRGINIA JOURNAL:

Arrived at the University of Virginia in August, 1999. Extremely hot summer, had been since June's early heat wave during the ACH conference. All those Digital Humanists floating on what was left of water in the James had come back from their excursion with red patches burning their pale, computer-familiar skin. The heat never seemed to break. We moved from New Haven to Charlottesville in July, in the midst of the thick summer, and in August shorts and bare legs were still survival necessities, not options for exposure or unwarranted display. Now three and a half years later, iced in and cold, seems like time to reflect, take stock. Hence this account.

My charge was to build an undergraduate, interdisciplinary program in Media Studies that would suit the intellectual profile of the University of Virginia. Strong in liberal arts, low on pre-professional skill-training, high on critical and theoretical approaches. In the interview process I'd sketched syllabi, outlined some courses crucial to a core curriculum, and optimistically scoured the undergraduate catalogue, The Record, to find courses appropriate to the Major.

Digital Humanities dominated the intellectual landscape I had been attracted to at UVa. The work of John Unsworth at IATH was an anchoring point of reference for activities in research and application at the intersection of humanities disciplines and computational method. This universe was populated by luminaries including many I have come to work with closely (Jerome McGann, Worthy Martin, Bethany Nowviskie, Daniel Pitti, Andrea Laue, Nathan Piazza, Steve Ramsay) others whose work extends the larger community of activity (Thorny Staples, David Seaman, David Germano, Yitna Ferdywick, Will Thomas, Ed Ayers, Kim Tryka, Ben Ray, and numerous others). We were lucky in having distinguished visitors. Rune Dalgaard for Fall 01, Geoffrey Rockwell for the entire academic year 01-02. Many other visitors came to lecture and consult during this period, and traces of their activity will come through descriptions of our work on the Digital Academical Village, Center for Digital Initiatives, Digital Humanities MA, and the Knowledge Representation Seminar, as well as our ongoign SpecLab Computing activities.

The group now functioning as SpecLab coalesced through a series of activities and projects, most specifically: Ivanhoe, Temporal Modelling, and the Patacritical Demon. Tracing the elaborate web of conversational exchanges through which our now esoteric and developed vocabulary of concepts came into being would be tedious. But a quick overview and timeline of crucial milestones marks the points along what has been a period of productive exchange.

Chief among the persons with whom my work has developed since Fall 1999 has been Jerry McGann. Our conversations began as intermittent exchanges through a lunch-time discussion group I formed on Visuality in Fall 1999 -- largely, I should hasten to add, to allow me a forum in which to get to know Thorny, Worthy, John, Michael Kubovky, and Jerry. Continuation of my discussions with Jerry occured electronically in the Spring of 2000, when he was in London. I was working on various Metalogics of the Book drafts and talks that season, and he was drafting some of Radiant Textuality.

His return at the end of Spring semester 2000 provided the opportunity for greater engagement and various experiments in Deformance, my project Face Off, and the first rounds of Ivanhoe were the immediate, direct outcome of these exchanges.

My interest in visual epistemology, and in the graphical activity as a primary mode of knowledge production, has persisted. Combined with poetical activity, the result has been a series of projects whose visual/verbal quality parallels the more scholarly/academic production we've mapped elsewhere. Links are provided to visual archives and full-text papers. This account can be read as a narrative.

This account is mine. Voice and tone are not accountable to any standards besides those I feel are suited to the projects at hand. So many of these are ideas generated in conversation, particularly in my constant dialogue with Jerry, that I'm simply allowing this version to be a highly subjective, carefully personal, discussion of these activities, not an objective or thorough account. Others in this community have contributed greatly, and I hope that will come through in my narrative unfolding of activity and exchange. The journal serves as a record, retrospective and ongoing, of the ways exchanges and opportunities have provoked and engaged my energies and imagination since 1999. As of this writing, on the verge of New Year's 2003, that process is charged and passionate, likely to go on generating considerable work for some time. I hope.

Media Studies (Fall 1999)
Context and Charge: 99-00
Undergraduate Program: "Learning, not Teaching"
Digital Humanities: 99-00
DAV/CDI (E-summit, Spring 2000 through Spring 2001)
Knowledge Representation: 01-02
Alumni and Professionals, Career Day, Internships, Grads (02-03)
Hires and planning (future)

Visuality Group (Fall 1999)

Metalogics of the Book to Meta-rhetorics (Spring 2000)

Ivanhoe (Summer 2000 and ongoing)
Ivanhoe Phase I (Summer 2000)
Original Ivanhoe: J/J (Summer 2000)
The Rules: J/J (Summer 2000)
Wuthering Heights: BPN/SR/J/J (Summer 2000)
Ivanhoe Phase II: Storyboards (Summer 2001)
Ivanhoe III: Research on Deformance Modes (Fall 01-Spring 02)
Game Designs and Games Played
Frankenstein
Wrinkle in Time
Turn of the Screw
Prototypes and Design Discussions (ongoing)

Quantum Poetics (Fall 2000)

Time Modelling (Winter/Spring 2001)

Speculative Computing (Fall 2001)

Graphesis: Page space / Espace (Spring 02 to Spring 03)
What is a Letter? (Fall 02)
The Entangled Word (Yale, Spring 02)
What is a Mark? (Ongoing)
White space in William Morris's Chaucer

Autopoeisis: Algorithmic Theories of Text (Summer 02 - Fall 02 - ongoing)

Patacritical Demon (Fall 02 ongoing)