Vacuum Tubes and the Circuits of Memory

I’ve had the opportunity to resume this project with a massive reading and research campaign that began back in May, and will now be bringing it forward to a book and fully fledged digital humanities initiative on church architecture and memory in Proust. This site will remain as a blog, database, and data repository as I think through the material and the practices that we engage in as humanists and digital scholars. It’s been interesting—even moving—to pick up a project that had been a side show during graduate school, as the layers of memory and return to the past form a nice analog to the quest in Proust’s Recherche itself.

Thinking through the ideas of memory and return has been stimulated in other ways, notably through a hobby (habit?) in vacuum tube electronics that leads to some much broader questions about making and technology that inform our mission as humanists. The pursuit of the sound of a particular music amplifier system by the Wright Sound Company, which needless to say has a completely analog signal chain, has some interesting parallels with the digital practices I’ve explored with Proust and modernist periodicals, as well as the substance of the Recherche.

The forays into text mining, topic modeling, and network analysis that appeared here back in 2010 and 2011 were done with no clear idea of what I wanted the data to show. I played with the software so as to gain a sense of the possibilities, and a new obsession was born. I will never forget the thrill of beholding my first Gephi network graph, and thinking, ‘So that’s the church motif!” With these tools, the temporal dimension of memory is eliminated: it flattens the chronology of the narrative and its interpretive metadata to make all connections simultaneously present. What this means for the study of Proust is that we can think of the novel (and the novel genre) as a network of nodes consisting of concepts, characters, narrative elements, and any other unit of meaning that might enhance exploration of its text. It is an electrical circuit in which a magical being resides.

Architecture, like music and writing, is an art of rhythm and thematic variation that necessarily builds upon a kind of internal memory structure. When a recurring element such as a motif is modulated back into the composition, it brings with it the associated emotions and ideas of its previous iterations but with differences arising from the effect of the intervening material. Biological memory functions in much the same way, and Proust was fully aware of this: when a memory is recalled, it is actively re-created by the mind with alterations stemming from the act. New layers of emotional association are added onto it like a palimpsest.

Proust’s Narrator at one point ascribes memory to objects rather than the mind, a notion that, when extended, renders the church as a kind of prosthetic memory device. “[T]here is much to be said,” says the Narrator, “for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison” (I.59) “And so it is with our own past,” he continues. “It is a labour in vain to attempt to recapture it. All the efforts of our intellect must prove futile” (I.59). Thus the connectivity of involuntary memory is an epiphanic moment resembling an electrical shock—it is always an accident and puts one in direct contact with reality like nothing else can. Hence the potential in moments like the famous madeleine scene, in which a certain combination of gustatory and olfactory impressions spontaneously unlock (unimprison) and galvanize the Narrator’s childhood memories, which become as real as a self-contained world.

One of the more interesting aspects of the Recherche is the way in which music, like church architecture, becomes a medium of shared memory among asynchronous and even inter-generational subjectivities. For instance, the “little phrase” of Vinteuil’s sonata attains a monumental significance for the Narrator, even though the events that created its significance occurred a generation earlier when his parents’ friend Swann was haunted—in the literal sense—by the phrase at a salon during the waning days of his love affair with Odette. The experience attains the dimensions of a religious ritual in which “a pure and supernatural being… unfolds its invisible message as it goes by” (I.494). The musicians are not so much playing the little phrase but “performing the rites on which [this being] insisted before it would consent to appear… Swann, who was no more able to see it than if it had belonged to a world of ultra-violet light… felt its presence like that of a protective goddess, a confidante of his love, who… had disguised herself in this sweeping cloak of sound. And as she passed… he made involuntarily with his lips the motion of kissing [an act of consummation], as it went by him, the harmonious, fleeting form” (I.494). As a consequence of the apparition, “Swann had regarded musical motifs as actual ideas, of another world, of another order, ideas veiled in shadows, unknown, impenetrable by the human mind” (I.496), which is largely congruous with the Narrator’s belief that memories, like souls in the pagan imagination, reside in external objects and are essentially real beings.

Many years later, in Volume 5, The Prisoner, the Narrator—attending the salon of Mme Verdurin while in the throes of jealousy over Albertine, whom he has imprisoned in their now deteriorating love affair—experiences an apparition similar to Swann’s upon hearing a performance of an unpublished Vinteuil septet. “The concert began,” he says, presuming that a work by some other composer would be played before the Vinteuil piece. Suddenly the music becomes a “magical apparition” that washes over him like “a genie, or a maiden of ravishing beauty” (V.331). “[A]ll of a sudden,” he recounts, “I found myself, in the midst of this music that was new to me, right in the heart of Vinteuil’s sonata, and, more marvelous than any girl, the little phrase… came to me, recognizable in this new guise. My joy at having rediscovered it was enhanced by the tone, so friendly and familiar, which it adopted in addressing me….” (V.332). The surprise of hearing the familiar phrase in an unfamiliar setting reinforces for the Narrator, as it had for Swann, that an independent reality resides in the motif, in the external object, and is there to be recalled when a state of dehabitualization renders the subject passively receptive. But it also means that the Narrator and Swann are able to consummate with the hidden reality that the music embodies in a moment of shared consciousness across a generation of Time. Music, like church architecture, is another medium of memory storage and retrieval, and I am willing to bet that many of us digital humanists approach our data practices with a similar aesthetic or emotional drive to unimprison the genie in that series of 1’s and 0’s.

Much of my recent technology work has not been academic, and has not been with digital but with analog technology, and I realized only recently that it is likewise a Proustian journey of chasing impressions. As an incurable tinkerer, for the past couple of years I have become obsessed with vacuum tube electronics in an effort to recreate the sound of the first stereo tube amplifiers I ever heard, and with which I fell in love. When I was 25 and living as a bachelor with a close friend, a mutual acquaintance lent us a tube amplifier system designed and built by the late George Wright. As a musician and avid music lover my whole life, I had thought I knew good sound reproduction but was wholly unprepared for what greeted my ears on that fateful day. Listening to Black Sabbath’s Paranoid was the aural equivalent to eating raw steak. A Mabel Mercer record fooled my senses into believing that a live person, like the goddess who touches Swann and the Narrator, was in the room singing to us – that feeling you get when someone is physically present. The three-dimensional sound stage projected by the stereo pair gave her a sonic embodiment in space that we could walk around every side of. Later, as we listened to an LP of a late 1950s recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, my ears could hear sounds from far beyond the walls of the room, wherein I could pinpoint each instrument of the massive orchestra in three-dimensional space. While that was amazing in a material and technological sense, the combined effect conveyed the emotion of the performance so powerfully that the three of us were speechless for several minutes after the record ended. It was a technologically enhanced sensory experience that triggered a transcendent state, connecting us with the structures of feeling of 1950s and 1820s Germany.

Making tube amps began for me as an affordable way to attain that sound but has in hindsight attained a much broader scope: it was the year 9/11 happened, a year in which I bonded in new ways with old friends, the year I met my wife, the year I applied to PhD programs and was on the cusp of transforming from a younger, less mature adulthood into something else—the turning point which led the world and myself down the path we are on now. In short, whether I realized it or not, my obsession with amp making has turned to unimprisoning, reanimating, and reconnecting with that past which is now lost—which is the very nature of music reproduction. Though the results have been good so far, I haven’t yet found that sound which summons the genie from the thermionic bottles, though I have now set up a breadboard on which I am about to test the circuit in question, which I have reverse-engineered from Internet sale pictures and crowdsourcing on DIY audio fora (George never wrote down schematics). When I discover it, it will be reimprisoned in my living room and bid to sing on command. How strange we become once we’ve heard the Siren’s song.

But what strikes me in all of these—Proust, DH, DIY audio—is that they have at their core the human impulse to invent technologies that indirectly resurrect and recreate—that mediate—the independent realities of the past. Hi-fi—that is, the technology of reproduction, not just the music it channels—is moving not just because it’s cool, but because when done well it provides an aesthetic experience of connection with that Lost Time by recreating it – the original event plus whatever associations we’ve added onto it in the intervening iterations. DH writ large develops technology in order to uncover some state of affairs in the text, the corpus, or the dataset so that it shows us the reality of some important aspect of our collective past. Proust invented new writing techniques in order to explore the avenues of memory and to recreate Lost Time on the page so that we might know it too. While we must continue to improve our analytic techniques, let us be mindful of the synthetic, the human side which those techniques serve. I’m sure many of our colleagues have experienced intellectual breakthroughs that started as whims, so let us not forget that whimsy can be found in a range of practices beyond reading and writing – in the guilty pleasures of dataviz for its own sake or the vintage parts bin at the electronics store. We develop technologies for our own emotional and epistemological needs all the time, so why not expand the range of practice to enrich our discourse? The circuitous ways in which we go about our quests often tell us more than our circuits of memory.

NB: Most of the content here was presented, in a slightly altered form, at the DH@OU#4: Digital Humanities Symposium, University of Oklahoma, September 5, 2017.

Churches and Aeroplanes

I just came across an interesting image, the only color picture in the January 1910 issue of Scribner's Magazine at the Modernist Journals Project, and wanted to document it here for a later expansion. It seems relevant to the passages having to do with airplanes, angels, and of course churches. It depicts an early biplane and monoplane with the profile of Rheims cathedral in the background. Rheims of course became a focal point for Allied propaganda after it was shelled by the Germans.

The poster refers to an aviation event at Rheims in September 1909. Perhaps Proust attended it. Some biographical searching about his experiences with early flight and where they took place could be very useful. Also the caption centers on the idea of point of view, a crucial focus of the Recherche. Will have to read the story to which the image corresponds, "The Point of View" on p. 124.

Proust

Just found out about this website called Proust that facilitates asking life-defining questions of your loved ones and having deep conversations with them. It works like a questionnaire. Not really sure how this is different from Story Corps, or why you wouldn't want to just ask your loved ones in person.

Introduction To Proust.com from Proust on Vimeo.

Foray Into Topic Modeling

Topic modeling suggests new avenues for Proust studies. Applications like Mallet and PhiloMine compute the statistical relationships among tokens (as single, double, or triple word phrases) appearing within specified spans of text such as paragraphs or groups of, say, fifty words. Since the Recherche embodies more than one million words, topic modeling can be used to highlight features of the text that are not perceptible during the act of serial reading. I ran the first tome, which contains Du côté de chez Swann part I, “Combray,” and part II, “Un Amour de Swann,” through Mallet to generate token clusters for ten topics, which reveals some interesting patterns. The command line output shows the top nineteen recurring words that are statistically significant within the top ten recurring patterns (topics) in the text.

  1. chose moment pouvait jamais puis rien esprit pourtant visage savait voulait dire savoir mal trouvait première devait autres instant
  2. dit bien dire air jamais beaucoup tête toujours princesse ami docteur reste choses sais enfin regard répondit jeune entendu
  3. vie amour plaisir souvent celle ainsi gilberte pu pensée besoin donnait tant sorte milieu cause femmes étais connaître joie
  4. après temps jusqu heure pendant allait presque chambre longtemps près seul passer heures penser jour tard souvenir chercher toute
  5. combray côté déjà rue soleil semblait fleurs saint bois place eau ciel petits vers jardin matin champs dessus autour
  6. faisait toutes petite peine seule beau toute sourire donner phrase quelques trouver parfois contraire nature suite musique croire corps
  7. swann odette chez verdurin monde disait gens femme forcheville homme soir effet amis connaissait demander personne cœur cottard
  8. voir faire aller autres jours jour toujours maison venait venir désir grande contre dès autant paris rien lequel bien
  9. grand tante mère père françoise faire bien fille disait parents maman voix partie personne bonne petit mort famille laisser
  10. devant guermantes yeux nom air petit surtout or doute mieux église image fit vue dame tant aussitôt figure lesquelles

Some of the results are unsurprising, such as topic 7, which clearly derives from the many evening scenes at the Verdurins (soir, chez, maison) where Swann courted Odette among their coterie (forcheville, cottard), often becoming jealously heartbroken (cœur, désir) with wondering whether she was seeing other admirers on the sly (demander, conaissait, amis). Other topics reveal interesting patterns that fit with scenes across the entire narrative, such as number 10. It emphasizes the use and observation of the eyes (yeux, vue) in connection with the Duc and Duchesse de Guermantes, whose mysterious airs and glances are described in several Combray church passages, as well as their association with art and symbolism of France (image, figure). But what also emerges is the consistency of the preposition before (devant), emphasizing the narrator's location not only in front of their paintings and of their glances, but also in front of a church in connection to a woman (dame), a recurrence that we can tease out by reading the database passages from the English translation.

Using a PHP script and MySQL database (graciously provided by Elijah Meeks), we can extract the tokens, word counts, and their connections from the Mallet topic model files into a graph file that generates edges and nodes, allowing us to view the ten topics as a network model in Gephi.

This entirely computer-generated model of associative networks in tome 1 of the Recherche is markedly different from the static model created by my particular reading of the church motif above, though it shares some consistencies and interesting disparities.

For instance, when we drill down and filter to look more closely at the terms that join the different topics, we see that the word for nothing (rien) is the one that most frequently connects topics 6 and 9, which respectively center on themes of beautiful bodily gestures in music and family/home relationships, while time (temps) joins topic 6 with 3, which is focused on positive terms for love of Gilberte.

According to the statistical features of the text, then, the first two parts of Du côté de chez Swann associate the expression of romantic love primarily with time, while the memory of familial love is associated primarily with absence. This perhaps comes as no shock to most readers of Proust, but if we compare this model with a search for the term nothing in the church motif database, we receive a number of passages associated predominantly with romantic love. These two fields of data, then, suggest a reading of the church motif as concerned with concepts of absence in romantic love, somewhat against the grain of the rest of the novel. There is not enough space here to deal with the problematics of translation/tutor text comparisons or the relation of computation algorithms to critical interpretation. But it is clear that domain expertise is just as necessary with digital scholarship as it is in print, as shown by the (illuminating) disparities between a human-reading and machine-reading of the text.

French Stop Words / Mots d'arrêt français

I've searched for French stop word lists for use in text mining and synthesized my findings here. It may not be definitive, but could be useful for those looking for stop lists.

J'ai effectué une recherche pour des listes de mots d'arrêt français pour utilisation dans l'exploration de texte et synthétisé mes conclusions ici. Il ne peut être définitive, mais pourrait être utile pour ceux qui recherchent des listes d'arrêt.

à
ah
ai
aie
aient
aies
ait
alors
as
au
aucuns
aurai
auraient
aurais
aurait
auras
auriez
aurions
aussi
autre
aux
avaient
avais
avait
avant
avec
avez
aviez
avions
avoir
avons
ayant
ayez
ayons
bon
car
ce
ceci
cela
celà
celles
celui
ces
cet
cette
ceux
chaque
ci
comme
comment
dans
de
des
du
dedans
dehors
depuis
deux
devrait
doit
donc
dont
dos
droite
début
elle
elles
en
encore
es
essai
est
et
eu
eue
eues
eusse
eusses
eûmes
eurent
eus
eussions
eussiez
eut
eût
eûtes
eux
fait
faites
fois
font
force
fûmes
furent
fus
fusse
fussent
fusses
fussions
fussiez
fut
fût
fûtes
haut
hors
ici
il
ils
je
jusqu’à
juste
la
laquelle
lequelle
le
les
leur
leurs
lui

ma
maintenant
mais
me
mes
mine
moi
moins
mon
mot
même
ne
ni
nommés
non
nos
notre
nous
nouveaux
on
ont
ou

par
parce
parole
pas
personnes
peut
peut-être
peu
pièce
plupart
plus
pour
pourquoi
quand
qu
que
quel
quelle
quelles
quelque
quels
qui
sa
sans
se
sera
serai
seraient
serais
serait
seras
serez
seriez
serions
serons
seront
ses
seulement
si
sien
soi
soient
sois
soit
somme
sommes
son
sont
sous
soyez
soyons
suis
sujet
sur
ta
tandis
te
tellement
tels
tes
toi
ton
tous
tout
trop
très
tu
un
une
valeur
voie
voient
vont
vos
votre
vous
vu
ça
étaient
était
étant
état
étions
été
étée
étées
étés
êtes
être

mme
mlle

a
b
c
d
e
f
g
h
i
j
k
l
m
n
o
p
q
r
s
t
u
v
w
x
y
z
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
~
`
!
@
#
$
%
^
&
*
(
)
_
-
=
+
{
}
[
]
"
'
;
:
,
.
/
<
>
?
«
»

A Little Close Reading with Network Analysis Software

I thought I would do some closer "distant-reading" of the Recherche. When using ORA to look at a metanetwork, the visualization can be manipulated in real time to highlight the links among nodes and their related concepts or passages.  What this means for the study of Proust is that we can think of the novel (and the novel genre) as a network of nodes consisting of concepts, characters, narrative elements, and any other unit of meaning that might enhance exploration of its text.

For instance, isolating the network constellated around the note “Finding common element of formative impressions” shows that the narrator's activity of reflecting upon his formative impressions is primarily connected to the associations of Memory, Music, and Literature.

The Memory association in turn connects with “Memory at Grandmother's deathbed”; Music connects with “End of Mass at Combray church, return home” and “Vinteul's sonata played at Swann's”; and Literature connects with “Charlus berating Marcel,” “Epiphany at Guermantes' Party,” and “Describing morning routine back in Paris, after second Balbec visit.” When the nodes above are moused over to show the passages they represent, we see that most of them, from various sequences involving musical performance or literary discussion from all over the novel, refer to the twin steeples at Martinville that formed the subject of the narrator's first piece of writing as a youth (I.253-257). Thus, the steeples form an orientation point for that part of the narrator's writerly vocation that pertains to analysis of impressions, filtered primarily through memories of music and literature. These connections are not apparent by searching the database at the Ecclesiastical Proust Archive because it does not provide the simultaneous view of layered networks afforded by ORA. It seems on the surface, then, that this particular network within the Recherche forms a theory of impressionism based on the structural commonalities between music and literature.

The network for the Time association similarly connects various types of recollection to provide insight into the narrator's artistic development.

We find Time at the center, ringed by “Contemplation sparked by conversation with M. de Cambremer, at Guermantes party,” “Imagining Florence and Venice (before visit),” “Contemplating experience of Vinteuil's sonata while jealous of Mlle Vinteuil and Albertine,” “Contemplating women and past,” “Observations at Guermantes party,” and “First visit to Balbec.” The last in turn connects with Narthex and Carqueville. In other words, the primary function of Time as a backwards-looking concept is associated with jealousy over women, while the forward-looking passages imagine the reddish domes of Florence and the frescos of Venice. This suggests a deepening of the structure that became apparent in the database searches, where the thought of meeting a future lover in early passages, though not explicitly concerned with the nature of time, took place on the porch of a gothic cathedral. These nodes presented by ORA show that the church passages that consciously deal with the nature of time happen after the narrator as had experience being in love with women. And correspondingly, the architectural element of this ring is the narthex, which is the entrance area just indoors or on the threshold to the porch. The narthex was not considered part of the church proper, but was placed close enough so that those not worthy of entry, such as the unbaptized or unconfessed, could still receive instruction from services. Hence, the experience of love has brought the narrator past the porch but, because he is lost through jealousy, he still remains an outsider.

The Truth network presents a very clear view of the novel's main thematic chains and character developments.

With Truth at the center of the middle network, the first ring comprises “Riding in Dr. Percepied's carriage” (the moment at which he observed in motion the twin steeples of Martinville), “Reflections on getting the truth about Albertine from Andrée” (in which he had final confirmation of his lack of knowledge about Albertine's lesbianism, the root of his obsessive jealousy), “Reading Bergotte” (the writer who most influenced his literary sensibility, and who figures so prominently in his appreciation for churches), and “Reflection on Charlus' perversion” (the unmasking of homosexuality as a major recurring element of the novel's concern with epistemology). What we also see in the picture above are two micro networks that are not directly connected, yet were placed close to the Truth network because of their conceptual affinity. If we take all three networks into consideration, the second ring around the Truth association comprises Motion, Laws, the Archaic, Beauty, and Knowledge, which further connect with three passages about household habits and the Great War. Taken together, Truth in Proust's novel can ultimately be understood as a rather stable essence based on the epistemic laws of motion and observation, as well as the aesthetic laws of beauty as evident in old objects. These, too, are a function of Time. While this visualization might not provide much insight that is new in Proust studies, the interface at least allows the reader instantly to access the passages that contribute to a given part of the network.

Tome I Word Cloud

Generated by Wordle. Wordle recognized the French and stripped out the common words, but many of them, like comme, quand, et, si, etc., still crept in. Interesting, though, that in this visualization of absolute word frequency, the words Swann and Odette are weighted as heavy or heavier than many prepositions and conjunctions. Given that this tome covers the "Combray" and "Swann in Love" sections, it accounts for the narrator's obsession with the pair in his early childhood, and likewise Swann's obsession with Odette in the years before the narrator's birth. I would have expected words like église or fenêtre or mère to weigh heavier. Interesting too that the other meaningful words that make it into this cloud are Verdurin (emphasizing the salon and the coterie culture), yeux (where the narrator reads the souls of others), Françoise (who is mentioned -- and valued? -- more than his mother), and tante (Léonie, the relative in residence at Combray).

Pages